Nature and Gardening

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All things green, outdoors, and nature-y. Whether it's animals in their natural habitat, hiking trails and mountains, or planting a little garden for yourself (and everything in between), you can talk about it here.

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Removing lawns to plant better things. Practical options for large yards? (self.greenspace)

submitted 2 years ago by insurgenRat to c/greenspace

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So digging up lawn is a nightmare, particularly if that lawn is kikuyu which is very common in my country. Every patch you clear will rapidly become colonised again without constant vigilience.

In an ideal world you'd rent something like a turf cutter, clear everything, and landscape from there. Unfortunately that's prohibitively expensive a lot of the time. Not to mention not always an option if you're not physically able to optimise the rental time with continuous work.

Solarising is popularly mentioned, but for a quarter acre of lawn that would take a loooot of laid down stuff. Doing it patch by patch tends to lead to recolonisation by the grass.

Does anyone know of better solutions for someone who can chip away for a couple of hours a week at most reliably? Where it wont end up in using all that time policing the edges of whatever you've cleared with spades and tears.

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[–] plactagonic 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

TheKiwiGrower on YT made few videos about planting trees with this method. He is from NZ so similar climate as you so his channel can be good resource for you.

[–] insurgenRat 2 points 2 years ago

That's great to know. They have their own quite fascinating ecology over the ditch but I can probably transfer much by trying to match general theory.

I wish I could replant the rainforest on my block but it was cleared for powerlines (which I don't exactly begrudge given the alternatives to electricity are abject misery :p)

One day I'll retire to a dead farm nearby and spend my last years slowly turning it back into forest.