Liberate Your Lawn - one new bed DONE!

You may remember back a couple of months ago when I laid out our plans for how we wanted to liberate some of our lawn for new garden beds. Then, a couple of weeks ago, I started digging and working on getting our new garden bed in the backyard started. This weekend I really dug in...pun intended... and got the new bed finished. We were expecting, and received I might add, foul weather on Sunday so I really wanted to get the new bed finished up before that got here. As a part of this process I had been working also to eradicate our bindweed problem, at least in this part of the yard. All that work came to fruition this weekend.

I decided to build this bed as an experimental type of bed. Experimental for me at least. I am trying a Lasagna Bed. This isn't a garden bed where I will focus on growing the ingredients for homemade lasagna, but rather is a garden bed that will be made with multiple layers of compostable materials put down right in the prepared bedding area and allowed to compost right there. Check out the video below to get an idea of what I'm talking about in case you aren't sure.

After I covered the entire bedding area with cardboard, I spread a thin (1-2 inch) layer of soil over it to hold it down. The first image in the movie shows the first layer I put down on top of the soil which was the old bedding from the chicken coop which was part sawdust, part straw, and of course the girls "outputs" as well. Next layers in order were: straw, grass clippings (free from two of my neighbors and free of chemical herbicides.), mowed over garden waste, four bags of coffee grounds from Starbucks, straw, homemade compost, grass clippings, straw and peat moss.

Fall is really the optimal time to do this kind of bedding. For the obvious reason of course that there are so many available greens and browns to add to a pile like this in the fall, but also, because it will allow the materials to sit over the next 4-5 months and get snow melt and rain down into it, breaking it down into a soft humus for planting in, or at least that's the plan. I will be adding to the top of this pile, one last think layer of materials, leaves. I recently acquired a lot of them, but I'll cover that in another post in a couple of days, but leaves are truly a great composter.

I can't say I enjoyed making this bed, it was a lot of hard work. I had to move, break and set all the concrete "urbanite" stones for the bed hardscaping, break up the ground below the cardboard, remove the bindweed, and load all the greens and browns into the beds. I think it will be a good bed for us though. It is on the north side of our southern fence line, so it will be the last bed in the yard to get full sun in the summer, and the first to lose it in the fall, but what I'm planning to do is to maximize that micro climate for a lot of the cool season things that won't normally grown here in the summer to see how much I can extend their seasons. As always, we'll see.
Hope you all had a great weekend. More coming soon.
P~

This lawn is your lawn...

This is a great video I borrowed from a site that I check into from time to time, KitchenGardeners.org



I love the idea of trying to get the next president to grow food on the white house lawn. Don't you?

Liberate Your Lawn - Preparation & Planning

Being inspired again by the good folks at Freedom Gardens (PTF) We've been planning to tear out, or "Liberate" some more of our lawn. This is something that we came up with earlier in the year, not long after we put in the fence, and was actually A~'s idea for the most part.

It's something that I can totally get behind, and would no doubt have suggested, but I sometimes feel like "my garden" is slowly taking over the whole back yard, (I know, that's a bad thing because?) and I didn't want to make a play for any more space just yet. But hey, she wants more space for planting a traditional potato bed and other storage veggies and who am I to argue.

Below is one picture of what I'm talking about. This is the side yard of our house on the south side. It's in a place that gets pretty much full sun all day long, is out of the way for the most part and has access to both timed irrigation as well as a hose bib to keep things growing. You can also see that it is sloped. Not a problem. A challenge, but not a problem. Hey, this blog is about going from possibility to reality right? You can see that the lawn has been dying off in this area already. This is because when we installed the fence posts, we broke one of the sprinkler lines in a couple of places. Of course it's not a problem at this point because we WANT the grass to die. You'll also notice all the urbanite in the background if you're paying attention. This is the same stuff that we used to landscape around our house and have really grown fond of.

Below is another area that we have that runs along our fence on the south side of the yard. This will also be liberated during the process. We'll be lining the edge of the fence with another 3 foot wide bed, but unfortunately will have to remove the fruit trees that we have there. I know, please don't heckle me for that. I don't necessarily want to pull the trees, but they are full dwarf varieties and give so little fruit every year, that they're not really worth the effort. This year, I think between the two cherry trees we netted about 12 cherries. And that was up from last year! We just think that the space will be better served as an extension to our garden beds.
Take a look at that shadow along the edge of the fence line. It's there all summer. Hmm, could be a good micro-climate for head lettuce through the summer huh?

It'll be great to have this extra bedding area for next year. I haven't measured it out yet, but it should nearly double our current garden size, maybe closer to another 3/4, I'll get back to you on that one later.

I'll make sure to post again later this week with an update to the work that we're doing and also with the plans as they develop. Anyone else Liberating they're yards? Any suggestions to more easily remove the sod?

Hope you all had a great weekend!

P~