I love this so much. I turned a receptive side lot into a meadow, and let people know it was purposeful by mowing paths through and around and by planting natives. A seed meadow I planted two falls ago is looking fantastic now on top of my septic leach field. A true labor of love, and the educational aspect for myself and for people walking by has been terrific. I have grass and my beloved perennials like peonies and dahlias in tidy areas. This year, I am growing rudbeckia and milkweed from seed. Hopefully they will be successful, but if they aren't, I'm enjoying the process.
For those that are interested in a similar native plant consultation for their own yard, highly recommend looking into your local Audubon society. They had a long waitlist, but we got a full consultation and write up on their suggested plantings for our whole yard for a $70 donation a few years ago. It’s been an awesome resource to refer back to as we undertake a similar process of lawn removal over time.
In Chicago, the Chicago Bird Alliance has an annual native plants sale as a fundraiser - we got some plants this year and I am excited to see my little native plant pollinator corner grow.
We pulled out our entire front lawn in 2020. We had someone scrape it down with a bobcat, then my husband dug unreasonably deep trenches through it all. We got 2 tons of aged manure from a local guy with too many cows on a small acreage. He halls manure to the greenwaste pile at the dump pretty regularly, and has pay to dump. So, he was happy to dump it in our driveway instead. That manure we hauled into the trenches. Then, we planted a dozen dwarf fruit trees able to cope with 7200' elevati9n weather extremes. We edged it all with a succulent border and loads of native shrubs (sagebrush, currants, serviceberry, chokecherry, buffalo berry, rabbitbrush). We covered all the soil with really thick landscaping cloth and several inches of rock. After 4 years, it looks freaking amazing. We do a wee bit of hand weeding and a deep soak on the trees once a week. If it's really hot, we'll also water the shrubs and succulents weekly. It was an astronomical amount of work, but it is the most luscious "lawn" in the neighborhood, even with a strictly rock cover. We watch all kinds of birds and the local rabbits up close, now. And, like Anna said, we got to know *every* neighbor, because they all came by to chat about what we were doing. We've heard we inspired a shift toward more native, waterwise landscaping throughout the neighborhood. (Note, I say this all present tense, but I'm still in mourning as we sold that house and moved in early May. The house was special, but the yard and garden in the back are what I'm grieving.)
May I ask what fruit trees you planted, Bethann? We are at 7700', north facing literally side of a mountain and glacial moraine, so also extreme weather, and I worry about investing a lot of money in trees that just won't be able to survive.... because almost nothing can.
Western Idaho, 7b, ~9” rain annually, last frost April 15, first frost October 15. We took out about 1/3 of our lawn 3 springs ago. We also put in a wood chip “sidewalk “ along the street since we have no sidewalks in our neighborhood. It catches the rain preventing it from running into the street. The sod we removed from the sidewalk area we used to make a slight berm. Got cardboard from a bike shop and appliance stores, asked our tree trimmer to dump a load of chips which he was happy to do. I took out a lot of landscape fabric I had installed years earlier and planted sunflowers to take advantage of their deep roots to open up the soil. I used potting and garden soil from Costco to plant tomatoes in on top of the mulch. I put about 4” of leaf mulch on everything in the fall and some homemade compost in the late winter and this year the soil needed very little amending when I planted my squash and peppers. I also had bought some native plants from the ag program at the nearby university and put them in as well. Unfortunately I didn’t have a plan, just put things in where I thought I would enjoy looking at them. And mostly I like it. But plants can be moved! Last year I put some strawberries that were languishing along the property line into one area that was bare to make a ground cover. This year I’m picking so many strawberries and there are barely any weeds! My nemesis that has me attempting exorcism with incantations is bindweed or field morning glory. It truly is evil. Nothing kills it as I learned in a noxious weed class. So every few days cut it below the soil with an old long bladed knife and it comes right back! I learned the roots can be as deep as 50 feet and the seeds can sprout after 50 years! I just try to keep it from blooming or strangling my plants. My goal is to decrease runoff that is channelled into the river, plant water wise natives, plant perennials that spread gently, decrease water, plant perennial fruit and vegetables that come back like asparagus, loveage, and perennial herbs. I tell the neighbors I’m feeding the bees with the dandelion colony and just try to pick the flowers before they seed. We are also installing another rain barrel on our garage to harvest rain to use on the non-food areas. Any suggestions for low water, low maintenance plants ? Or water conservation?
Do I read this correctly that your area only gets 9 inches of rain a year?? That blows my mind. I live in Florida, the average yearly rainfall for my area is close to 60 inches. I can't imagine!
