Starting a new garden on grass has to be one of the most discouraging things imaginable.
Jane on Horiticultural recently posted on how new allotmenteers in the UK often get stuck with some of the worst plots, and how this can quickly turn into a very discouraging situation for beginning gardeners. I think anyone starting an urban garden in North America or elsewhere can easily find themselves in a similarly discouraging situation trying to get rid of an established lawn.
Doviende on Anarchocyclist has recently been posting about a garden he is expecting to build. He lives in the Vancouver area of British Columbia, and he is looking for a new place to live, a rental with roommates, and space for a garden. Since he hasn’t found his new place yet, there’s no way to know for sure what it will look like, but it seems likely he will have to start with a lawn.
I have some ideas, but I was also hoping some of my readers would have some ideas for him too. One of the things I already commented on in his post was that different gardeners had different ideas about things, and one of the best things was for him to read a couple of different people’s ideas, then decide what he thought was the best for him to do. In that spirit, even if you disagree with me, I hope you will feel free to share any thoughts you have.
What to Look for in a Garden Space
The first thing may be to think about what makes a good garden, and what kinds of things he should be looking for.
Sun is very important for vegetables. It’s very important if the garden area gets any shade at all, for any part of the day. Ideally, the garden should have no obstruction towards the south.
It will also help a lot if the garden is as level as possible.
You should give some thought to if the ground could be contaminated with anything. Perhaps if it is next to an old house, there could be lead paint in the ground. Maybe if it used to be an industrial or agricultural area, there may be other chemicals present. You might ask around if anyone knows of any possible contaminants.
A soil test might be a good thing to do early on, both for nutrients and contamination, if it can be arranged.
Can anyone think of anything else?
Getting Rid of the Lawn
Grass is so hard to get rid of in part because it hides so many other weeds. Even if you manage to quickly kill the grass itself, you can easily find yourself battling with dozens of new and different weeds. You also always have to plan a good barrier on the edges of the garden, or encroaching weeds will constantly be issue.
Digging is always only a partial solution, because pieces of roots will always be left in the ground that will grow into new weeds. Using a garden tiller on fresh grass is a recipe for disaster because it will chew the weeds up into tiny pieces which will all turn into new weeds. Digging also always uncovers weed seeds buried in the ground.
Many people argue a garden tiller is never a good thing to use. In any event it should never be used on ground with established weeds in it. I use one sometimes for green manure or for mixing amendments into the ground, but I will probably stop using it eventually because it’s not really very useful and wastefull of energy.
No-dig or no-till solutions always take time, and when you are starting a new garden the last thing you want to do is sit around and wait another 6 months waiting for the weeds to die.
So what’s the answer? Probably some some combination of dig and no-dig methods? At least to begin with?
Lasagna Gardening
I suggested that depending on the size of his new garden, he take the approach of mulching layers. For example covering the grass first with a layer of cardboard or newspapers, then a mulching material like grass, leaves or compost. The expectation is that this would rot in place, and the plants could just go on top of it, perhaps together with more mulch.
I didn’t think to mention it before, but he may also want to combine this with raised beds. Raised beds might be too expensive and too much trouble if he is only going to stay in the same place for a few years. Raised beds can be made with almost any material except treated wood! Treated wood will have chemicals you won’t want in your vegetable garden. Wood that isn’t rot resistant (like pine) will only last a couple of years, but maybe that will be enough. Bricks or rocks also make nice raised beds, as does plastic lumber.
How long should he wait before trying to grow on ground prepared this way? I think about 6 months.
Lazy Bed Method Potatoes
This is an Irish method for growing potatoes directly on grass. Details can be found here, and a variation on the method here.
Basically if you imagine a 4 foot (120cm) wide row in your garden subdivided into 1 foot (30cm) sections as follows:
* A * B * C * D *
* * * * *
* * * * *
* * * * *
* * * * *
On row B & C you first put a layer of compost, then the seed potatoes on top of that. You then dig up the sod in rows A and D and fold it over the seed potatoes with the grass facing down.
As the potatoes grow you should ‘hill them up’ by digging dirt from rows A and D, always maintaining about 2 in (5 cm) of potato plant above the ground.
About a week after they bloom you can use your hands to search for new potatoes in the ground, but remember this will reduce your final harvest. After the halliums (plant tops) die back, you can dig up the potatoes in the ground.
If you grow potatoes you should learn about late blight, because this has become a serious problem all over the world. I can give you more information on this if you are interested.
After you grow potatoes like this, the ground will be left (mostly) free of weeds and ready to be planted with something else.
Rotation is very important with potatoes, and you shouldn’t use the same ground more than once in three or four years, so you should plan accordingly and only use a fraction of your garden for potatoes.
Compost
Doviende asked about compost, and what are good systems for beginning gardeners. Specifically he was thinking about a compost tumbler, so he could get compost quickly.
