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sleepyowlet:

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gallusrostromegalus:

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lastxleviathan:

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Okay. Gardening 101; or “Auntie Sys I have a yard that’s currently a yard and don’t know SHIT or FUCK about how to make it not be a boring-ass yard.”

Step 1; go to your local landfill and get all of the newspaper you can. Cardboard will also work. If your neighborhood puts them out for recycling, go around and grab them all like a little newspaper goblin.

Step 2; acquire mulch. If you WANT, you can go pay for it at a garden store, but we’re all cheap lazy bitches here so screw that. Most landfills will collect yard waste and branches and chip them into woodchips, which you can get for PENNIES or FREE. Go load up on that good shit.

I like straw too, which I can get for barter because I am related to half the people around here and a solid 65% of my extended family are farmers. I give Uncle Daryl three quarts of elderberry jelly or a couple pounds of morels in spring and he loads me up with straw bales.

Step 3; figure what parts of grass you want to be not-grass, and cover that shit in newspaper, good and thick. 5-10 layers. It helps to wet the newspaper to keep it from blowing away as you work.

Now, cover that newspaper with a good thick layer of mulch.

Congrats, you’re removing the grass. It’ll starve to death under the mulch and newspaper and rot into compost. You now have garden beds and have not dug one single bit of sod.

If you can’t wait for six months to plant, pull the mulch aside, cut a hole in the newspaper, and dig out a plug of sod the size of the planting hole. Throw some compost in there and plant. Tuck mulch back around plant. Water well.

There ya go. Garden beds. In a year, when you pull back the mulch the newspaper will be almost rotted away, and the soil underneath soft and loamy.

I like to edge garden beds like this with rocks, which I can ALSO get for free because I live in the part of Iowa dotted with limestone quarries. Just, pick that shit up along the road and

I’m collecting flat ones for a FREE crazy paving path too.

I love you for this.

No prob.

Protip; the best way to do a large area without killing your knees or back is to load up a bucket of water with newspaper, sit down on the grass, and sorta scoot your ass along as you drag the bucket with you, newspapering as you go.

Then dump buckets of mulch on that and spread it out with your feet. Just sorta kick it where you want it to be.

Source; my 61 year old mom with bad knees.

AAAAAAAYY my mom did the much-to-get-rid-of-lawn thing over the course of a winter- she’d read the paper in the morning then go spread it out on the lawn and toss muclh on it.  By spring it was ready to cut holes ans dump irism day lillies and peonies into.

and all this BEFORE she got her hip replaced.

10/10, recycling, enviornmental stewardship, loos baller AND YOU DON’T HAVE TO MOW.

Or you could just…dig over the soil so the grass is upside down. Tadaa. All you need is a spade.

Which is fine, if you want to, but the entire and whole point of this is to not have to do that. 

…and you gotta do it anyway because you turn over soil before planting.

• You do it to preserve the water by breaking capillaries in the soil.
• You do it so the water preserving capacity of the soil rises (which sponge will hold more water, one that is fluffed up, or one you’re already squeezing?).
• You do it so oxygen enters the soil so your plants can breathe (yeah, they take in oxygen through their roots).
• You do it so anaerobic bacteria don’t turn your soil sour.
• You do it every autumn and every spring in areas you replant annually or bi-annually.
• You do it once before planting permanent cultures.

I’m a professional horticulturist. This is my job.

Yeah. I know all that. And I’ve never turned over soil before planting, and my plants are just fine. I’ve been doing the mulch method for five years, and my soil has gone from rock-hard and could bend a shovel to soft and crumbly. 

If you’re willing to wait a little longer rather than do the digging, it’ll be fine. The worms did the soil aerating for me, I just needed to wait a bit longer. 

I understand that you do it professionally and have, presumably, clients that expect results fast. But I have, in twenty years, never fussed about turning soil over for large garden beds, and my plants are just fine…better than fine, my roses are eight feet tall…and I haven’t stripped a bit of sod or turned over a bit of soil save off my veggie patch, which I wanted to plant the first year. 

My mother’s been gardening the same way as me, for forty years. Her plants are fine too. Thriving, even. 

There are tons of alternatives to turning over your soil. Turning over the soil also sometimes cannot be done by people with mobility issues. 

Oh, btw, sources for no dig gardening being perfectly viable;

Esther Dean, No Dig Gardening, 1977

Masanobu Fukuoka, Do nothing gardening, 1970

F. C. King, Is Digging Necessary? , 1946

Ruth Stout, Gardening Without Work, 1961

Charles Dowding, Organic Gardening the Natural No-Dig Way, 2013