There are a couple of different ways you can get rid of the grass in your soon-to-be-former lawn. One way is to solarize the area. This means covering the existing plants (weeds or grass) with plastic and allowing a season of sun and heat to thoroughly kill everything under the covering.
There is also the smother method. For this method, you cover the area with cardboard and a thick layer of mulch. The benefit of this method is the breakdown of the cardboard and wood chips enriches the future garden soil. But this process takes longer than simply killing off the grass under a plastic tarp.
But if you want to transform a lawn into a garden immediately, the quickest way is to physically remove the sod. Sure you can use a shovel to do this. But for anything larger than a single raised bed, I recommend getting some specialized help. You can rent a machine called a sod ripper from a local small machine rental company or hardware store. A sod ripper is a gas-powered machine designed to remove sod by cutting under neath the top layer with a moving metal blade. It cost us approximately $150 to rent it for the weekend.
Our new garden was on a busy urban street. There was a poorly-maintained driveway which no longer made sense with the speeding cars passing by. The house has access to the garage from the alley. So the homeowner decided she wanted to rip out the driveway entirely and turn the whole front yard into garden.
We rented a sod cutter. The rental was only for the weekend, though, so we had to work fast.
The problem we hadn’t expected was disposing of the sod. When we had done this to one of our front yards three years earlier, Ramsey County Yard Waste would accept sod at their Arden Hills Yard Waste location. https://www.ramseycounty.us/residents/recycling-waste/collection-sites/yard-waste. But now with jumping worms in the area, Ramsey County doesn’t accept sod any longer. There are a few local landscaping companies you can pay to accept it.
Part of our solution was to fill the divots left from the removed driveway with upside-down sod and then cover the green material with cardboard to cause it to break down over the summer. We held the cardboard down with rocks and bricks and then spread a few inches of soil and compost on top.
As we started planting in this area we used a knife to cut an x in the cardboard to allow the plant roots to easily make it through the cardboard.
We carted the remaining sod to the back yard and made a massive “berm” out of it. We covered it with a tarp and let it break down over the summer with the intention of using it in the back yard garden remodel the following year.
To help the garden get off to a good start, you need to add some soil amendments. The mostly-compacted soil remaining once the sod is removed isn’t the most amazing. Over time, as garden materials break down and worms and microbes do their work, it will improve. But to start out, adding compost or garden soil is a really good idea. One way you can do this is cheap but very labor intensive. You can fill your car full of buckets of compost from the Ramsey County Yard Waste locations and then spread that around. But our homeowner here opted to pay to have a landscaping company deliver a half truck-load of mixed compost and garden soil.
After the dirt and compost were delivered and spread out, we had a blank slate. Now for the planting. We started with the tree that would be the center of this part of the garden. The homeowner chose a serviceberry tree. It made sense to add this first so that the we could design the garden around this focal point.
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