Let us assume, for the purpose of this writeup, that you just hate grass. You have a lawn, and you want to have a lawn't. Your disgust and loathing for the entire notion of lawns burns with the heat of a thousand suns, and you have found yourself in possession of a soulless plot of monoculture ornamental grass, in a location where there isn't any Home Owner's Association to crawl up your back about getting botanically creative. If this doesn't describe you, then obviously the following guide is best disregarded. Additionally please note that this entire set of instructions is ecologically unethical if you live in a region suffering from water scarcity, and you should instead pursue xeriscaping as the most ethical and sustainable means of maintaining the state of your yard. In all cases, however, a grass lawn is to be eradicated, and the only difference from one region to the next is what to replace it with.
Let's unlawn your lawn! You're going to need some materials to get you started:
- relatively flat pulpy cellulose-rich material: newspaper, straw or hay, grass clippings, leaf litter dropped by trees in the fall, corn stalks from a field after harvest
- any ordinary potting soil OR a huge amount of relatively lumpy compostable material, strictly plant based, NO animal products (unless you don't mind unbearable stench): orange peels, banana peels, used coffee grounds, other kitchen scraps that are in the process of spoiling
- a black tarp, many black garbage bags, or many large pieces of regular brown cardboard
- bricks, cinderblocks, large rocks, or other material that can act as weights to keep material from blowing away in the wind
Take note that manure and mulch are not listed anywhere. Unless you live in the United Kingdom or a similarly cloudy and rainy region, their involvement works against your goals, at this time. Skip to the second-to-last paragraph of this writeup, however, for clarification about mostly-sunless biomes.
Here's your mission, if you choose to accept it:
- Any time of year, but waiting for autumn leaves to cover the ground is best, in terms of labour saving, you will select a section of your yard to begin rendering inhospitable to grass and its supportive microbiome of soil bacteria and fungal mycelia. If you have a tarp, just start with an area the size of your tarp. First, if there are already leaves on the ground, leave them where they are.
- Next, if there are not already leaves or other cellulose-rich material on the ground, then place the material of your choice in the target area, and layer it at least one full inch deep. This material exists to passively generate heat through the winter, and will facilitate the survival of beneficial beetles and moths. Use buckets or a hose to completely saturate this layer with water. The water serves both to weigh down the flyaway material (especially newspaper) as you work, and to drive any worms in the soil up to the surface, to give them a chance to relocate themselves.
- Over the top of the cellulose, loosely scatter your compost or potting soil. This layer serves to introduce novel fungi and bacteria into the topsoil, with greater compatibility for plants that are not grasses. This also gives friendly invertebrate animals something to eat, so they don't starve when the grass dies.
- Over the soil layer, place your tarp, cardboard, or trash bags. Do not bother taking measures to help rainwater pass through this layer. Use heavy objects to secure the tarp, so that wind cannot easily blow it away.
- Leave your project undisturbed for the entire winter and spring, and check the state of it about a week before the summer solstice. At this point, the ground is likely to be a bit compacted and "cooked," with no surviving grass, nor any of the microorganisms that support grass. Any invasive hammerhead worms (nasty neurotoxic creatures that kill native earthworms) should also have fled for more hospitable environs, while native ants and beetle grubs should still be quite content in these soil conditions. This is your blank canvas.
At this point, you may get the very stupid notion in your head that this would be a good time and place for some landscaping shrubs. Banish the notion; any woody plant you try to install at this stage will die within a couple months, because the soil isn't saturated with its symbiotic microbes, and it won't be able to liberate nutrients from the soil for its own benefit. No amount of fertiliser will help, but will in fact cook the roots of your out-of-place shrubbery. It's also very likely that any shrub you have in mind is non-native, and while you might feel genial toward invasive species, this is my writeup, and we don't truck with that nonsense.
