Tearing Up My Lawn Part 1

One of the main reasons why my wife and I purchased a house was for the opportunity to grow our own food. We took our time and found a wonderful house that we love and has a full southern exposure in the backyard. The yard has about 3000 square feet of lawn, I decided to start at the eastern end of the yard to start tearing it up. Not having any experience but a strong determination, I got started.

Having shovels, rakes and implements of destruction, I mapped out strips where I would grow my "crops". Talking with a co-worker, I was advised not to remove all grass but to leave strips in between. He has a small yard and has to put down straw to keep things from getting too muddy. I dug up rectangular strips about twelve feet long and about two feet wide. Of course sticking to my peak oil principle of reducing my carbon footprint I didn't use any electric tools but good old fashion hand tools.

I first marked the area with a shovel then went through and dug up the grass trying to leave as much soil as possible. I took the strips and added them to my compost pile which gave it a large amount of brown mixture to combine with my mostly green mixture pile. I was also able to bring a bunch of worms over which I believe is necessary to help my compost. I should have read more up on this, I'll have another post about my trials and tribulations with composting later on. I think it may be starting to work, but I want to be sure before I write about it.

The process took a few days. I found out my soil is clay which makes it a bit hard to dig and move around. Hopefully next year when I get that compost pile to start working I can use it to mix with the soil. But even with the soil not 100% perfect for growing you can still grow something. I dug up the first three strips to plant garlic, lettuce and onions. After preparing my seed in a mini style greenhouse I had a lot of onion starts but didn't have many lettuce starts.

I then put a few lettuce start in the north side of the middle strip and some fennel in the south end. I put in about thirty garlic cloves in the eastern strip and about fifteen onion starts in the western strip. All but one of the garlic cloves have shot up, a few of the lettuce are growing and now most of the onions are starting to grow. I did add more onion and lettuce seeds, some of the starts just did not take.

The plan is for this weekend to tear up two more strips for the twelve tomato plants that I have growing to get them in by the end of the month. More photos to come.