I talked to my son’s soccer coach this morning in Surrey, BC as he pumped air into our team’s soccer balls. His lawn at home is struggling and he’s considering alternatives. There is some shade, evergreens make the soils acidic and he has a raised bed for vegetables. Now he’s considering extending his back patio to cover up the lawn.
The coach also wonders about the costs associated with his struggling lawn. Does it make sense to water a dormant lawn while the Lower Mainland suffers through summer heat waves?
Alternatives
This fight can go two ways. The coach fights and improves the health of his grass or he decommissions it. Third way would be to do nothing but that would make for a short blog post.
So let’s assume the coach finds the cost of a new patio too high and decides to kill his lawn and plant more shrubs and flowers. How exactly do you kill your lawn?
Answer from my hero
It turns out the answer is easy and it comes from my West Coast garden hero Dr. Linda Chalker-Scott. Incidentally, I recommend all of her books and technical papers.
I borrowed the following steps from her blog. You will find the extra pictures helpful, I’m sure. What follows is my version but remember, the basic steps come from Linda’s original blog.
Step 1
Commit the ultimate sin and scalp your lawn. That’s right, we don’t want it to grow. Since grass regenerates from meristems located roughly in the lowest third of all grass plants scalping eliminates the active growing points.
And do this in summer when our West Coast lawns go dormant. Obviously, this would be a bad time to break the dormancy with lawn watering.
Step 2
Cover up your lawn with arbor chips which can be obtained for free from many of your local tree companies. Since they will settle after installation, you want them piled on at 8-12″ thickness. Don’t go cheap on this step because we want to suppress the lawn and any persistent weeds. And there are many persistent weeds.
Step 3
Wait! We must wait because turf decomposition depends on temperatures and moisture. Optimal conditions at this step are warm and moist.
After two to four weeks pull some of the mulch back and check. When it’s easy to dig through the soil then you know you are ready for planting.
Step 4
Now that you’re ready to plant, move the arbor chips, plant your favourite plants and move the mulch back. At this point, 3-4″ mulch depth will suffice.
See, killing your lawn is easy!
