Removing grass
It seems everyone has an opinion about the best way to remove lawn from your yard. In my research, I chose a new one every day until I started actually doing it. I don’t claim to have an answer for a definitive method, but I have logged approximately 200 hours at the task (so far) and am ready to share some wisdom, such as it is.
After tediously and painfully picking rocks out of various spots in my yard I set myself to the task of creating something of a blank canvas upon which to grow the garden of my dreams. I knew I wanted a mini prairie in my back yard, and I wanted to replace the lawn in my front yard with more interesting and ecologically-beneficial plants. In total, I approximated this to be about 3500 square feet of space to deal with. Some of it was weeds and invasive stuff I had dealt with the previous fall, but most of it was lawn. Scroll down for pictures.
In my research of grass removal, I learned about five main methods:
Smother. This involves using large sheets of dark plastic, cardboard, or mulch to cover the areas you want to kill. Whatever you use, it must block all sunlight, so if you go with mulch, you’ll need several inches. You need to leave it on long enough for things to germinate in the darkness underneath the cover and then die from lack of sunlight, probably about six weeks. This method has the advantage that all of those dead grass and weeds become organic matter for the worms to eat and make your soil healthier for your future plantings.
Solarize. With this method, you cover the area with sheets of clear plastic, which allows the sun to shine through and create a fatally hot environment for the plants underneath. Hopefully, dormant weed seeds will germinate in all that sunlight and then die from the heat. In this scenario, you leave the clear plastic on for about eight weeks. The drawback of this method is that you can also inadvertently sterilize your soil in the heat which doesn’t set your new plantings up for success. Also, this theoretically only works in sunny areas.
Sheet mulch. This approach is sort of a cousin of the smothering method. It involves laying clean cardboard or several layers of newspaper on the area and then covering it with layers of compost, topsoil, and/or mulch. Similar to smothering, this eventually starves the plants underneath of light and they die but unlike smothering, you don’t remove all of these layers. Over time, the paper/cardboard breaks down underneath the soil/compost/mulch and becomes additional organic matter for your soil. Eventually, you just plant on top of everything. The
Sod cut. This is just what it sounds like—you use a sod cutter to, you guessed it, cut the sod from your lawn. Most people don’t have a sod cutter lying around, but you can most likely rent one at your local farmers’ co-op or big box home improvement store. This works really well if you simply have a large relatively flat swath of lawn to get rid of, as it cuts the carpet of sod underneath in about two-foot wide ribbons. Then, you simply roll it up and cart it off, exposing the soil underneath. The first drawback with this method is, obviously, it only works where you have contiguous sod, and not on weedy spots, as the sod needs to come up in a neat mat. The second is that sod cutters are incredibly unwieldy and heavy, which means that in order to rent one you probably also have to rent a trailer to tow it home, which means that you have to have a vehicle that can tow said trailer. And then when you get home you have to maneuver around a several-hundred-pound piece of equipment potentially by yourself.
Till. With this one, you use a rototiller and till up the grass and/or weeds to kill them. Because tilling disturbs dormant weed parts underneath the surface, you then wait for those new weeds to germinate and till again a couple of weeks later. In theory, this is a faster method than some of the others listed above, but if you have a large area to work with it will be time-consuming and very labor-intensive. This method can be useful if you have soil that needs loosening, but many experts don’t recommend it because in tilling, you damage the structure of the soil. You can rent various types of rototillers from your farmers’ co-op or big box home improvement store and they’re much more easily transportable and maneuverable than the sod cutter as described above.
To clear the large area of my backyard for my mini prairie and front yard, I initially chose the tilling method. Naively, I thought this would be the fastest and I wanted to sow seeds and plant up those areas in the same season. In reality, it took me MANY weeks to clear all that sod and was incredibly labor intensive. I rented my first tiller on May 3 and didn’t complete that first phase of the grass removal process until June 20. The tiller was the wrong choice for such a large area. In fact, partway through, I realized I was never going to be able to get it all done by myself so my husband helped me by renting a sod cutter and going over the large flat areas to speed up the process. I had initially written sod cutting off as too difficult given how heavy it was which meant we’d need to a) rent a trailer and b) borrow my parents’ SUV to tow the trailer and that just seemed like too many logistical components. I finally finished the job in the 90-degree heat of late June, hauling shockingly heavy rolls of sod to the curb (more on that later) and getting down on my hands and knees to cut the last sections out with a flat shovel and a garden knife. I don’t think I’ve ever been so sweaty for so many hours so many days in a row in my life, but I was determined to GET IT DONE.
Pictures of my unnecessarily hard work below. (Note: little did I know when I began this project last summer that we were about to enter a period of severe drought. Everything looks horribly brown and dusty in these photos as a result.)