I am a newer subscriber to Garden Study and thought I wouldn’t get much use out of it right away because my gardening is kind of on “hold”…while we do almost exactly what Anna did/is! I had a native landscape design consultant over this Monday and it was such a relief. Turns out landscape design is not my passion in the plant realm. We have about ~1800 sq ft of lawn we’ll be converting to a gravel/raised bed area, a native installation, and leaving about 25% of some sort of turf as a “utility” area (aka for dogs and if kids come over). I’ve found sheet mulching very daunting based on my online research, so I think we are going to opt for solarizing instead? I’m excited to learn more as we get our process rolling. Your yard looks great Anna, I’m inspired!
Sheet mulching is definitely WORK — but if the area you're working on is close to where you can pull a vehicle, it's far less work. I'm going to try using a long silage tarp to solarize a long strip of former blackberries because I don't think sheet mulching will be able to do the job; I'll report back in a year!
I feel like I’ve watched enough YouTube videos of people who DO know what they’re doing who’ve had to do a few runs at it, and we don’t really have the schedules or budget to fail multiple times! The native landscape guy was who advised solarizing. Having dealt with a blackberry vine at a rental for a few years, they seem fairly hardy, which is why solarizing over sheet mulching I assume?
We just moved into a house with a TON of catmint and I did not realize you could cut it back and have it bloom again! Thanks for sharing, I will definitely try this!
Thanks for this! We are planning to sheet mulch our backyard this fall as well as a bed in front of our house where the grass and mock strawberry have invaded past the point that any manual weeding will make a difference. Lawn eradication is fairly popular in our neighborhood but our neighbors with no lawns got rid of theirs before we moved in so I appreciated these earlier stage process thoughts!
From someone who’s a recent transplant to a completely new climate/zone and house, and has been redeveloping all the landscaping - I like to walk the neighborhood and look at what people have planted and how things are doing. I’m trying to do largely native/pollinator plants also, so I look for plants I’ve learned and how they’re situated. I take photos of interesting plants I don’t recognize to research. Also if there’s parks or public gardens, those are instructive. I’m having some hit and miss also - native perennials that are supposed to be easy but I find impossible to germinate from seed, but then an allegedly annual plant will overwinter and come back great. I had some easy signals early on, because we had a record breaking heat wave our first summer here and it fried and killed many plants that came with the house. The previous owners had remodeled and flipped this house, and landscaping was not their forte - I’ve pulled out numerous dead shrubs that were clearly grabbed off the Lowe’s sale rack at random and stuck in the ground with no amendments in sticky clay and rocky soil, and had not been able to develop any extended roots. So learning that I’m heavily amending before replanting such areas. Some things that are doing well, I leave and plant more if it’s aligned with my goals (e.g. lavenders, poppies). I would also say if a plant isn’t thriving where it is, look it up and see if there’s a mismatch with water needs, sun exposure, etc. Adjust what you can adjust, and if it’s still not doing as well as it should, try moving it. Better to risk a transplant than let something languish and end up dying anyway. Finally, experiment with more new things. I’m growing many new plants from seed 2 at a time, to see how things fare, so I can learn what works here.
I found this *enormously* useful when I lived in Montana, because it gave me a very clear vision of which plants survived/thrived in the cold AND survived/thrived amongst the deer.
It’s a game changer. You use it standing up and step on it to close the prongs around the plant. The root nearly always comes right up if I’ve centered it decently on the plant. We’re gradually killing our enormous lawn to replace it with natives and garden beds; the dandelions are hardier than the grass, so in year two we’ve got hundreds? thousands? of dandelions that we are gradually pulling. I would have quit in frustration long ago except my sister recommended the grandpa’s weeder to me. It’s saving my back and helping my sanity. :)
This is a lovely story. Thanks for sharing. I live in Washington now, but I was born and raised in Bozeman. I read that 50% of Bozeman's water goes to lawns and landscaping projects, which is a horrifying number, considering what we're facing waterwise. Thanks for doing your part. It will be so beautiful.
We have been removing our grass in our front yard and have created several beds and are absolutely thrilled this time of year when things are blooming. It’s always a work in progress, moving plants and weeding and adding more plants, it’s a process of discovery. My new favorite- Verbena bonariensis
I want an elevated treehouse like that SO BADLY for my kiddos but I'm not at all handy and I don't even know who to hire. I found DIY plans on Etsy but I seriously doubt myself.
