Is there an easy, low cost, non-chemical way for me to get rid of the lawn and weeds in the back part of our yard? We’ve been dumping all our leaves in this area for a few years hoping to create some natural mulch cover, but weeds are still rampant. The area in the last pic used to be a sand pit for an old swingset (aka the neighborhood litter box), and suckers have now taken over since we hauled the sand away last spring.
What’s the most straightforward way to get this looking halfway decent, somewhat intentional, but also natural? I was thinking:
-cut in/define a nice natural curving edge with the existing lawn
-remove all sod behind the red line with a rented sod cutter (or solarize?)
-hand pull all weeds in the mulch area (or solarize?)
-backfill the old sand area with new topsoil (not sure if this is necessary or not, lots of exposed tree roots right now)
-plant a couple more trees, a few shrubs, and scatter some wildflower seeds, clover, or other native ground cover
I don’t want to be weeding every week and I don’t have irrigation to water easily. Is there a “let nature do its thing” option with just enough intervention to push it to become a native, hardy, aesthetically pleasing area requiring very little long term upkeep? Zone 4B.
Note: I recognize this is a lot of lawn, but we don’t have the time or mental energy to get rid of it all yet.
by noimpression18
16 Comments
sorta but not really
Zone 4B New York? Alaska? Location is helpful 🙂
And yeah the process you describe is pretty much exactly how you’d do it. The book The Living Landscape by Darke and Tallamy has a great section showing doing pretty much exactly this. You can either tarp or solarize the grass, then cover it with mulch. Don’t go too thick with the much where the tree roots are surfacing – tree roots need to breathe and don’t like grade changes. Along those lines, you can skip the topsoil.
What will help to make the area lower maintenance is to plant more “green mulch” i.e. desirable plants that displace weeds. I really like using sedges for this, but lots of native plants can fill that role.
not really. you need to find a way to control invasive, and i doubt there aren’t any near you. if i don’t weed got a few weeks the creeping charlie takes over
Forests with full shade probably require the least amount of active maintenance once they get established and cleared of invasives. Everything else you’re essentially dealing with managed succession, which is work.
Granite. Even that is only good for a few hundred years before the lichens start, followed by weeds a few millennia later
Other than that last photo, it looks beautiful to me. But I love letting nature do the work.
Easy, low cost, non chemical. Pick two cause you can’t have all three.
No
Yes it’s called a forest.
Using a battery operated weed wacker would make it a little bit easier than by hand, and faster. Go as low as you can. Maybe costs around $90
I would sheet mulch/lasagna garden- you can google it, but the basic premise is layers of cardboard at least 1/2″ thick, make sure there’s NO GAPS! and soak it well with the hose, then layer well-rotted manure like Black Kow, aged compost, layers of material like leaves. straw, grass clippings, etc, and then top with top soil and straw/mulch and soak the whole thing again. Be sure to leave a gap around the bases of the trees…you may have to weed a bit for a few years, but you don’t want to smother them.
You’ll want to wait 6-8 months or more to plant, but I’ve done it as soon as 3 months with great success.
Add your decorative border of choice, carve out a trench edging to keep the grass from invading, and you’ll have a fantastic shady garden bed with only the efforts of moving some dirt around. If you do it late fall/early winter after all the seeds have been dispersed from living things and plant bulbs then, desired seeds over the winter, you’ll have a fairly easy garden bed ready to go in spring (if you do it during warmer weather before all the late-blooming seeds have dispersed, you’ll want to cover it with plastic or cardboard until the ‘danger’ of volunteers has passed.
Nature abhors a vacuum and will absolutely fill it as soon as it’s bare (whether you realize it or not), so when you plant… Let the plants you WANT to be there fight it out for the space by putting bushes and shrubs in first, then plant native perennials heavily with seed. To hedge your bets, fill in everything HEAVILY with annuals seeds that you don’t mind coming back for a few years. The perennials will ultimately take the space over and naturalize comfortably with the bushes after the first 3 years. You can absolutely put all your seed down just before winter; if you get a good snow, put it down then. You’ll be able to see exactly where it is and how heavily it’s sown, and make sure the snow is nearly fully covered with seed. After the winter and snow melt, the seeds will take root.
I have a well established native plant garden and I pretty much weed once in late spring and once in early fall.
For the lawn areas, I mow weekly.
However, it’s taken me a long time to get to this point. There’s been plenty of trial and error.
Full sun meadows, some shrubs, and perennial grasses and forbs can all be fairly low maintenance *once established.* It’s a good idea to be prepared to water most shrubs and trees for the first few years so they have a chance to establish root systems.
Charles V had some good suggestions about low-maintenance shade and sun groundcovers. Things like wild strawberry or golden ragwort will happily spread under the right conditions.
The most effective way to suppress weeds in a garden bed is for there to be no physical space for weeds. That means either a thick layer of bark mulch and regular maintenance of the lawn edge with an edger, or a planting of desirable plants so dense there’s no bare soil, plus regular maintenance of the lawn edge with an edger. The mulch has the added benefit of chemically suppressing weed seed germination and growth, but you need to occasionally top the mulch up.
Bark mulch will also suppress all seed germination, including plants you like, so a mulched bed is a bed you don’t direct sow anything in and don’t expect anything to self-sow in.
But I’ll tell you right now that any plan that rests on “scatter a few wildflower seeds” is going to get you more of the same. Maybe even worse. Because you won’t know what’s a weed and what’s a “wildflower” until the weeds are overwhelmingly numerous. And unless you put in a ton of prep and effort, the number of weeds coming up will outnumber the “wildflowers” by 10:1.
I’ll also tell you that planting an area that large with enough plants to fill in all the gaps and cover all the bare soil is a massive amount of work and will require many thousands of dollars in plant material. You can try propagating them yourself, but you will need *hundreds* of individual plants and if you’re going native, many will take years to get big enough to actually do any work suppressing weeds. Properly converting an area that large to a dense, weed suppressing meadow that looks nice is a massive, expensive, multi-year project that (IMO) needs to be planted more or less all at once if there’s any hope of it actually surprising weeds.
So if I were you, and time, energy, and maybe budget was a consideration, I’d go the mulch route. Because a garden that actually suppresses weeds to the point that it’s almost no maintenance looks like this:
https://preview.redd.it/6t0h59lj1n0f1.jpeg?width=5712&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3fc55087b8861de8fa3b80c7d77147dec640bde0
And that only cost $6k because I found a professional horticulturalist who was willing to just do the layout and provide the plant material at wholesale prices and let me do all the labor of planting them. If I bought those plants at retail prices it would have been closer to $20k. Your garden areas looks at least twice the size.
Here’s the easiest, lowest cost, least maintenance plan I know:
Sign up for Chip Drop.
Spread wood chips super thick over the area (the least easy part).
Get native plants (the least free part) and plant as plugs.
The wood chips will help a ton, but you will need to weed the first few years until your plants fill in the space. (The most maintenance part)
Once established, you’ll get to simultaneously enjoy free, easy, and low maintenance.
Some additional details:
Weed whacking anything with a strong stem before burying with wood chips. Laying cardboard first helps, above the weeds but below the chips. Laying cardboard is essential if you’re going normal mulch thickness, you can get away without it if you go super thick. For natives I’d recommend a tree/s or some shrubs paired with at least one flower that spreads by seed and another that spreads by rhizomes. That way they’ll fill in nicely and keep out weeds once established. If free matters more than easy for new plants, check local buy nothing groups or local plant swaps. If easy matters more than free, order natives online from someplace like Prairie Moon Nursery.
Nope. You will always have maintenance.