KILL YOUR LAWN

TOOLS NEEDED :

“Sharpshooter” Shovel (a shovel that is 2-3 times longer than it is wide). By far the best sharpshooter shovel I’ve ever owned (and I’ve been through about 9 of them) is the “Fiskars 46" Steel Garden Spade Shovel with Ergonomic D-Handle, Garden Tool for Transplanting and Digging”. You can Probably find it online somewhere, though I think Scamazon discontinued it. The whole thing is made of iron, with a plastic handle. If you’re serious about planting stuff and want something that lasts pass the lawn-kill, avoid wood handles. I’ve found the wood contracts and warps over time and the shovel head becomes loose. Sometimes these shovels are marketed as “drain spades”. I will never again use a traditional spade-shaped shovel. They suck despite their prevalence as props in mafia movies.

MULCH (lots of it) - Mulch is gold. It insulates the ground, prevents the sun from heating up the roots and soil (roots like it cooler), helps retain moisture, is broken down by microbes and releases nitrogen when the microbes and fungi die, and builds soil. Lay mulch down thicker than you think you’ll need to because it breaks down fast, especially in higher rainfall climates.

WEED-WACKER - Native plant gardens are low-maintenance, they aren’t “no maintenance”. If you want a “no-maintenance” yard than just lay down asphalt and create your own little miserable heat island (no matter what you do, please don’t do the weed-cloth and gravel method). It will surely suck and make the area around it hotter, but you won’t have to maintain it and you can continue living disconnected from the land you live on (I’m being a sarcastic prick). Maintaining native plant areas is a form of stewardship, and it’s fun. It gets your sorry ass outside and forces you to pay attention to the ecosystem you’ve created, and you still have to do it far less frequently than you would if you had to mow a lawn. Anyway, once the native plant install is established, you’re still going to need to weed-wack, primarily any grass or invasive weeds that pop-up, while simultaneously avoiding the natives and enabling them to thrive. This is essentially what grazing animals sometimes do in various ecosystems (while they can also trample native plants and foul up streams with massive amounts of cow shit). As you continue to do this, the native perennials, shrubs and trees end up shading out the light-hungry invasive grasses, and your yard goes about the process of ecological succession.

I hate f*cking with 2-stroke gas weed-wackers because they’re loud as hell, you’re not supposed to leave gas in the engine for longer than a month. Up until recently, most battery-operated weed-wackers weren’t strong enough, but that’s changed. I use SKIL brand weed wackers and hedgers. The batteries last for about two rounds of use, are sturdy as hell, and they sell different sizes.

HEDGER - This is my favorite tool. It looks like the mouth of an alligator gar. The native habitat where I live is known as Tamaulipan Thornscrub, and it becomes thick very quick. I give my yard a haircut after any significant rain that we get, but the hedger is great because in prairie ecosystems or grasslands, it can be used to cut down and reduce dead branches and stems at the end of the year and “mulch” them on site so they don’t look “unsightly” (for members of the square community who might work in your municipalities code enforcement division or neighbors who are still part of the lawn cult that thinks all other plants are “messy”). You just have to add a little bit of lube to the teeth every once in a while.

HOW TO KILL

SODCUTTER : Rent a sodcutter. This machine cuts the roots two to three inches deep and disconnects the grass from the soil beneath. The “rugs” of grass must then be flipped over so that the roots can be exposed to the sun and it will die. Does not work well with Bermuda grass since Bermuda grass roots go so deep and the stolons - the tiny bits of root left in the soil when you rip it out - can resprout and become new full-grown plants. The “rugs” of sod that you flip over are left on the ground as a mulch, protecting the ground beneath from getting baked by the sun. The dead sod can be moved aside whenever you need to dig and plant Pros : can kill a lawn in a day, especially bluegrass or St. Augustine Grass, leaving you with essentially a blank canvas Cons : labor intensive, sodcutter is heavy as shit.

SOLARIZATION/SMOTHERING : Cover lawn with a tarp or cardboard and mulch (need lots of mulch, like a dumptruck full). Easiest in lower-latitude hot climates like Texas. May not be possible in Eastern, higher-rainfall climates like Maryland, the Carolinas, Pennsylvania, etc.

This method takes a while, which is a drag, and I’ve seen it fail. The time that it takes to die could be time that you’re spending getting native plants established. Thus I recommend the sod-cutter or just doing the bit-by-bit method.

