Food Forests Part 1- AKA Kill Your Lawn

My friend and teacher, Luke McMullan, wrote today’s blog post. Luke is an exceptional permaculaturalist and landscape designer who is transforming people’s lives and homes one by one. If you are looking for a beautiful landscape that requires little maintenance AND FEEDS YOU, thus saving you money, Luke is your guy. To learn more about Luke and his company, click on this link: Branches Ecological Landscapes. You can also email Luke at mcmullanluke@gmail.com or call him at (919) 830-7847. 

I am fortunate to now be a student of Luke’s, as he is generously designing another community garden in which my family is participating. I am so turned on by his vision of sustainability and respect for the Earth that I promote him every chance I get! 

Food Forests Part 1- AKA Kill Your Lawn 

What are you getting out of your yard? I am asking not only how much enjoyment you get from it. I am asking a serious economic question: what is the land surrounding your home giving to you? The current cultural paradigm within our urban and suburban areas primarily supports the maintenance of lawns which, while arguably they do have some spatial and aesthetic value, are really huge money pits, add nothing and poison the environment if chemicals are used to maintain them. Lawns require water, fertilization, and mowing, which all cost while giving no return. When I look at a lawn, however, I start to get excited because I see the potential and I know the time is coming. 

So what do I mean by that? I'm talking about food and nutrition and liberation from our dependence on the very sick factory food system. How can I say this so cavalierly? Because I know that all of our dietary needs can be either produced in our yard or paid for by products grown in our yards. In a sense I'm talking about gardening, but not simply your typical high input and high maintenance vegetable garden. People have been setting up systems of living that use plants, animals, and fungi to recycle our waste, build soil, convert sunlight into carbohydrates, capture rainwater, and produce food right around their homes for millennia. And people are still doing it in urban and rural areas all around the planet. 

I am a permaculturalist, which means that instead of seeing weeds I see food. Instead of seeing a drainage problem I see free water. Instead of seeing poop (of any animal) as waste I see it as a resource. In short permaculture expands the idea of a yield and turns the problem itself into a solution. It also means that I consider the earth and people and our time here as sacred, and I use these ethics to create spaces that are very much in keeping with the patterns of wild ecosystems yet are centered on human nutrition. 

So let's turn our focus on a do-able activity that can give us great health and abundance. Annihilating our lawns. The full phrase would be annihilating our lawns and planting a food forest, but we'll get to the second part in other posts. We only want to get rid of your lawn if we are planning to cover the ground with some other vegetation, whether it be a garden or a forest or a forest garden, because once we remove that layer of vegetation nature will be quick to re-vegetate. In some cases lawn removal should be done all at once while other sites and situations may call for a progressive or phased approach. Time, scale, and available resources are usually what dictate this choice. 

If lawn removal is progressive then it should be organized around trees or large shrubs(preferably food producing) as points from which to spread. The reason for this is to allow for focus on production immediately while not spreading our time and energy too thin.   

OK so let's get to the “how-to” part. 

The method that I will now outline is known as sheet mulching, and the idea is to kill the grass by starving it of light while building and nourishing the soil. The first step is to let the grass grow fairly tall (5-6 inches) and then mow it as short as possible. Leave the clippings where they are, as they make great fertilizer. The ground should then immediately be covered by a biodegradable organic weed barrier. I suggest using old newspapers or flattened corrugated cardboard boxes. The edges should overlap by 6 inches so that the creeping nature of some of these lawn plants don't get the better of you. After that 8-12 inches of organic mulch should be applied on top of the weed barrier. This can be old wood chips, rotting straw, rotting hay, ground up mulch, or rotting leaves. It's best to use free materials since they're everywhere, but for convenience you can use a commercial mulch as long as it's not dyed or made of inorganic materials. My favorite commercial mulch which I use is partially composted leaves (leaf mould). This is a great resource because it: 

• breaks down really fast

• is a product generated by the city’s trees

• is often available by the dump truck load

• is literally far cheaper than dirt. 

Adding topsoil is almost never a good idea and should only ever be done per the site specific advice of a soil engineer.  The final ingredient in this mulchy spongecake is water. 

Some don'ts: 

• Don't pile mulch against a building as this will be a way for insects to get in

• Don't pile mulch against the trunks of existing trees as it will be a way for insects and rot organisms to get in 

Before we actually begin sheet mulching we have to do the hardest and often most time consuming part of the project, which is accumulating materials: 

1.    enough cardboard or newspaper to cover the area while overlapping 6 inches

2.    enough organic mulch to spread over the area 8 to 12 inches deep

3.    enough people to make the job very fun and to make it obvious to the neighbors just how much fun we are having.

Design is crucial and I would suggest not killing your lawn unless you have at least some idea of what you will replace it with. You may actually want to keep some of your lawn for a playing, gathering, four-leaf-clover hunting, dandelion harvesting, dog pooping space. Probably the most important step in the design process is to observe, and observation is best done while interacting with your land. Take note of the sunny and shady parts of your lawn. Notice which spots are wetter or drier. Are there really windy spots? Are there steep areas? These observations will give great insight into the potential of that area and are essential guiding points regarding what to plant where and for what purpose. We'll get into more details about permaculture design another time but for now just go outside, be present and pay attention.