Now is the easiest time of year to start a new garden bed (assuming “now” = early fall, day time temperatures around 45f). All you have to do is lay down cardboard:
Top it with still some nitrogen rich compostable matter, in this case grass clippings:
Some carbon-rich matter, in this case old wood chips:
And keep layering until it’s pretty thick:
And then walk away and ignore it until spring. All winter long, it’ll be decomposing, while killing the grass and weeds underneath. By spring time, the soil underneath will be nice & loose and fertile, and you’ll be able to plant straight into it.
(If you want to meet organic standards, then make sure any cardboard or paper is non-glossy and black & white. This was for someone else’s flower bed, so the red ink isn’t going to be an issue)
To answer the weed seeds question, I personally usually top it off with a thick layer of fall leaves or wood chips, which doesn’t give seeds a good place to start. Both of these are used as weed-preventing mulches here. It also helps that were going into the cold season, so they’re not going to get much of an opportunity to grow.
I forgot to mention, but the name of this method is sheet mulching or lasagna gardening, so search those terms if you want more info.
Mulch is awesome! I would like to note that if you are using kitchen scraps or manure, they need to decompose first, for two main reason. The first is that the process of decomposition uses nitrogen, and will pull it from the soil and away from plants. The second is that both, though manure is more of a concern, can carry bacteria such as salmonella and E. coli.
I’m very much a proponent of “food not lawns” but I’m also fucking realistic that a ton of people do not have the resources/time/energy and getting into gardening is daunting as fuck. I’ll excitedly encourage it but if people can’t or even just don’t want to then that’s FINE. I hate the posts full of pictures of idealistic food lawns. Even outside of the actual growing and care, just processing a harvest takes so much damn time and More Energy and More Resources or Techniques and acting like it’s as simple as “just grow your own food!” is setting people up for a huge letdown when they realize how much that can take
i watered my garden every single day it didn’t rain last summer. no matter how tired i was, i had to go trundle around with the hose and the watering can. because i didn’t use pesticides, i lost all my pumpkins and squashes to a squash borer. my carrots didn’t really amount to much. all my watermelons died on the vine, tiny. my grape vine still hasn’t fruited. my herbs pretty much universally croaked. my lettuces looked great but were sobitter. i didn’t harvest my cabbages in time and only got to eat one–the slugs got the rest. i planted a bunch of peppers and got almost nothing from them, just weird little gnarled green fists.
then i got an absolutely absurd amount of cucumbers and turned every single jar in my house into a pickle container. i’m still working my way through the six gallon freezer bags of frozen beefsteak tomatoes that august produced.
your garden will produce way less of a lot of stuff you want and way more of some stuff you’re not prepared to consume or preserve. you have to water, to weed, to think about sun exposure, to debate about pesticides.
i love gardening! it’s great, it keeps you grounded, it feels wonderful to materially contribute to the local ecosystem, to see the wasps and spiders and bees and butterflies, and fresh tomatoes are delicious! but it’s SO MUCH MORE WORK THAN A LAWN.
Hi, indigenous person here with good news: The food not lawn doesn’t have to be food -for humans-
You can do amazing work for your local ecosystem by replacing your lawn with native wildflowers, shrubs, and trees. Which have the added benefit of generally not needing any looking after -because they are native and evolved to be there-
The following infographics are going to be North American (and specifically Northeast) centric because guess where I’m from:
^^ this is it, and “what would happen if you did LESS maintenance” is such a good question to center with.
In terms of human food, I’m a big fan of allotment/community garden style food production, where you go away from your immediate home to a place shared with others with individual personal plots for the purpose of producing food. People are available to help, it creates a place to go, it becomes a social center, you can have events and work days, and if you form enough relationships then someone will be available to (say) water your plants through the tricky periods or during vacations; plus, if you get bored or hate the work, you simply stop paying dues and hand the plot to the next eager person. Of course, this isn’t available everywhere - but setting one up might be a valuable use of time and energy, with more resilience than converting your home plot to something high-maintenance.
There’s also a middle ground to all of these. Having less lawn and more native plants is a more practical option or starting point for a lot of people than converting their entire property to native plants at once. Start small whether it’s with native landscaping or food gardens.
Growing natives isn’t necessarily lower maintenance, just different maintenance. They might not need weekly pruning and watering but they do need weeding and a good clean up in the spring or fall. Yes, they’re adapted to your local environment but we have changed that environment profoundly and your front yard, surrounded by cement, partially shaded by trees, with the only grazers being rabbits is a very different environment to a wide open prairie with frequent flooding, seasonal grazing by a wide array of large herbivores, and semi-annual fires. (Assuming you live in an area that was formerly plains, we’re also not even going to talk about invasive plants, worms, bacteria, diseases, soil compaction, etc etc etc)
Give yourself the room and permission to learn in your garden. You will need to acquire new skills to succeed and you will absolutely fail at some things in the process. You will plant things in a location you think will be perfect and they will struggle along or die. You will plant other things that were only supposed to get 3’ tall and instead are taller than you. It’s all part of the process and fun. Start small, get a hang of the new techniques, then grow from there.
As a person who tends other people’s gardens for a living, I’m going to disagree and say that native plant gardens are way lower maintenance, though I do recognize that this might be different in different ecolosystems.
