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Step 1: Kill your grass

I started on this path a couple of years ago with one goal: kill my grass. I was still forming my thoughts on what I really wanted to do for landscaping around my house but I knew that I didn’t want to spend any more of my life maintaining grass. Grass is dumb. We’ve all been fooled. Grass is the most idiot crop that we have talked ourselves into growing. Yes, I called it a crop. Look at all of the time, maintenance, materials, tools, services and businesses that exist solely to maintain grass. If you have a lawn, you are a grass farmer, probably even a weed farmer too. How many of you go out to cut the weeds every weekend in the summer? I was no longer interested in spending time, money, thought or water on grass. So I killed it.

Killing your grass is important for two reasons:

1. It reduces any future weeds that you’ll get in your garden
2. It changes how you will start to look at grass. Grass is the enemy. Eradicate it. Deprive it. Hate it. Don’t worry, you’ll move on to other things to hate, like violets. Those damn things grow everywhere in my garden.

When you kill your grass, you can let the fall leafs stay on the ground. They’re mulch, organic material. Gold for gardens. You can collect them if you want, but first time around, I recommend leaving them on your lawn to kill the grass. Yep, this is gonna feel weird. You can also put a tarp down, or cover it with plastic. My personal favorite is to have a massive truck load of local fresh mulch from a recently ground up tree to just cover up everything. I wouldn’t fool with the fabrics and plastics, they’re just trying to sell you more products and if you put down enough mulch, nothing will easily grow through it.

Step 2: Plan your space

You need to get an idea of how you want to divide your yard up and what your goals will be. One of the first things I did was put up a fence because I knew that it would be a little messy at times and I felt like it would frame the yard nicely no matter what state the garden was in. For your planning, you’ll be considering sunlight, traffic flow, access to remove weeds (and fruit!), how you will water and what kinds of plants you want.

I couldn’t sketch out my ideas easily enough so I made a little cardboard model to scale where I could move the beds around and figure out where they would fit. The scale was 1ft = 1cm. Super nerdy, but it helped me feel very confident about where I wanted everything to go. If you have any materials that you need (like for bed liners), a model will help you estimate how much material to order without going outside with a measuring tape every time you need to get something new.

In the end, I mostly stuck with my plan. It wasn’t complicated, I just wanted to use every foot intentionally. I strayed from it a little bit. After I had built one set of beds, I decided it was way too much work and the next set would be more iterative, so I built up the next beds over a few seasons instead of weeks.

When it came time to do my backyard, I didn’t make a model. Instead, I move large elements within the yard based on various flows that I had roughly mapped out. I considered water flow, people flow and workflow. I addressed the most pressing issues when I had time available and delaying on things that weren’t a priority. For instance, I moved the shed first, to free up the space and move my tools closer to the front. I also planted a large swath of wildflowers before I had a plan on what else to do with it. I even placed a fire pit where I thought it fit best, before I had any ability to seat anyone around it.

Step 3: Spend the time executing the plan

• Get friendly with your shovel and start digging.
• Build out a few beds.
• Amend the soil or bring in good soil.
• Plant stuff if you have it.
• Only take on what you can maintain the first year.

The next hardest part is putting in the time. That’s what Coach always says, right? Or was that the music teacher? Or any activity that you want to get good at. The good news is that you’ll be spending it outside. The more time that I spend outside, the more in touch with nature I get. It’s kind of nice. I spent the good part of a summer outside painting a fence. It was hard work, but only because I had to carve out time to do it. Painting a fence in the summer sun is a job. So is digging a 100 ft long trench, shoveling gravel and milch, chopping wood, and pulling up old plants and planting new ones. It’s all work, for sure, but I gained something that I can’t gain anywhere else: perspective and free exercise.

The more time that I spent outside, the more of nature that I noticed. That is also some of the reward. I noticed how the sun travels through the sky at different times of year, and what kinds of animals and insects live in my area. I even met more of my neighbors by being outside so often. I’m almost certain I wouldn’t have met them any other way.

Learn the plants

• Water daily.
• Observe daily changes.
• Weed, train, or trim stuff back.

Don’t just learn the plant names, yes that’s important and yes they can be confusing. Learn how to look at a plant and figure out if it’s happy and what it needs if it’s not happy. I started to see patterns in how different plants will react when they have too much sun, not enough sun, too much water, not enough water and what they look like when some unknown thing is eating them without your permission. When I look at my garden every day, I see the differences and what changes.

It becomes easier to notice when something isn’t going right in your garden. When a problem comes up, I would start to form hypothesis on why, and try to make corrections. If you do this, I’d bet that you too will eventually develop a skill for being able to “listen” to what your plants are telling you, just by looking at them. It took me a couple of weeks to realize that the reason my peanuts weren’t growing was because I had little rabbits sneaking in my garden at night. A basic fence fixed the problem, but it took some persistence and a security camera to finally get to the bottom of it.

Reap the rewards

Then there’s harvest time. You probably aren’t going to be able to sustain yourself off your garden when you first start. If you’re lucky, you’ll end up with an abundance of a few vegetables, maybe even more than you know what to do with. If you’re unlucky, like I was for so many years, you’ll learn some hard lessons like why good soil is important. However, if you’re able to see a season through, you’ll find yourself going out to the garden for a snack, or a salad, or maybe even get enough cucumbers to try pickling. You may get enough tomatoes that you’ll need to preserve them because you can’t eat them fast enough. You may start to get a better feel for what is in season, so you know what to expect to be on sale at the farmer’s market because the professional growers will have them in abundance at the same time. Maybe you’ll only have an herb garden and will never have to pay for overpriced grocery store basil again.

The point of all of this is to show you that I started with a standard ugly front yard, just like many of you probably have, and I ended up growing food instead. It took a couple of years of focusing on it, but I was able to produce more veggies and plants last year than I could have hoped for. Whether you have a small yard, or a big yard, if you start to look at grass as a crop and ask yourself “what crop would I rather have”, you may be surprised what you come up with. Maybe you can have a small vineyard, or a large collection of blueberry bushes. Maybe you love to eat pickles, or love hot sauce and can grow a bunch of fresh hot peppers to make your own. Why don’t you have a fruit tree in your yard? Apples, peaches, oranges, lemons? Almonds? I like any of those things better than grass. This year, I’m growing even more in my yard. Hopefully I’ve inspired you to grow more food and less grass. The gains aren’t just food. You can become educated in nature, and possibly even more social by being outside and interacting with your neighbors.