Adventures in sheet mulch

Before I give you the low-down on the mess I'm making of what used to be the back lawn, I took a couple of pictures of some new colour in the yard. The cool part of early spring (okay, still winter at this point, but it defenitely feels like spring) is that there's a whole different palette of colours to get excited over. No, I'm not going to wax all Robert Frost on ya... ("Stay gold, Ponyboy"), but those first greens really have a different look to them.

The lightest green is Sedum spectabile "Brilliant". The leaves at the top left, floating above everything, are from an alba rose, Alba Semi-plena. There are also some columbine seedlings coming up at the bottom of the frame, and it looks like a daffodil in the middle there too.

Green is great, but new shoots come in other colours too. Here you'll see the bronze and purple combination of virginia bluebells (Mertensia Virginica) coming up:

I took a picture of the purple emerging shoots of Blue False Indigo too, but I'm afraid it didn't turn out well enough to post. Maybe it wasn't all that spectacular to begin with, but when I pulled up the fallen leaves, and found them pushing up through the soil, it was enough to convince me to pull out the camera. There's just something about those early purple shades on the shoot of a hosta, or the fresh red on the tops of roses that somehow excites me (strangely) perhaps more than the much more exuberant shades of later in the season.

Okay, on to sheet mulch.

My long-term goal is to have all the grass in the yard taken up by garden space. I can safely admit that here because I'm pretty sure my wife has already figured out my scheme. I usually make up some sort of excuse related to lawn mowing. In this case, the lawn was on a pretty steep slope, and really was a bit of a pain to mow. So I promised to put in some herbs and vegetables, and got the go-ahead to garden it.

When I've previously negotiated away lawn space, it was a mixed blessing. Yes, more space to dig in. But then we had to remove the sod, right? Well, we did remove it, but I'm not all that sure we needed to.

This fall, I read the book Perennial Vegetables by Eric Toensmeier (excellent book, as are several others by the same publisher, Chelsea Green). He wrote a short description of some of his personal landscaping. The author wanted to remediate his front yard, where the soil and lawn was in pretty bad shape. Instead of bringing in the heavy equipment, he simply covered it with a layer of cardboard, and then covered that layer with mulch.

The sheet of carboard served to smother the lawn and weeds, and the organic matter layered above would break down over time to make for more fertile soil. Why didn't I think of that in the first place?

So I'm doing something similar. I'm using several layers of newspaper to smother the lawn, and I'm covering it with what I have on hand - mostly fallen leaves from a couple of big native maples (Acer macrophyllum) in my back yard. Here's a picture:

None too pretty at this point, is it? That's pretty much been the feedback from my wife at this point.

"Just wait until I get the borage planted in there... it'll look great!" was my response. Now, I'm not sure if she's looked up images of borage on the internet, and just doesn't share my opinion of the ornamental nature of the plant, but she's not yet convinced.

I'm sure the neighbours have noticed I'm up to something too, but on the whole, they're a pretty easygoing bunch. At least I haven't started planting potatoes in the front yard.

Yet.