One of my clients keeps their yard as a mostly native plant space, with a bit of sad lawn because it’s too shady to grow well. I go out there two or three times a year, for about 2 hours each time. While I’m there, I remove any invasive plants, and thin the under story (as they’ve fenced it, so the deer can’t do their job), and occasionally expand the planted areas into the lawn by adding plants, roughly 75% of which are native, and the remaining 25% are adapted to similar climates but are not invasive.
Compare that with most of my other clients, who have similar sized yards, that are a mix of ornamental plantings & lawn. I visit them every other week from April to the end of October, about two hours each visit. I’m pruning, deadheading, trimming, weeding, mulching, dividing, mowing, raking leaves, etc etc etc.
I think it’s helpful to remember that lawns and purely ornamental gardens started as a way to show off wealth, because of how much work they take to maintain. But just because that’s how they started, doesn’t mean they have to continue that way.
From my experience, if you live in an area that was forested, the easiest way to have a yard is to have native trees, with native under story plants, and then leave the leaves & conifer needles alone. Go through regularly and remove any invasive species. If there aren’t enough herbivores and the under plantings start getting congested, start pruning out the oldest stems of multi-stem shrubs- maybe every other year, maybe less often. More specific maintenance is going to depend on your type of forest- not all of them evolved with regular burning.
If you’re starting a forest from scratch, I highly recommend you start by putting down a thick layer of woodchips. That’ll help kill/prevent weeds, increase soil moisture retention, and help keep the soil cool in summer, much like the shade from a forest.
If you’re trying to make an ornamental garden less work:
1. Mulch with woodchips and then plant a ground cover. Do not let soil be bare. Ideally, have multiple layers of foliage, so the soil is very shaded- makes it way harder for weeds to get established.
2. Stop watering. Plants are much more capable of getting their own water than a lot of peels think- and if it can’t in your climate, really think about whether you want it. Watering also makes it easier for weeds to grow.
3. For every tree and shrub, look up its adult width, and plant it no closer to another shrub or tree (unless you’re doing a layered forest on purpose, in which case consider how tall they’ll get), and make sure you plant them far enough away from paths, fences, and buildings that you won’t have to prune them away.
4. Learn which weeds are invasive and will take over, and which you can live with. Bindweed vs dandelion, for example. Ignore the ones you can live with.
5. For things that die back to the ground, mulch every fall. That alone will reduce your weeding by a lot.
6. Figure out which native plants will work in your yard. Some are very adaptable (see: self-heal) and some are much more particular (trout lily). Keep in mind that your region isn’t just one kind of ecosystem- and there’s a lot of habitats within each ecoregion.
I really appreciate native plants because they are so important to other native species- particularly native bees. There’s a lot of bees that are dependent on particular native species, and for whom lavender and all the rest of the non- native flowers people say to “plant to save the bees” do nothing. The best way to save native bees (and birds, and butterflies, and, and, and) is by planting native species & creating habitat
I do agree with the previous poster in large part though.
I planted a new strawberry last summer, I’m very particular about which and where I plant so I can tell them apart and figure out the best varieties for our conditions after some unproductuve duds. When I found these edible ornamentals with COLOUR FLOWERS I snatched them up, both for the novelty and easy identification! They’re a light and dark pink, specific to each mother plant. One tag said “Toscana”, which there is plenty of info online about but the other was something like “Havana” or “Hovana” but I can’t any information on it. Or even any other shades/names for pink strawberies besides Toscana, so make of that what you will. They are doing great as a garden perennial and also look fantastic cascading out of a hanging basket, which is how I origionally bought them.
I’m also very excited to see my buckweat flowering, although of the three pounds of seeds I planted it was considerably sparse. Rodents have been digging up my seeds just as fast as I plant them, sometimes eliminating entire crops before they can sprout, and it’s become an epidemic in our garden… I’m hoping to fill in gaps around the garden and between beds with Buckwheat to use as bee forage. A local homesteader recommended it for it’s fast growth and ease of uprooting when rotating crops. It also produces a dark molasses-like honey if a lot is available.
Here’s some hardy roses, greens clipped for lunch, our hugelkultur mounds with perennial berries and herbs, a ground cover of radishes and rye that I pull up and use as green manure (it’s been coming back for a few years, anywhere I drop the seeds), squash vines (on a hugel mound) with a cattle panel set up for a trellis, and tractor tire raised bed full of tomatoes.
Finally, what I’m hoping will be a snake habitat to control pests. It’s set into a hugel mound that the rodents made nests and tunnels in, there’s a water dish nearby and the bricks and rocks catch the sun and warm up. I’ll let the grass around it grow long to create cover. Strawberries grow on top.
Did I take our most mature monstera with a new leaf down two flights of stairs to take this photo? Yeah, I might have but in my defense, our basement gets some really lovely direct light in the late afternoon. Not pictured: all the plants I moved to make way for this big ole girl.
Trailing Tuesday feat. All the Vines Around my Ikea Greenhouse Cabinet
The pothos and zz plant on top of the cabinet weren’t there originally but we quickly found that the spots they were in were neither kitten nor puppy proof - oops! We are going to have to get creative haha - happy national puppy day ❤ meet our new babies, Laika & Clover ☘
Sorry I’ve been so absent, friends. I miss my kitty and the grief feels so insurmountable at times. I am trying my best to be present and grateful but each day feels so difficult. Thanks for your patience and support!
Looking for some opinions! I am considering putting a moss ball in the ceramic pet fountain I keep in my greenhouse cabinet… do you think it would be happy there?
