Flip Your Lawn into a Beautiful Water-Wise Garden

Tired of maintaining a lawn, dealing with a diseased lawn and don't have the budget to get new sod, or want a drought-resistant garden?

In the 41st installment of Gardening Tips & Tricks, I will give you tips on flipping your lawn to an attractive, water-wise garden, especially if you live in a dry climate. This will be a 3-part series, so ensure you have joined my group and hit the notification bell.

Let's dig in!

First, it's important to decide the space you have that includes:

🌞 Light - Do you have trees that give your lawn shade?

🚰 Water system - Do you use an installed sprinkling system or a surface sprinkler that is manually moved to areas?

🏡 Design - Are you looking to just remove the diseased grass and create a garden, so it's part lawn and garden, or do you want to remove all grass and install a rock garden with pockets of plants throughout the yard? Or do you want to create a produce garden?

Parts one & two will go through the lawn removal process; part three will discuss the best plants for a water-wise garden.

📦 The easiest way to transform your lawn into a garden is by a process called Sheet-mulching, where you place biodegradable material such as cardboard boxes (ask Home Depot or Costco/Sams Club) or old newspapers and lay them down on the grass you want to flip. Ensure it's a thick covering and wet the material to ensure it molds to the grass.

So there are no gaps for the grass to come up through, ensure the boxes/newspapers overlap like roof tiles at the edges of the grass.

TIP: Remove any tape or stickers on the boxes, as they won't break down and will stay in the soil after decomposing. Also, don't use any shiny or glossy material since most are made from plastic and won't decompose.

After, you have two options:

1️⃣ Cover the cardboard layer with 6 plus inches of compost or topsoil.

2️⃣ Cover with 4 plus inches of mulch.

The compost/mulch helps to smother the grass.

Using the compost/topsoil option, you can plant your new garden as you would with an existing garden. However, it can get expensive to get that much compost. If you have access to a lot of mulch, you can just spread it all over the cardboard; it's also less expensive.

TIP: Sign up for ChipDrop to get wood chips delivered to your door for free or at a very low cost. You can also ask a local farmer if they have old, spoiled hay or straw, which they can give you for free. Or collect leaves from your trees or neighbors, which you can use as grass covering as well.

Part two will go into cutting out grass and replacing it with rock, creating a garden that way.

Happy Gardening!!

#gardeningtips #flippinglawns #gardens #gardening #removinglawn

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