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 1 year 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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[–] greatwhitebuffalo41@slrpnk.net 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

We have !nolawns@slrpnk.net just so you know :) or if you need the full link, https://slrpnk.net/c/nolawns

That being said I personally don't have experience with that and I wish I could give you a better option.

[–] insurgenRat 1 points 1 year ago

Brilliant, subscribed. Lawns are nasty.

I'm slowly making progress and one day all that was cleared in bushfire paranoia will be bushes/trees/and meadow.

It's been so rewarding over the years seeing all the life return as I unfuck the place. In bits where I've had stuff growing for a few years every random handful of soil will have like 20 insects in it and thick mycelium.