Category: spring

As I suspected, research would have helped with my attempt to murder our grass convert lawn to garden. I spent a warm Saturday cutting black garbage bags open, hauling bricks and stone edgers, and fighting with crinkling sheets of plastic in the wind while I tried to anchor corners and smother grass.

Four days later, at least five corners had dislodged; sled-sized patches of bright green grass grew happily towards the sun. Growing grass bulged under the billowing bags while a friend overseas asked, “How’s the grass-killing going?”

When I told him I didn’t think it was working, he sent me an article on No-Dig Gardening. “The hippie way,” he said. Another friend said his dad used newspaper, then covered the newspaper with mulch, instead of using plastic.

This didn’t occur to me, to smother with materials that worms can eat, that will decompose, that will become a part of life instead of a blocker to it.

On Friday, it was warm and sunny, and I decided to undo all the work I did last weekend. I pulled up the plastic only to see how ineffectual it had been. The bricks and edgers succeeded in killing some grass, but the plastic did not.

I stacked the bricks, threw the plastic away, and started reading about happier ways to kill grass.

On Sunday, in the late afternoon after a run, when the sun was shining and the sky was blue, I dug out my gardening gloves, whacked last year’s crusted dirt off of them, and got to work in the “garden.”

I use air quotes because it’s not a garden yet. Right now our “garden” is a huge swath of gras: grass that last year had to be mowed, and grass that currently occupies the real estate where flowers and herbs will live.

In other words, grass that needs to die.

The snow has all melted, and we’ve got about 2 months until it’s time we can start putting plants in the ground.

Sunday was the perfect day to get out and get to work. I can’t start seeds indoors, and there’s not a whole lot we can do outdoors yet either, seeing as how we could still have more snow.

But in the warm sunshine, I could start laying black plastic over the grass we want to kill. At the nursery they recommended spraying it with a bunch of Roundup, but I didn’t really want to do that. So instead I cut huge black lawn bags to open and spread them, then weighed them down with bricks and edgers we dug out from the previous owner.

I have no idea if this will work. I thought the plastic was to keep the light out and prevent the grass from photosynthesizing, therefore killing it. My husband thinks it’s more for heat: plastic will trap the heat, killing the grass. He says the plastic is a benefit because the heat will kill weed seeds as well, something Roundup wouldn’t do.

I’m sure I could research to find out for sure, but I’ve found that when it comes to gardening, I’d rather be outside messing around, actually doing stuff instead of reading about it. I try things on a whim, sometimes resulting in massive frustration because a little bit of research would have told me the thing I did was dumb. Usually, though, I just appreciate being outside, poking around in the dirt.