Hi from just north of you (Kimberley, BC)! Also dealing with DEER and figuring out what thrives in this wild temperature swing environment. Winners for my front yard bed (full south-facing sun, open to deer) have been peonies and lavender, both of which do well with 1-2x week watering. The rest of my front yard has been bark mulch since we moved in nearly 6 years ago, but it's getting to look pretty rough, and since fire season is what it is in our neck of the woods, I think we're going to move to more plants/rock within the next year or so.
For refreshing plants that are having a hard time, I first check that they really are getting the same water as everything else—I've found issues before, like hose kinks or holes or blockages that impeded watering. And then a little extra compost and protection (if you've noticed nibbled bits) are usually my go-tos. And hope! Good luck!
Regarding the plants struggling, I always do a root inspection. You can learn online how the roots should look and get clues. I will look to see if they are overwatered since you have irrigation. Drainage can vary significantly in different parts of a front yard.
I would love to remove a lot of the lawn around the house I'm about to move into. The backyard is huge, and it slopes gradually downward toward the house. So I'm wondering if having a landscaper save us by coming in with equipment and removing/rolling up the sod/turf could leave material that could be used to somehow adjust the grade of the land to send rainwater away from the house (maybe about 30" of rain per year?). We also had an old in ground pool filled in that was at the end of the yard closest to the house, which I am thinking might be a good spot for a rain garden to capture rain water from that slope...
Love this article! I’ve lived in my house for about 8 years and have been removing a bit of grass each year. The first grass we took out was the strip between the sidewalk and street and I am in love with the results. Last fall we removed a grassy hill at the front and installed tiered flower beds which I have filled with low water plants (I’m in Denver so important here) with many coming from High Country Gardens. If you live in any arid west climates, check them out - I have been so impressed with their plants so far. I also reserved a section of the new beds for dahlias (I blame that on Anne Helen Petersen, haha) and was thrilled to see my dahlias have just started to appear about the soil. 👏
I love this so much. I turned a receptive side lot into a meadow, and let people know it was purposeful by mowing paths through and around and by planting natives. A seed meadow I planted two falls ago is looking fantastic now on top of my septic leach field. A true labor of love, and the educational aspect for myself and for people walking by has been terrific. I have grass and my beloved perennials like peonies and dahlias in tidy areas. This year, I am growing rudbeckia and milkweed from seed. Hopefully they will be successful, but if they aren't, I'm enjoying the process.
For those that are interested in a similar native plant consultation for their own yard, highly recommend looking into your local Audubon society. They had a long waitlist, but we got a full consultation and write up on their suggested plantings for our whole yard for a $70 donation a few years ago. It’s been an awesome resource to refer back to as we undertake a similar process of lawn removal over time.
In Chicago, the Chicago Bird Alliance has an annual native plants sale as a fundraiser - we got some plants this year and I am excited to see my little native plant pollinator corner grow.
Bird people 🤝 Native plant gardeners
We pulled out our entire front lawn in 2020. We had someone scrape it down with a bobcat, then my husband dug unreasonably deep trenches through it all. We got 2 tons of aged manure from a local guy with too many cows on a small acreage. He halls manure to the greenwaste pile at the dump pretty regularly, and has pay to dump. So, he was happy to dump it in our driveway instead. That manure we hauled into the trenches. Then, we planted a dozen dwarf fruit trees able to cope with 7200' elevati9n weather extremes. We edged it all with a succulent border and loads of native shrubs (sagebrush, currants, serviceberry, chokecherry, buffalo berry, rabbitbrush). We covered all the soil with really thick landscaping cloth and several inches of rock. After 4 years, it looks freaking amazing. We do a wee bit of hand weeding and a deep soak on the trees once a week. If it's really hot, we'll also water the shrubs and succulents weekly. It was an astronomical amount of work, but it is the most luscious "lawn" in the neighborhood, even with a strictly rock cover. We watch all kinds of birds and the local rabbits up close, now. And, like Anna said, we got to know *every* neighbor, because they all came by to chat about what we were doing. We've heard we inspired a shift toward more native, waterwise landscaping throughout the neighborhood. (Note, I say this all present tense, but I'm still in mourning as we sold that house and moved in early May. The house was special, but the yard and garden in the back are what I'm grieving.)
This sounds amazing! I'm so sorry you had to leave it behind. Do you have plans for something similar at your new place?
May I ask what fruit trees you planted, Bethann? We are at 7700', north facing literally side of a mountain and glacial moraine, so also extreme weather, and I worry about investing a lot of money in trees that just won't be able to survive.... because almost nothing can.
