Life is full of compromises. My distaste for lawn grass as a landscaping element is well known to friends, family and some readers of this blog. I have managed to convert several chunks of our lot to something more useful, or at least prettier. My husband, however, is set on having a grass lawn in front of the house. I think this is related to his suburban upbringing and warrants therapy, but I graciously conceded. The lawn could stay. Still, something needed to be done about it; the current situation could be more accurately defined as “meadow” rather than “lawn”. It was unmanageable in winter, sending up wiry flower stalks a few days after each mowing, and dead and brown in the summer when there was little rain.
My initial approach to grass homicide, covering the area with cardboard and mulch and allowing it to rot for several months, has yielded satisfactory results, despite the fact that my new sworn enemy, nut grass, apparently has the superpower of being able to grow through cardboard. But even I must admit that having a front yard consisting entirely of mulch might look a bit odd, not to mention that’s a lot of cardboard to scavenge, so we attacked this project with a more conventional approach.
The first step was to rent a big, noisy, smelly tractor tiller and rip the whole thing out. Naturally we picked a blistering hot, sunny day, but I guess the alternative, a mud bath, would have been worse. Pushing a tiller looks simple, like pushing a lawn mower only bigger. Our turf, however, was a thick layer of thatch over an even thicker layer of highly compacted clay dirt over an even thicker layer of rock. It laughed at our puny tiller. After several passes my husband managed to penetrate as far as the actual soil, and eventually he more or less prevailed. Meanwhile, I raked off the dead grass and rocks. This is also more difficult than it sounds. I ended up feeding most of the grass to my chickens (yes, my chickens ate my lawn, now that is recycling, friends). The considerable rock pile was redistributed into landscaping, and the “soil” returned to the erstwhile lawn. While we were at it, and had the rented trailer at our disposal, I picked up a couple yards of organic lawn and garden mix from Hawaiian Earth Products and threw it on the lawn (see how easy and casual I made that sound?).
At this point, the typical approach is to go ahead and seed or sod and hope for the best with fighting the weeds, or to apply a broad spectrum herbicide that kills everything in sight and then wait before planting. I’m sure you can guess that the second option wasn’t even considered. Well, not by me. Fortunately I was able to come up with an alternative: solarizing.
And so it came to pass that, after my husband installed an efficient automated sprinkler system (also more laborious than it sounds), our lawn is now tightly covered with black plastic held down by landscaping rocks and random objects. The concept is to raise the temperature of the underlying soil high enough to kill weed seeds, pests and the like (we don’t appear to have a nematode problem but I often see solarization recommended for this). UC Davis’ extension office has an excellent article outlining how to solarize here.
We deviated from the article in a couple respects. Most sources recommend clear plastic to get the best greenhouse effect, but we had already purchased black before I read up on this. It is also advised to perform solarization during the hottest and sunniest months of the year, but as it happens we had the time to devote to this in October and I was not feeling inclined to endure another rainy season with the current status quo.
So now we have her nicely tucked in until after the new year, and then we will start fresh in 2012 with the most eco-friendly option we could find: zoysiagrass, a slow growing, drought tolerant dense turf that will crowd out at least most of the weeds if properly cared for.
I’d still rather have a vegetable garden.
