Turning a Neglected Lawn Into a Productive Garden With No-Till Methods

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When we first started making plans for our new garden at the homeplace, the biggest challenge was definitely the ground we had to work with. My great grandparents grew a lot of crops on the property, but their old garden spot is now part of the pine forest. Our best option was the lower part of a field that had been kept somewhat cleared over the years.

The field in question was livestock pasture years ago. Since then, it had become part of the lawn, and the ground there had never been cultivated.

Occasional mowing was the only kind of maintenance that’d been done to this swath of sad-looking grass. There were all kinds of gnarly weeds and saw briars, and the hedge of invasive autumn olive shrubs along the lower edge were invading the area. We also had to have several unsafe trees cut down, which made quite a mess.

We started working on the new garden spot the in the fall before we wanted to plant there. I didn’t set my expectations too high that first year, since the no-till methods I planned to use take time to improve really shoddy soil. But despite those tough conditions, the garden ended up doing a whole lot better than I’d anticipated.

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Here’s a look at the prospected garden spot after we had the tree work done. You can see the bare patches where the tree company had to drive their heavy rig right through it to access the trees needing removed:

Surprisingly, we got decent to good harvests from most of what we planted, even with some not-so-ideal weather that summer (record heat in June, drought conditions by early July). These are some photos from the first spring and summer garden at the homeplace:

Hopefully, sharing our process can help anyone else who’s looking to convert a lifeless lawn or a sad weedy patch into a productive garden.

Here’s what we did:

Maintenance and Planning

The first stages involved a lot of clearing. Pruning the hedge back, cleaning up debris left over from the tree removal, and pulling up lots of saw briars, honeysuckle, burn weed, and poison ivy.

The stray autumn olives were the easiest thing to deal with. Turns out, the little ones have shallow roots. After a rain we were able to yank most of them up by hand (though the war is still ongoing).

Then, we had to figure out how to approach the pitiful soil under that “lawn.” It was badly compacted even before the tree company drove their rig back and forth across it. I couldn’t stick a digging fork in it more than an inch, even if I stood on it and jumped. Granted, I’m a small person, but I’m pretty determined.

I’m not going to lie, I was tempted to take the neighbors up on their offer to pull a plow through it. Just once! But we ultimately decided to stick with no-till methods and see how it went.

Deep mulching Back to Eden style is my go-to no-till strategy, mainly because it’s easy to get natural mulch around here (pine needles, leaves, and we also had the chips from the several trees we had cut). But I also knew that improving soil with deep mulching is a slow process. With that alone, it might’ve taken years before the ground became as productive as I wanted it to be. So, I took a few extra steps in hopes of getting a decent harvest the first year.

Marking the Layout

First, we used some small logs and branches (plus a few construction flags we had) to mark out roughly where the garden beds would be.

I stuck with a very basic layout, since I’m admittedly not a great designer. I prefer individual beds over rows- wide enough to plant on both sides, but not so wide I can’t reach the middle from the pathways. This way, there’s plenty of room for companion planting and intercropping. We made the beds roughly 14’ by 4’.

Some Controversial Digging

At this point, considering the extreme compaction of the soil, I decided the best course of action was to break it up some to start with. Some folks might argue I can’t claim it’s a “true” no-till system, since I bothered the top few inches of soil. But I like to think of no-till as a mindset for managing your soil, not a set of rules you must never break.

Honestly, when you’re dealing with hardpan clay like this, it isn’t exactly teeming with life in the first place. Breaking up that rock hard top layer just makes sense. That way, future amendments (and decomposers like earthworms) can get beneath the surface and start to work.

First, I loosened the grass and thatch with a claw hand cultivator. I made one more pass after that, loosening about the top four inches of ground underneath. In doing that, I found out it wasn’t just hardpan clay I was dealing with. There were also dozens of surprise large rocks. A few rocks won’t hurt, but you don’t want this many, especially close to the surface.

Once the ground was broken up a bit, I took my broadfork through the beds to aerate them a little deeper. A broadfork will pierce compacted soil to let air, water, and amendments in without compromising the stability of the ground. They’re also surprisingly easy to use.

As for the clumps of grass I’d pulled, most went back into the beds with the roots facing up. The hope was that they wouldn’t regrow once covered in compost and mulch. The rest went into a pile, which we covered with a tarp so we could use it for compost or fill dirt once the grass was completely dead.

Mind you that grass is incredibly resilient and hard to kill, so if you’re converting part of your lawn into a garden, it pays to make sure you’ve got it under control from the get-go. Otherwise, it’ll come back to life and try to take the place over.

You might can get by just smothering the grass with a weed barrier, without bothering to turn the sod upside down or remove any of it from the garden area. Cardboard and newspaper are go-to weed barrier options. But be warned that some grass, like Bermuda grass, may regrow even through a barrier like cardboard. We’ve seen it happen, so we didn’t want to take any chances. Also, I wanted to put a layer of compost directly on the soil, without adding that extra time it takes for the weed barrier and thatch to break down.

I worked on cultivating the beds a little at a time while my husband dug the post holes for the fence (also using just a handheld post hole digger), and it took us around a week to finish both jobs.