Western Idaho, 7b, ~9” rain annually, last frost April 15, first frost October 15. We took out about 1/3 of our lawn 3 springs ago. We also put in a wood chip “sidewalk “ along the street since we have no sidewalks in our neighborhood. It catches the rain preventing it from running into the street. The sod we removed from the sidewalk area we used to make a slight berm. Got cardboard from a bike shop and appliance stores, asked our tree trimmer to dump a load of chips which he was happy to do. I took out a lot of landscape fabric I had installed years earlier and planted sunflowers to take advantage of their deep roots to open up the soil. I used potting and garden soil from Costco to plant tomatoes in on top of the mulch. I put about 4” of leaf mulch on everything in the fall and some homemade compost in the late winter and this year the soil needed very little amending when I planted my squash and peppers. I also had bought some native plants from the ag program at the nearby university and put them in as well. Unfortunately I didn’t have a plan, just put things in where I thought I would enjoy looking at them. And mostly I like it. But plants can be moved! Last year I put some strawberries that were languishing along the property line into one area that was bare to make a ground cover. This year I’m picking so many strawberries and there are barely any weeds! My nemesis that has me attempting exorcism with incantations is bindweed or field morning glory. It truly is evil. Nothing kills it as I learned in a noxious weed class. So every few days cut it below the soil with an old long bladed knife and it comes right back! I learned the roots can be as deep as 50 feet and the seeds can sprout after 50 years! I just try to keep it from blooming or strangling my plants. My goal is to decrease runoff that is channelled into the river, plant water wise natives, plant perennials that spread gently, decrease water, plant perennial fruit and vegetables that come back like asparagus, loveage, and perennial herbs. I tell the neighbors I’m feeding the bees with the dandelion colony and just try to pick the flowers before they seed. We are also installing another rain barrel on our garage to harvest rain to use on the non-food areas. Any suggestions for low water, low maintenance plants ? Or water conservation?
Do I read this correctly that your area only gets 9 inches of rain a year?? That blows my mind. I live in Florida, the average yearly rainfall for my area is close to 60 inches. I can't imagine!
Yes! It’s dry here
I am a newer subscriber to Garden Study and thought I wouldn’t get much use out of it right away because my gardening is kind of on “hold”…while we do almost exactly what Anna did/is! I had a native landscape design consultant over this Monday and it was such a relief. Turns out landscape design is not my passion in the plant realm. We have about ~1800 sq ft of lawn we’ll be converting to a gravel/raised bed area, a native installation, and leaving about 25% of some sort of turf as a “utility” area (aka for dogs and if kids come over). I’ve found sheet mulching very daunting based on my online research, so I think we are going to opt for solarizing instead? I’m excited to learn more as we get our process rolling. Your yard looks great Anna, I’m inspired!
Sheet mulching is definitely WORK — but if the area you're working on is close to where you can pull a vehicle, it's far less work. I'm going to try using a long silage tarp to solarize a long strip of former blackberries because I don't think sheet mulching will be able to do the job; I'll report back in a year!
I feel like I’ve watched enough YouTube videos of people who DO know what they’re doing who’ve had to do a few runs at it, and we don’t really have the schedules or budget to fail multiple times! The native landscape guy was who advised solarizing. Having dealt with a blackberry vine at a rental for a few years, they seem fairly hardy, which is why solarizing over sheet mulching I assume?
We just moved into a house with a TON of catmint and I did not realize you could cut it back and have it bloom again! Thanks for sharing, I will definitely try this!
I have a lot of salvia in my garden and last July I cut that back and was rewarded with a second bloom toward late August that lasted into October.
Thanks for this! We are planning to sheet mulch our backyard this fall as well as a bed in front of our house where the grass and mock strawberry have invaded past the point that any manual weeding will make a difference. Lawn eradication is fairly popular in our neighborhood but our neighbors with no lawns got rid of theirs before we moved in so I appreciated these earlier stage process thoughts!