What you want to do at this stage is called stratification and succession: you're going to plant some 100% native "disaster species," also known as "pioneer species," also known as "weeds." Weeds are your friends right now, because the one thing they absolutely aren't, is lawn grass, and their life cycles are blessedly short and facilitative of companion plants. The thing to understand about native weeds is, they're already in your soil, waiting eagerly for the smallest excuse to take over like wildfire. Their seeds have been deposited by birds years ago, and they've just spent a whole autumn and winter cozily basking in an unreasonably warm patch of dry Earth, where nothing has been trying to eat them. The first rainfall after you uncover the cooked soil, and you'll have dandelions and clover and woodsorrel and deadnettle and crow garlic popping up, all on their own. Take this opportunity to deliberately install some aggressive native seeds, sown directly into the soil: echinacea, Indian paintbrush, region-appropriate milkweed, black-eyed Susans, and goldenrod. If you want this patch of dirt to be an asparagus patch, this is also your chance to plant some asparagus seeds, though don't expect a food yield from it during this growing year.
Over the coming growing year, weeds will take over that patch of soil, and your only two jobs are to let it happen, and to remove any obviously non-native plant that starts growing there, especially honeysuckle and other vining or runner-sending plants.
Once autumn rolls around again, and the grassless patch of your yard is once again laden with leaf litter, you have some options. If this is meant to be an asparagus patch, all you have to do is leave it alone through the cold season, plant even more seed asparagus in the spring, and weed it regularly until it's self-managing. If it's meant to be a spot where you intend to plant a woody shrub, a grapevine trellis, or a tree, then instead you're going to want to introduce some mulch to the equation, over the top of the leaf litter. Mulch introduces fungi to the soil below, which can support woody plants by helping them obtain nutrients from the soil. If, on the other hand, this is meant to be a place where you intend to have a flower bed or vegetable garden of non-woody plants, then a thin layer of manure and a thick layer of potting soil over the top of that, all over the leaf litter, will instead introduce helpful bacteria into the soil, for the support of herbaceous plants. Don't mix manure and mulch, because their respective microorganisms will compete against each other for resources through the winter, and some of them will kill each other off, defeating the purpose of the exercise. Do not use mulch for vegetable plants intended to produce roots, leaves, stems, or flowers that you intend to eat. It isn't uncommon for mulch to deposit unsafe heavy metals into the soil, and while these mostly will not concentrate into tree fruit, vine fruit, or above-ground seed pods (like beans), they will concentrate in the edible leaves, roots, tubers, and stems of plants grown in mulch, rendering them unsafe to eat. Furthermore, always thoroughly wash vegetables and fruit, no matter what conditions they were grown in.
After overwintering with a protective layer of biomass that colonises the right microbes into the soil, the following spring you can start planting what you actually want to grow in that patch of your yard, and any adjacent grass won't constantly be threatening to overtake your deliberate plantings any longer. Placing some brick pavers or rocks along the edges of your planted areas will support isopods and other friendly critters in the soil, and help keep the grass out.
If you live somewhere with very few days of intense direct sunlight every year, and many days of heavy precipitation, the process can go much faster: apply your manure or mulch on top of your composting layer, and don't even bother with the tarp layer at all. Your climate is one which will allow the mulch or manure microbiome to rapidly colonise and outcompete the grass microbiome, without needing to employ the sun as a heat source to cook it all away. Leave everything undisturbed until the spring equinox, then proceed directly to planting. This approach works less effectively in places with either much sun, little rain, or both, because the soil microbes in those regions are much more resistant to thermal extremes, and killing them requires the exaggerated circumstance of extreme heat, extreme dryness (and the resulting severe soil compaction and loss of aeration), and total deprivation of a living grass plant to maintain mutualism with.
If you find that the soil is too densely compacted at the mulch/manure stage of the process, turn it over by whatever means you have handy. Chunk it apart with a spade, aerator, or hoe. You don't need to reduce it to fine dusty particles; just loosen it into fist-sized lumps. The more clay composition your local soil has, and the less loam, the likelier you will need to do this. You can also use store-bought potting soil as loose filler, mingled with the existing local soil, to provide your plantings with an area around their roots that is easier for them to claim.
Any questions I am sent for elaboration, I shall append to the bottom of this writeup, for the benefit of anyone else who reads it. Good luck and godspeed!
Iron Noder 2024, 25/30