Drought Tolerant Front Yard - Converting Lawn to Soil

Step 8 After

This is my yard today - I've done this 3 different days, and have 3 distinct swaths you can see in the photos (two are compost and one is chipped wood). My front yard will take about 3 more days of work. It will take at least 6 months for this to become what feels like a "normal" soil, and it should be wonderful. In the meantime, I can add little mounds of my own soil mix and plant small things, or dig/cut through the mixture to plant something like a tree.

Good luck!

Comments

[megmaine]

Thank You!
I will try this to smother out the grass this Spring, just as it is coming up, in preparation for a Chamomile lawn! I have a tiny lawn so I can start enough Roman Chamomile from seed, to do the trick thriftily.
By the way, if it survives in your area, Roman Chamomile smells nice, is drought tolerant, tolerates light foot traffic, confuses some vegetable pests, attracts beneficials, and never needs mowing if you don't mind an ankle-deep lawn. If you grow Roman from seed, you will get flowers you can harvest for tea.
I will take photos of my project and see if I can make an Instructable on the whole thing! Thanks again, I will do the cardboard method, starting now as it is pouring rain daily.

[welshwaters]

What a great idea, we live in Wales and even though we have got enough water here, we will follow your instructions so next year we can plant a wildlife garden in the front of our house. Thank you for the step by step instructions.

[sir_h_c]

I've tried this same method a couple of times to start new garden plots. Once it worked great; Put it down in the summer and planted the following spring. The second time was in Oklahoma where lawns are largely made up of Bermuda grass. It just crept up right through the layers! Know what you're up against, I guess.

[lisascout]

Part of my lawn is Bermuda grass. I was willing to do nearly anything to avoid chemicals. How long did it take to come through?

[dchall8]

Bermuda won't necessarily come back. I smothered about 200 square feet of it a couple years ago with 2 inches of sand and 2 inches of mulch on top of that. Anyone thinking of doing this needs to check local prices. In my neighborhood compost delivered costs about $70 per cubic yard and it takes 4 cubic yards per 1,000 square feet to pile it an inch deep. You should be able to get truckloads of chipped trees from a tree trimmer for free, though. Many municipalities give away a coarse compost if you are a resident and you load it and haul it away. I could be wrong but I think you will regret having smothered your lawn before the end of the year. In my experience picking weeds out of bare soil has always been more trouble than weekly watering and mowing a dense stand of tall (3-4 inches) grass.

[lisascout]

We shall see. I doubt I'll want the grass back. I have 13 citrus trees, a peach and an almond planted in the front yard so far - many of them in the past 2 years - and it was getting really difficult to mow anyway. I'm planning to move to a drought-tolerant ground cover now, and haven't decided which one. Maybe creeping thyme. I've also erected a tipi out of tree poles, and planted scarlet runner beans to climb up the poles; and I have a tree torso laying on the ground for my boys to climb on. I'm thinking of putting a platform around the willow tree for them to use as a "treehouse". All this in a city that objects to anything taller than 3 feet! We'll see how many nastygrams I get from the city. But a green lawn in the midst of all of this playground just wasn't cutting it - and it was an invasive lawn. I'm not planning to give the weeds a lot of opportunity. In fact, I'll probably be putting out squashes in mounds today. The compost was all free (and there's tons more), very close to home, at the local recycling center. I don't know how that compares to other cities; I'm in California. The compost has been cooked according to organic standards, and should not have live seeds. The chipped wood I have to drive farther for, at my property that is mostly trees where I have to chip to keep the forest pushed back. I have tons more of that, too. I chipped it myself and know it's not full of weeds. Thanks for the tip on the Bermuda grass, it's nice to hear that someone managed to dominate it. Seems to be one of the rats of the plant world!

[CapnChkn]

All you all is so sweet! It depends on the amount of moisture your soil gets in one season. If you lay the compost on top of the corrugated paper, it gets enough moisture, and the temperature is right, it will lay the weeds in the dirt, Lay the cardboard overlap about 6 inches (15cm). In the heat, the pile will heat up, it needs time to cure. This is the right time to try this technique, but don't expect fast results. The pile needs to cool and so on... I'm just growing Capsicum in the hot pile, I didn't get the technique until spring of this year. I don't know why I didn't think of it before. Cap'n!

[ericCycles]

I believe this is called "Sheet Mulching". When I did it, I made the mistake of only using a single layer of cardboard (I should have used two or three). I put down clover seed on top, since its nitrogen fixing. A friend did his entire backyard that way, resulting in no weeds, great soil, but an incredible slug problem. Apparently all that decomposing vegetation material is just a smorgasborg for slugs.