From someone who’s a recent transplant to a completely new climate/zone and house, and has been redeveloping all the landscaping - I like to walk the neighborhood and look at what people have planted and how things are doing. I’m trying to do largely native/pollinator plants also, so I look for plants I’ve learned and how they’re situated. I take photos of interesting plants I don’t recognize to research. Also if there’s parks or public gardens, those are instructive. I’m having some hit and miss also - native perennials that are supposed to be easy but I find impossible to germinate from seed, but then an allegedly annual plant will overwinter and come back great. I had some easy signals early on, because we had a record breaking heat wave our first summer here and it fried and killed many plants that came with the house. The previous owners had remodeled and flipped this house, and landscaping was not their forte - I’ve pulled out numerous dead shrubs that were clearly grabbed off the Lowe’s sale rack at random and stuck in the ground with no amendments in sticky clay and rocky soil, and had not been able to develop any extended roots. So learning that I’m heavily amending before replanting such areas. Some things that are doing well, I leave and plant more if it’s aligned with my goals (e.g. lavenders, poppies). I would also say if a plant isn’t thriving where it is, look it up and see if there’s a mismatch with water needs, sun exposure, etc. Adjust what you can adjust, and if it’s still not doing as well as it should, try moving it. Better to risk a transplant than let something languish and end up dying anyway. Finally, experiment with more new things. I’m growing many new plants from seed 2 at a time, to see how things fare, so I can learn what works here.
I found this *enormously* useful when I lived in Montana, because it gave me a very clear vision of which plants survived/thrived in the cold AND survived/thrived amongst the deer.
So appreciate these details. I recommend a grandpa’s weeder for removing dandelions. I think this is the brand we got: https://garrettwade.com/product/grampas-weeders?gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjwvIWzBhAlEiwAHHWgvawNi1ybLe6apPx2wYX2vVz0QA-hl_IOST-uuqFoDA0aUrB_U2pM8BoCHkMQAvD_BwE
It’s a game changer. You use it standing up and step on it to close the prongs around the plant. The root nearly always comes right up if I’ve centered it decently on the plant. We’re gradually killing our enormous lawn to replace it with natives and garden beds; the dandelions are hardier than the grass, so in year two we’ve got hundreds? thousands? of dandelions that we are gradually pulling. I would have quit in frustration long ago except my sister recommended the grandpa’s weeder to me. It’s saving my back and helping my sanity. :)
Thanks for the tip. I’m looking this up right now.
I hope it’s helpful to you!
This is a lovely story. Thanks for sharing. I live in Washington now, but I was born and raised in Bozeman. I read that 50% of Bozeman's water goes to lawns and landscaping projects, which is a horrifying number, considering what we're facing waterwise. Thanks for doing your part. It will be so beautiful.
We have been removing our grass in our front yard and have created several beds and are absolutely thrilled this time of year when things are blooming. It’s always a work in progress, moving plants and weeding and adding more plants, it’s a process of discovery. My new favorite- Verbena bonariensis
I want an elevated treehouse like that SO BADLY for my kiddos but I'm not at all handy and I don't even know who to hire. I found DIY plans on Etsy but I seriously doubt myself.
Hi from just north of you (Kimberley, BC)! Also dealing with DEER and figuring out what thrives in this wild temperature swing environment. Winners for my front yard bed (full south-facing sun, open to deer) have been peonies and lavender, both of which do well with 1-2x week watering. The rest of my front yard has been bark mulch since we moved in nearly 6 years ago, but it's getting to look pretty rough, and since fire season is what it is in our neck of the woods, I think we're going to move to more plants/rock within the next year or so.
For refreshing plants that are having a hard time, I first check that they really are getting the same water as everything else—I've found issues before, like hose kinks or holes or blockages that impeded watering. And then a little extra compost and protection (if you've noticed nibbled bits) are usually my go-tos. And hope! Good luck!
Love the pictures of the project.
Regarding the plants struggling, I always do a root inspection. You can learn online how the roots should look and get clues. I will look to see if they are overwatered since you have irrigation. Drainage can vary significantly in different parts of a front yard.
I would love to remove a lot of the lawn around the house I'm about to move into. The backyard is huge, and it slopes gradually downward toward the house. So I'm wondering if having a landscaper save us by coming in with equipment and removing/rolling up the sod/turf could leave material that could be used to somehow adjust the grade of the land to send rainwater away from the house (maybe about 30" of rain per year?). We also had an old in ground pool filled in that was at the end of the yard closest to the house, which I am thinking might be a good spot for a rain garden to capture rain water from that slope...
Love this article! I’ve lived in my house for about 8 years and have been removing a bit of grass each year. The first grass we took out was the strip between the sidewalk and street and I am in love with the results. Last fall we removed a grassy hill at the front and installed tiered flower beds which I have filled with low water plants (I’m in Denver so important here) with many coming from High Country Gardens. If you live in any arid west climates, check them out - I have been so impressed with their plants so far. I also reserved a section of the new beds for dahlias (I blame that on Anne Helen Petersen, haha) and was thrilled to see my dahlias have just started to appear about the soil. 👏