I’m starting a new garden bed this year, and it is in an area where our lawn is typically very lush. I was going to do a lasagna-style (layered) garden, but I don’t have enough dirt for the top layer. The garden is going to be 10×30 feet in size. So in mid April I decided to try to cover the grass to kill it, which would make tilling it a lot easier, and prevent me from having to dig up all that grass.
I marked the corners of the bed, and then used what I had on hand – large cardboard pieces, plastic tarps, and even a big sheet of metal. I placed rocks and pieces of wood on top to hold everything down.
Here is what it looked like with all the supposedly-grass-killing coverings:
I uncovered it all today because I’d like to start getting it ready – I have plants waiting to go in. I could tell over the last month that there were areas I’d still have to pull grass out from. I found out today that the plastic tarps acted more as a greenhouse for the grass than as a grass killer. The cardboard was the best thing – those areas are almost bare – the soil will be a lot easier to till. The metal sheet worked well also. Sheets of plywood or particle board would work as well – I found this out by accident when we left some scraps out a few weeks ago in an area where we didn’t want the grass killed.
I’m not going to be doing any tilling for a couple days, so I took the cardboard pieces and placed them over the still-very-grassy areas, in an effort to at least keep the grass from getting any bigger in those spots. Here is my bed now:
Once I get it all tilled, I will be fencing it in, and then planting! I think this little guy is excited too:
My tiny u.p. farm 