BIT-BY-BIT : Using a “Sharp-shooter”shovel (basically a long, narrow, 3-times-longer-than-it-is-wide shovel), you come at a low angle (mimicking the flat-slab subduction of the farallon plate, for any of you geology nerds), disemboweling the turf from ground in a back-and-forth stabbing motion. This doesn’t look as nice as using a sod-cutter to rip out uniform even lines of turf, but it works. It sucks to do and is exhausting, but you only have to do it once. Then you plant your natives, dump the mulch on top of the ground (while keeping it two inches away from the stems of natives so as not to encourage rot) to smother weeds and help retain soil moisture, water them in, and you’re done.

TILLING : Only possible with grass species that do not spread by stolons, like bermuda does. Bermuda grass is extremely hard to kill and often requires constant weeding or site-specific spraying and selective, targeted applications of herbicide using a large piece of cardboard to prevent over-spraying or hitting native plants. Tilling essentially “chops up” and plows the lawn into the ground beneath. With species like Kentucky bluegrass, it works like a charm. With Bermuda, it is pointless.

EASIEST, LAZIEST (andthat’s ok) METHOD : JUST START PLANTING STUFF, WHILE CONTINUING TO WEED-WACK AND MOW THE LAWN AROUND THE STUFF YOU PLANT.

The key take-away no matter what is that after you kill the lawn, you will essentially be planting and nurturing the natives, while continuing to go in and periodically remove or weed-wack/spray/dig-up-with-a-garden-knife any remaining bits of grass that pop up. I highly suggest against using herbicide unless you have one of the very invasive and aggressive grass species like Bermuda or Kikuyu Grass. St. Augustine Grass, by comparison, is easy to remove and kill.

The process of constant maintenance works because the native shrubs you initially plant (which should be easy to grow, common keystone members of your local ecosytem) will eventually outcrowd and overgrow the invasive grasses, and you will be the disturbance force that selects for the natives and selects against the attempted re-intrusion of the grasses. After a long growing season where you have watered the natives, any competition will successfully be put at bay since the natives have taken most of the available light and root space. Once you have reached this point, very little continued maintenance is necessary, especially for prairie gardens since prairies tend to be so dense.

So you want to kill your lawn? And what would replace it?

How to get started?

Step 1 : Find the remaining last bits of “natural” areas that contain some fragmented remnants of the remaining native plant species that once grew in your area. Visit these places, document what you see and take pictures of plants that interest you. Let these photos serve as study notes. Upload your photos to an app like inaturalist (obscure the location for privacy purposes) and other users or the AI will identify them. Pay attention to what family they are in. The more you do this, the more you will start to notice shared traits whether it be horticultural tolerance, flower shape, phytochemistry (ie smell of crushed leaves) among the plants in that family. You are starting to become familiar with the plants around you. You will start to notice things you didn’t notice before.

Step 2. Connect with native plant societies in your area, visit native plant growers, find others to talk to about your newfound shared interest.

Step 3. KILL THE SHIT OUT OF YOUR LAWN. Rent a sodcutter from a local big box store or equipment supply company if you want it done quick. Otherwise, sheet-mulch with cardboard and overlay with free mulch or woodchips from a tree company that is in need of a place to dump. Use a service like chipdrop.com or call tree companies out of the yellow pages. Mulch can sometimes be very easy to come by for free.

Step 4. Start planting native plants that you purchase from a nursery or better yet from seed that you have collected from nearby patches of native plants yourself.

HOW TO COMPILE A SPECIES LIST OF NATIVE PLANTS FOR YOUR REGION USING THE INATURALIST APP :

Go to www.inaturalist.org and select the “explore” feature”. In the taxon (ie species) field, type “plants”. You can also search by plant order (ie “Asterales” - sunflower order), family (“Campanulaceae” - Lobelia family), genus (Lobelia), etc.

Next, go to the “location” field. You can search by continent, state/province, county, town etc. If the name of a particular place comes up in the suggestions that pop up once you type it, you can search it.

Click “go” and you will get a list of every plant that occurs within the boundaries of the location you typed in.

Under the “species” tab you will get a list of individual species (not just all the observations). Most species popping up will be native (ideally), but in heavily disturbed or urban areas, it is likely that many invasives or non-native horticultural species will pop up, too, so be sure to click the taxon name in order to be taken to the taxon page of that particular species where you will be able to read the wikipedia entry and see the plant’s distribution to confirm that it is indeed native to your area.

You can use this tool as a way to compile a list of potential native species to plant in your yard once you’ve killed the shit outta your lawn nice.