Faced with an unsightly brown area or any unbroken piece of ground, today’s gardener can go in one of two directions:
1. Work with what you’ve got.
2. Throw up your hands and start fresh.
Both are perfectly acceptable options. In “Land Conversion: The Series,” we’ll be taking a look at both approaches and providing details on how to convert a sad, brown patch of ground (or even a bright green expanse of lawn) into something a whole lot better.
Exhibit A: When good things happen to sad yards.
The first thing to keep in mind is that Soil Is Everything. We will explore this in depth in a later post, so for now simply note that:
Healthy Soil = Healthy Plants
Crappy Soil = Hurt and Disappointment
This is the plain, straight-up truth. If you want big, lovely plants, armloads of vegetables, bees and butterflies flitting about your head, and if you want to conserve water, cut out pesticides, and make your little patch of the world a healthy place, you need to go all out on building healthy soil.
Your Choices for Greening a Brown Area
When converting a piece of land, you can either make it really easy on yourself or just slightly more difficult. Your choices break down like this:
When you work with what you’ve got, you improve or amend the soil by adding organic matter to it like compost, manure, and leaves - either by working it in or by dumping it on top. Depending on your patch of ground, you might become engaged in hardcore, hands-on land conversion such as removing sod prior to fixing up the soil beneath.
Starting fresh can mean building a raised bed out of wood, rocks, or bricks, and filling it with new soil that you buy or somehow charm your way into. It can also involve practicing a revolutionary and really satisfying technique known as “sheet mulching.”
The miracle of sheet mulching.
First things first…
We will be reviewing each of these options in detail throughout the Land Conversion Series, but before we go on and before you do anything, look at your patch of ground, look at the area around it, and think about this:
What kind of ground is this?
If you are working with a slightly dodgy patch of ground, like alongside a busy street, in an industrial area, or just long-abandoned land, it’s important to have the soil tested. (Easy to do - we’ll talk about this soon.) It’s possible the soil could contain heavy metals or toxic crap like lead, pesticides, oil, gasoline, and so on.
What do you want to grow here?
If it is vegetables you want, you’ll need some really good soil and you’ll have to assess the surrounding environment to determine whether vegetables are a good choice. There are several considerations, which we will look at in the Series. In general though, you need a minimum of 6 hours of direct sun everyday (the more the better - south and west facing ground is best), access to water, and be as free from air, soil, and human and animal pollution as possible.
If it is flowers, trees, or shrubs that you want, you will have fewer worries and can get away with less than perfect soil. Don’t get us wrong—you still want to build healthy soil, but these kind of plants are less picky than vegetables.
Natural Selection
When it comes to choosing flowers, shrubs, and trees, Urban Land Army’s guiding philosophy is: Natural Selection. If a plant can’t survive hot sun, dry days, and a little neglect now and then, they’re out. Anything that’s neurotic, fussy, thirsty, or overly sensitive will not do well in a hardworking landscape or with anyone who doesn’t want to deal with the drama. Vegetables are another story. We will lay down our lives for a Russian heirloom tomato.
City-proof your landscape
We urbanites need to create hardy, burly landscapes. Cities are pretty rough on plants - the buildings and the concrete make cities hot, the vehicles blow out exhaust, the climate is changing, and most cities in the world are getting more and more crowded, making resources like water potentially scarce. Plus, we probably won’t always be around to take care of our little patch of ground, so it’s important to put some steel in its spine from the start. For the sake of conserving water, saving your time, and for hotter days to come, put in plants that are drought-tolerant. This means they do not need much water to thrive, do well in less-than-perfect soils, and are generally low-maintenance.
There’s a lot to talk about in terms of converting brown areas, building soil, and choosing and caring for plants, so for now we will leave you hanging with four main things that an urbanite always has to keep in mind when converting land:
- Soil. Soil. Is. Everything.
- Water. You need it, plants need it, the rest of us need it.*
- Time. Do you have it? Plants need some.**
- Tools. Just a few.
* So go easy with it. We’ll talk about smart (and not so smart) ways to water.
** It’s ok if you don’t, by the way. There are sneaky ways around this.
Stay tuned.
