Kill your grass and grow a garden!

Did you know that 30-60% of our drinkable water goes to watering our lawns? You water that lawn; adding pesticides and fertilizer at a rate 10 times as much as the amount used by industrial farms just so it can grow. Then you have to mow the grass. The average home owner’s gas-powered lawn mower produces as much pollution per hour as 11 automobiles do. At an estimated 1,300,000 gas powered mowers owned by American's that's the equivilant of 14,300,00 cars in an hour. Then there are those gas powered leaf blowers that blow dust and allergens into the air. So growing a lawn leads to water shortage, ground and air pollution.

My friend's whimsical garden.

Am I saying you should just let your lawn die and leave bare dirt? No, grow an edible landscape.You don't have to grow a traditional garden with straight rows spread 3 feet apart. The row garden was designed for machinery like a rototiller. Use your imagination. You can grow ornamentals for variety. Tuck herbs among your vegetables, they will benefit each other. And don't forget those edible flowers like nasturtiums. You get flowers you can eat that will also attract bees and other insects that are needed for pollination. Your garden could be concentric circles with a sundial at the center. You could grow pole beans up a trellis to provide shade for a bench. Plant fun things like sunflowers and pumpkins that your children can enjoy. You can start small and work your way to a larger area. Your property line is the limit.

Now that I've convinced you to kill your grass, where do you start? Well grass isn't always easy to kill. You could spray it with a systemic plant killer like Round Up. Remember, Round Up will kill everything you spray it on and will cause collateral damage to anything it drifts to on the wind. I killed several bean plants when I sprayed some crazy Johnsongrass in my garden this year. I also killed my squash one time when I watered shortly after spraying weeds with Round Up. The water carried the weed killer to the squash. So be cautious. For anyone who is concerned about Round Up as poison, well you aren't going to eat your grass, but definitely read the cautions and follow the directions. In Canada they spray Round Up on the wheat to kill it before they harvest it to make bread and all those other grain products we like to eat. Once the grass is thoroughly DEAD (don't get in a rush), then turn the soil with a shovel or rototiller. If you have large amounts of roots, use a garden rake to "clean up" the excess. Add well rotted manure and compost to improve your soil and you are ready to plant your new garden!

Honey bee after nectar.

For those of you who are organic purists, you can kill your lawn by covering it with several thicknesses of newspaper topped with at least 4-6 inches of mulch. When you're ready to plant, just poke a hole through the newspaper. This method is very labor intensive and can also be expensive if you have to purchase enough mulch to cover a large area. If you have access to plenty of mulch you're in luck. Supposedly, you can pour bleach on your grass to speed it's death, but it requires the equivilant of 1 1/2 inches of bleach. That's alot of chlorine and I'm not sure that's good for the soil either. You can use vinegar without harming the environment, but it won't work as quickly. For those of you with Bermuda grass or Johnsongrass, don't be surprised when it pokes through the mulch. The roots go deep and the joints (rhizomes) of these grasses will lie dormant for long periods of time only to sprout at the first chance at moisture and sunlight. Just keep pulling the grass or smothering it. Eventually it will die.

Young Preying Mantis

My original garden.