Step 1: Get rid of the grass

Want a veggie garden instead of a lawn? Rip it out! All it takes is a shovel, a pair of gloves, a wheelbarrow/other holding device, and a couple of beverages. It’s a great way to put kids and friends to work, and with helpers you’ll get it done in no time.

We took out a good chunk of grass yesterday at Headquarters to make way for the Grow It Yourself test garden, where we will grow 5 vegetables and 5 herbs and walk you through everything from breaking ground to seeding to watering, eating, harvesting, and preserving.

Here’s what we had to work with:

Far away:

Close up:

All of you are going to have something different to work with, but when deciding where to locate your garden you should keep these things in mind:

Sun: South and west facing is best. You will need a minimum of 6 hours a day of sun to have a vegetable garden and the more the better. Fruiting, heat-loving vegetables like tomatoes and peppers need more - at least 8 or 10 hours.

Water: A water source like an outdoor tap should be close by.

Budget, time, and ambition: Depending on your cash flow, schedule, and level of gardening experience or ambition, you may want to start small. (The Grow It Yourself garden is a good example of going small, but you can certainly go smaller.) Keep in mind that once you take out grass, you will need to fix up the soil with a good amount of compost, fill it up with seed and plants, water all of it, and take care it for the next 5 or 6 months. Time and money, people, time and money. Of course we can’t think of a better way to spend time and money than on a veggie garden, but we’re just saying that you don’t want to become overwhelmed, cranky, or broke.

Here’s what you do:

1. Mark off the area for the garden.

Rope, sticks, branches, or police tape will do.

The test garden is marked off as 13 feet x about 6 feet (it has a curve in it and is 8 feet at its widest point and 4 feet at its narrowest). Total: about 78 square feet. Our particular patch of grass and weeds is in a sunny spot and happens to be tacked onto an existing vegetable garden.

This size garden will be enough room to grow a bunch of pole beans on a trellis, 3 or 4 tomatoes, some marigolds, violas, a sizeable block of lettuce and green onions, a couple rows of potatoes, and a cluster of herbs: basil, chives, parsley, oregano, and thyme.

Of course if you have less room than this, you can scale back the number of plants you grow. A couple of posts down the road we’ll go through some scenarios for smaller (or larger) gardens and lay out how much you can grow of what. Keep in mind that here at Urban Land Army we practice intensive gardening methods, which is important to do if you want to get lots of food from a small space. Again, stay tuned for more on this.

Side note: we will put in a 2 foot path to the right of the stick below, which will cut through the existing garden. We’ll show you how to build the little path too.

2. Break ground!

Get your shovel and shove it into the grass.

It’s probably going to be hard to break through, so jump on the top of the shovel blade a bit.

Go down about 8 inches or the depth of your shovel blade.

Move over to the left or the right - you decide - and repeat.

Pause to laugh out loud, imagining your new kickass garden:

And repeat, until you’ve gone all the way around the perimeter.

But wait! We came up against a border of bricks at the edge of the existing vegetable garden, which we removed and then kept going, moving in about 6 inches into the garden to make sure we got all those grass and weed roots:

There. Once around.

Now you want to take one step in (about 1 foot) from the original cut you made along the edge and start cutting another row.

Keep going, continuing to cut the bed into rows:

Halfway there.

Go get a drink.

Refreshed, finish up in no time.

3. Chop

So now you have rows of grass sliced clean through. What you need to do now is chop these rows into manageable chunks so you can get a hold of each one, shake off the dirt, and get rid of the grass and weed clump. Here’s how you do it:

Clasp your shovel and turn it so you’re looking down on the back of the blade. Raise the shovel in a menacing manner and strike the first row - slicing it into 1 foot clumps, like so:

4. Go get your wheelbarrow or other holding device (tarp, big pail or bucket, etc.)

5. Shake the soil off the grass clump

Starting in one of the corners, pick up/pry out the first clump.

Shake the soil off the clump (you want to keep as much soil as possible). Do this by banging it against the ground and then whacking it with something, like your hand or a Japanese farmer’s knife:

6. Dispose of grass and weed clumps

When you have knocked off most of the soil and all you have left is a clump of grass and weeds and roots attached, toss it into your wheelbarrow.

Now you will have your first square of lovely soil - free of grass and weeds. Nice.

7. If you spot green plastic weed barrier trapped in your grass clump, groan, then curse.

Alternately rip and untangle it from the clump and dispose of it in a separate garbage bucket. This stuff won’t be breaking down in a compost pile or anywhere else soon - let’s say for 100 years. Put it in your compost pile at home and it will come back to haunt you. Put it in your yard waste bin for pick-up, and that’s just rude. Unless you come up with a creative use for it, you’re just going to have to throw it out.

8. Continue on your way, pulling out the clumps, shaking them off, and revealing satisfying dirt

9. Go get a drink

10. Root around one last time for remaining weeds and little clumps of grass you may have missed

We used a garden fork to dig down a few inches and turn up weeds, big dandelion roots, and grass bits that got missed the first time. We did this because these things will take root again and we don’t want to be battling a bunch of weeds in our new garden bed.

Done!

You now have the foundation for your vegetable garden. This soil is not going to be quite good enough for planting in, so the next step will be adding compost and learning a bit more about what makes ideal garden soil.

But you, my friend, have finished Step 1! Now go put away your tools and order a pizza.

Epilogue:

What do I do with the wheelbarrow full of weeds and grass?

We didn’t feel like dealing with the weeds in the wheelbarrow just then, but we are just going to put them in the yard waste bin, which is taken to a centralized composting facility. We’re doing this because most of the patch was weeds rather than grass, and these weeds won’t be killed in our home compost pile and we don’t want them coming back to haunt us in future compost. They will be killed off at high temperatures at the big hardcore composting place though.

If we had more grass than weeds, then we would have built a sod compost pile. Directions for doing this as well as other cool ways to “recycle” your grass can be found in, “So long, sweet lawn.” We really recommend these approaches because, first, you get really nice compost or other great use out of the grass. Also, yard waste bins often have weight restrictions and one filled to the gills with sod will hurt people’s backs and likely be rejected. So check out your options.

Time: In a 78 square foot area, with one person working and one person taking pictures, this grass removal took 3 hours. With helpers you could cut this down to 1-2 hours. No sweat.

Questions? Something to say? Go on and leave a comment here.

Up next: Prep the soil