The Non-Toxic Way I Killed All My Grass (On Purpose!) - Page 3

(looking for the beginning of this tutorial? Click here)

Step 4: Soak and weigh down the cardboard

Get your hose or sprinkler back out and drench your cardboard. This will take a while the first time you do it and your sprinkler (if you have one) will be your best option.

Once your cardboard is absolutely drenched, weight it down in different spots by placing large rocks or empty milk or laundry jugs filled with water on top. This will help keep the corners from blowing up if the cardboard gets dried out.

Step 5: Water the cardboard occasionally

Be sure to pop over to your garden and water your cardboard every day or every other day if it isn't raining. Part of how this method works is by both smothering and blocking light from getting to the grass so keeping it damp and weighed down is critical.

Step 6: Clean it up

After about 3 weeks you can start to check your progress. Pick up a corner and peek underneath to see how the progress is coming along. I ended up leaving my cardboard on for a full month before removing it and it looked AWESOME!

I raked it lightly to get up any dead grass chunks. I also dumped used coffee grounds over the top to use as a mulch (just pop into your local Starbucks and ask for "grounds for your garden" and they will give you a whole trash bag full of used espresso grounds).

So that's my story! Now it's ready for planting!

(Don't forget to pin this post to save it for later!)

Some questions I've been asked about this project:

Some people have been asking me WHY I needed to kill grass to plant a garden. Why not just put dirt on top?

Well, I could have put dirt on top. But in my particular circumstance this seemed silly. First, my city was providing me with free, awesome dirt. Second, buying that much high quality dirt is expensive! Also, because I was not building a raised bed on top of my lawn - where laying cardboard in the bottom and then filling with dirt would have worked awesome - I needed to do something different. I already had a raised bed filled with  good dirt - it just had a lawn growing on top of it!

I also heard this a lot: "Just spray a mix of vinegar, soap and salt on the grass to kill it. "

If you are planning to grow anything in the space you are treating, DO NOT DO THIS! I, too, use an organic Round Up alternative to kill weeds (get my recipe here). However, you should never NEVER never use salt to treat weeds in dirt that you want to grow healthy plants in later. It takes forever to wash away (depending on how much you use) and will most likely poison anything you want to grow there in the future. 

If you have a question about this process (or why I didn't do something else instead!), let me know in the comments!

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