I’ve never used a compost tumbler, so I can’t really offer a lot of advice. I’ve always viewed a tumbler as unnecessary and too expensive, but maybe there is someone out there who has had a good experience with them?
Does anyone have any other suggestions for a good composting system he could set up considering his circumstances? A container or a pile?
What to Grow and When
Doviende in his post said:
“We’re moving May 1st, so counting a few days to actually dig up an area of grass in the backyard and maybe bring in some extra topsoil, i should be able to plant things in about the 2nd week of May.”
What’s realistic to plan for and expect? What kinds of things should he think about planting and when?
Nitrogen fixing plants like peas and beans might help the soil, but these are difficult to grow when there are a lot of weeds.
Can anyone think of good plants he could get in quickly in May?
Am I missing anything else in this post? Does anyone else have any other ideas?
Lots of good advice here. When I moved to my current garden in 2004 it was almost entirely lawn, and I found potatoes were the quickest and easiest thing to get the ground back in cultivation. I used a method very similar to the lazybed system you describe, where I cut out chunks of turf and stacked them (grass-side down) on either side of the potato row, which made a nice sturdy structure which was easy to earth up and retained water very efficiently. Potatoes grown in newly dug grass tend to suffer a bit with wireworm, which make small tunnels into the tubers, but it’s a small price to pay because the potato haulms smother most of the weeds and leave the ground in beautiful condition and easy to dig the following year. Big fat white chafer grubs are also likely to be found in newly-dug turf, but they tend to disappear once the ground is cultivated.
As for things to plant in May, pole beans would be my recommendation. Fast growing and high yields!
Oooh, I don’t envy anyone who has to dig up established grass! Not fun–we went through that last year when we expanded the garden. We dug up the grass, keeping chunks of sod as large as we could manage. We put them upside down on grass we hadn’t got to digging yet, so we could start killing the grass underneath a bit.
Christa at Calendula & Concrete just went through this, but she had great success using a sod cutter: http://cc-calendula.blogspot.com/2008/03/bye-bye-lawn.html
Apparently she checked out a YouTube video to see how it would work. It looks like she got great results, and I would definitely look into renting or borrowing one the next time we’re looking to remove some grass!
Weeds were definitely a problem the first year, especially around the edges that were still bordered by lawn–maybe we didn’t disturb the root systems there as much. We used straw mulch to keep weeds down in beds and paths, and that worked pretty well.
I think early May in Vancouver is definitely not too late to get some brassicas in the ground, and greens, in addition to the peas and beans you mentioned.
Great to see people starting new gardens!
Starting with grass I find the root eating larvae in the soil most troublesome. Not so much the first year, as second and third year. Problem becoming minor in fourth year and gone in the fifth year. I think it is due to live roots left in the soil feeding most of the larvae the first year, the next two years there are no more roots from the grass, only the vegetable roots to feed on. Without a grass matt on the lot the adult insects seem to find a new grass matt to lay their eggs in. The larvae must have a life cycle for 3-4 years, since the problem eventually stops. In my experience a lot of tagetes in year two and three discourage the larvae, confusing or starving them? Anyway I wouldn’t grow a root crop in year two or three. And I’m in for a lot of (pole)beans in year one.
Stay away from the roots of large trees, if possible, because they will use all the moisture and nutrients in the soil. And remember that the feeder roots travel out a long way. If this is not possible, use a raised bed.
When I started my vegetable garden it was so hard you couldn’t even get a pick into it – it was previously a dirt driveway(!)and covered with grass and very bad, tough weeds knee high. I followed a ‘recipe’ from ‘Intrduction to permamculture’ by Bill Mollison.Basically I slashed the area flat, as low as possible.The area was then covered with blood and bone meal, leaves, thin scattering of food scraps and lawn clippings. Then carpeted with cardboard,newspaper, old coconut-fibre carpet underlay, old natural-fibre clothes. Cover thoroughly.Water well at this point.This gets the soil life going under the matting.Top this with at least 20cm of organic matter, like seaweed, manure, stable sweepings, finishing with something aesthetic like straw,or sawdust etc.Water well. Now, into this you can sow only large seeds – beans, peas, and tubers such as potatoes and small plants such as herbs, tomatoes, cabbage etc in this way: burrow to the top of the dense layer of cardboard etc and cut or break open a small hole and fill this with a double handful of soil. Cover over the seeds and tubers and bring the mulch back around the stems of the small plants. Water again.By the end of the first summer the soil will be pretty good and contain lots of worms and soil life. Then you can go ahead and sow and plants as you like. It is amazing what sorts of organic matter you can find nearby when you start to look. Gather it all, starting now if you can. This method works a treat and means you can start growing some thing straight away – so encouraging for someone just dying to grow something NOW !And no digging or weeding – very satisfying. My vegetable garden started this way and I couldn’t believe how quickly the soil became useful.