Even though using the hand cultivator was time-consuming and a little bit of a workout, it was probably better for the soil than using heavy equipment. The weight of the machinery can actually create another compacted layer beneath what you’ve loosened.

Borders and Proactive Weed Control

Once the hardpan clay was broken up on the surface, we gathered more fallen logs to make a complete border for the beds. We did that to prevent any washing of the turned soil or the compost we’d be adding. The soil will be healthy and stable by the time the logs rot down, so washouts shouldn’t be a concern anymore.

Before we put the logs in place, we laid down cardboard as a weed barrier around the edges of the beds. Since I’ve been using a deep mulch no-till method, I’ve learned that weeds (and any surviving grass) are most problematic around borders.

Most weeds can’t fight through the compost and deep mulch at the center of a bed, and the few that manage to will be loosely rooted and easy to pull. But they’ll take any opportunity to grow out from around the edges. Once they sprout, they’ll get a foothold there and become much harder to get rid of (ask me how I know!). Even if I’m not covering the entire bed with a weed barrier, I never skip those edges.

Adding Compost and Mulch

Next, we spread a layer of compost around three inches thick on each bed, followed by a 5-inch blanket of shredded leaf and pine needle mulch.

We worked on that part a little at a time throughout the fall, since I had to source some of the leaves from other folks’ yards. Whenever I had a few hours to spare, I’d make it a point to go round up more leaves, shred them, and spread them on the garden beds.

I chose to use leaves as the first mulch layer (instead of using only the wood chips or pine needles I had an abundance of) because shredded leaf mulch decomposes faster. I wanted to get that decaying organic matter into the soil as quickly as possible.

Trench Composting

As I was working on the other tasks involved in preparing the garden, I buried kitchen scraps and compostable garbage in all the beds. Instead of taking my inside scrap bin out to the main compost pile whenever it was full, I put it directly in the garden in a small hole or trench.

This method is called trench composting or dig-and-drop composting, and I think it was one of the biggest contributors to the good results we had with the first planting. Those buried scraps invite worms, microbes, and other decomposers to colonize struggling soil beneath the surface. Otherwise, they’d all hang out right beneath the mulch.

Really, the only way you can go wrong with trench composting is by not starting early enough. Our scavenger friends need at least several months to break down that waste and turn it into usable nutrients for plants.

In the spring before planting, I was out pulling some of the wild violets that had gotten past my mulch, and I found that the garden beds were full of nightcrawlers. That was a sure sign the soil was headed in the right direction.

Inoculating With Mycorrhizae

The final thing we did to give our first year crops a boost was inoculating the planting holes with mycorrhizae, which are beneficial soil fungi that poor soil usually lacks. You can buy granular mycorrhizae to sprinkle in planting holes, and it’s fairly inexpensive, considering one container goes a long way.

Some Things I’d Do Differently

Even though it did do better than I’d expected, this first year garden in the new spot wasn’t perfect by any means. Here are some things I should have done but never got around to, and the issues we had because of it:

-I should’ve done a soil test.

We had some signs of nutrient deficiencies in our tomato and pepper plants, even though we gave them plenty of organic slow-release fertilizer and fish emulsion.

The paste tomatoes struggled with some pretty serious blossom end rot, even though the plants looked healthy enough (blossom end rot means plants aren’t absorbing enough calcium). Also, our bell peppers had classic symptoms of magnesium deficiency and weren’t as productive as they could’ve been.

Later in the year, I had some soil tested from a nearby area we hadn’t amended yet. That told us the native soil has a pH of barely over 5, which is super acidic. For reference, the majority of vegetable plants are best able to absorb nutrients when the pH is between 6 and 7.

The pH has balanced out in the beds we’ve already grown in at this point, since compost has a neutralizing effect over time. But, a light top-dressing of lime or wood ash would’ve probably prevented the nutrient intake problems we had with that first planting.

-I should have paid more attention to drainage issues.

It appears water tends to pond up and stick around in one of the garden beds whenever we get heavy rain. It’s probably since the upper part of the garden is on a slight incline, and that bed is in a low spot.

In June before the drought set in, I lost two pepper plants that were growing in it to a mysterious wilt condition. I’m not sure if it was simple root rot or some kind of fungal wilt. Either way, the best plan to prevent it from happening next season is to improve drainage there.

At some point, I may plant a hedgerow above the garden with native plants so their deep roots can slow down some of the water. In the meantime, I plan to bring in some soil and compost to “berm up” the problem bed a little more. This will elevate the plants’ root crowns so they don’t sit in water.      

-I should have put cardboard beneath the mulch in the walkways.

Apparently, our grass has no problem with four inches of wood chips (as you can see in some of my pics). This is more of an aesthetic issue, as grass popping through the middle of the walkways doesn’t affect our crops. But it’ll be quick and easy to throw down a layer of cardboard and some new chips on top.

Regenerative gardening (any kind of gardening, for that matter) is an endless learning curve. But it’s a pretty forgiving endeavor. Even when some things don’t do as well as you’d hoped, there are always some successes to enjoy.