I have a great thing I do with making compost in situ. You get 2 cheap, plastic buckets or pots and join the open ends together with tape or wire or something. Cut out one end to make an open top. Into the bottom container drill holes about 1″ (25cm) in diameter, all over the sides and the bottom (don’t make it too weak). Dig a hole in the ground deep enough so that the soil comes 3/4 of the way up the top container.Place the whole container into the hole and backfill loosely. Put some veg scraps in the container and get some worms and put them in too. Place a piece of hessian directly onto the stuff in the container. Put a lid on – one that you can easily remove to feed the worms, but heavy enough not to blow off or let vermin in. That’s it. Add scraps bit by bit while the worm numbers increase.It will feed the soil in situ. If you want to, you can put them here and there in your garden. If you cover them with a nice lid they look good too – unlike a large compost bin.
Oh no I forgot to say – plant things around the container that need lots of nutrition and you will be amazed how much improved they will be. eg lettuce, and deep rooted things that can get down further. Always leave a way to access the top as you have to keep feeding the worms. Make sure you get compost worms, not garden worms.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve really been enjoying reading the comments everyone left here! These are all really good ideas.
Meg: If you are going to dig up the sod, I can see how a sod cutter would make things go faster. The problem always is when you use any mechanical method for removing weeds in the ground, you always leave behind piecs of roots that turn into new weeds. You also always dig up seeds that are in the ground, which start growing. I think it’s always better to use a non-digging method when possible.
Søren: I noticed that too, the last time I turned grass into a garden. Not so much with the specific larvae you had a problem with, but for almost everything it takes a few years to stabilize into a ‘normal’ garden.
Kate: I really love both your idea for vermiculture composting and your layer system! I have never done composting with worms, and didn’t think of it, but that sounds like a great alternative to tumbler composting. I personally think normal composting is so easy, and I am never in that much of a hurry, so I never consider doing anything else.
It’s worth pointing out that in terms of climates, both Rebsie and I live on the north western side of Europe, in temperate maritime-ish climates, at about the same latitude as Vancouver. Our climates are probably very similar to Doviende’s. Søren lives a bit further north, and in a colder but similar climate. Meg lives in Pensylvannia, and has a more inland and eastern climate with harder winters. Kate on the other hand lives in Australia, and has more of a dry desert climate with poor soil.
Since Doviende’s soil is probably naturally richer than Kate’s (and probably not as hard), Doviende might try a scaled down version of Kate’s garden layer system, and would probably be able to plant in it right away like Kate said.
Doviende mentioned he could easily get compost from the city of Vancouver and transport it on his bike. Instead of a lot of layers of organic material, he might just be able to use this compost.
I think if he put down a layer of weed blocking material, like cardboard, several layers of newspaper or the coconut fiber carpet underlay Kate mentioned (there is also a paper fiber parket floor underlay available that I think would also work well), then a centimeter or two of compost on top of this, a lot of things could just be planted directly into the compost. I think most plants would simply send their roots through the weed blocking material into the dirt below. I don’t think it would be necessary to break through the weed blocking layer with a shovel first.
This might be a really good way of planting beans (or peas in the fall) like several people mentioned above.
wow, so many great tips. thanks all, that’s a tremendous resource.
I guess because i’ve always been a renter, and had various problems with landlords such as resistance to starting a garden or evicting me because they want to jack up the rent price, i’m always worried that i’ll have to start over at a new place next year. I think that because of this, i’ve started viewing my gardening project as more of a guerrilla gardening project that happens to be located in my backyard, hence the focus on doing something right now and now waiting too long. that’s where i started thinking just about cutting up the grass and throwing down some city-provided compost, all in the space of a few days.
That said, i’d like my next place to be a place where i can stay for several years, so i’m paying lots of attention to the longer-term strategies that are mentioned too. i’ve still got a month before i move, so i’ll be doing all the reading i can.
i have a question:
last year, my husband & i bought a new house. i was excited to start a garden, & deciding building a compost bin would be the first step. not having a whole lot of extra money, i spied a broken futon in the dumpster one day & grabbed it up. my husband & i formed the pieces into a 3 sided square & since then we’ve been adding our yard waste & kitchen scraps to the pile. unfortunately, i didn’t consider the aspect of the treated wood when we did this. now, i’ve noticed that the wood looks untreated — which, i’m assuming means the chemicals have all leached into our current compost. the compost is not nearly close to being ready for gardening — & we have yet to build our raised beds — we just had a baby & are in the very early stages of preparation.
so, my question is this: because our compost probably won’t be ready for another year or so, is it safe to assume that the chemicals from the treated wood will be “weeded” out in some way? or would it be best to discard the compost i have now & start over? if i started over, should i remove the wood & start fresh, or is safe to keep the wood now, that it appears “raw”?
thanks for your help!
Hi Kristina,
I’ve tried to answer your question here:
http://www.patnsteph.net/weblog/?p=865#comment-36168