Small Lawn, new start- help needed

Hello!
I have two project areas I'm working on with 0 experience. My starter project is our very small lawn (26x22 ft) and backyard common area in our HOA (32x32 ft). the other is 10 acres of land we recently purchased. Both are in grow zone 7b in Oklahoma, though the land is in the eastern part of the state where it gets a lot more rain. My approach is to learn and implement as many of the permaculture principles as I can at our duplex in the city as a way to build confidence and learn how to approach and better understand the raw land we have. Our hope is to do a lot of the trial and error in this smaller, more controlled space before we venture into the unknown on a bigger scale.  

For our lawn, I've identified what is there, and am now looking for some help in transforming it back to a more natural, healthier state of being. Reminder, we are in an HOA, and while it is not uber-ultra strict, we have neighbors, and we don't want to give everyone in the neighborhood the wrong impression on what permaculture is with our first project. Eventually, I'd like to get the community on board with a community garden, and possibly open their minds to the meadow lawn idea as that not only builds the community, but also cuts the biggest cost of the HAO- mowing. To get people on board, I need to show them what it could be like, queue my front lawn.

Here is what I identified in our front and back lawns:
Front lawn
1. Prickly Lettuce
2. Slender yellow woodsorrel
3. Spiny sowthistle
4. Horseweed
5. Black medic
6. Wall barley
7. Dallis grass

Back Lawn
1. Horseweed
2. Knotted hedge parsley
3. Common blue violet
4. Blue field madder
5. Common dandelion
6. Silvergeen byrum moss
7. Black medic
8. Slender yellow woodsorrel
9. Horesweed
10. Purple margined liverwort

There is an American Elm tree and a Sugarberry tree in the back yard area, which is a common space for the HOA, so a contracted mower goes through once a week.

There is a little typical grass in both areas, I think Zoysia in the sunny areas, and St Augustine in the shady part under the elm.

We have a dead crape myrtle tree in the middle of our front yard (damaged in an ice-storm), and a small garden bed with newly planted raspberries and rosemary (in pots), and some bushes, another crepe myrtle, and roses. Unfortunately, there is rubber mulch there, so that's kind of a bigger process as I'll have to completely re-do the garden bed area. So focusing on the lawn first.

We also have a TON of anthills (about one every 6 inches in many places), and lots of bare patches as well as puddling and compacting issues.

My first thought is I need to regenerate the soil, but I was looking for some feedback on the types of plants we have there, which of them are valuable aids in the regeneration process, and how to use them as indicators for what I need to do to bring the soil back to life. In the past, chemical weed killer has been sprayed regularly, along with ant/bug pesticides. So, none of it is edible, even if it should be.

Your help is much appreciated! Thanks in advance!


Rebecca

Hello Rebecca, and Welcome to Permies!
I'm not familiar with some of your plants, but there are two on your lists that stand out to me as useful regenerative plants.
First is the black medick: as a legume it is a nitogen fixer and should make nitrogen from the air available to the soil network. Second the dandelion has very strong taproot and will pull up nutrients from deeper in the soil. I think sow thistle and prickly lettuce may be biannuals and also have pretty good taproots.
Can you clarify for us what you are hoping to achieve in these areas? Does it basically need to stay as lawn? The backlawn is mowed for you every week, but not the front lawn?

Hi Nancy! It does basically need to stay a lawn according to the by-laws of my community. "Lawns shall be mowed, shrubbery trimmed and exterior surfaces painted, all in a manner and with such frequency as is consistent with good property maintenance. This includes: lawn mowed and edged regularly; hedges and shrubbery trimmed and maintained; appearance consistent with neighborhood;..."

What I see in that is it doesn't have to be "grass", so I'm trying to find a way to work with what we have, introduce other beneficials, and remove the need for "weed" killers, pesticides, etc. while making it a more usable and natural space/habitat. It doesn't say how short the "lawn" has to be, or anything like that, so I think as long as I have a semblance of a patch of lawn it can work. I'm wondering if I can do a mix of grasses and wildflowers, or something like that. I think they would need to be short grasses and flowers that could ultimately look "good" in the neighborhood without needing to be mowed every week.

I was looking at maybe doing Corsican mint, or a ground cover that stays fairly flat to the ground. I also played with the idea of making the front lawn a "garden bed" where I add a border of some sort, and just plant a meadow inside the border...

I had to go back all the way to 2015 to find a picture that actually shows the lawn.  First thing we did was create garden beds that completely surround the front yard.  In those garden beds I grow herbs, perennial grasses, perennial flowers, self seeding annual wild flower, fruit trees, shrubs and random vegetables.   I don't always keep up the grass as well as I would like, but they have to look past all of these to judge my grass.

I have it on good authority that we are known as the sunflower house.  By the end of the season we have nearly complete privacy on the sunny side of the front yard.  

Read Paul's article on permies.  That's really all the grass should need.  For me I find our grass too competitive to grow much in.  I just weed it out of my garden and pull anything that interfere with us using our yard.  My plant care time and energy is better spent and more enjoyable in my garden beds.  I widened and expanded all the beds this year and I had forgotten exactly how bad the soil was when we moved in.  Even grass wouldn't grow in much of the front yard then.  

Thanks Casie!
I forgot I could post pictures
Here are my front and back lawn areas. The back area is the one where the HOA mows, the front is where we are responsible for "maintaining" it according to HOA bi-laws.

I am fortunate in not having a HOA but I am guessing that being able to have a uniform look for the whole lawn and having crisp edges would go a long way to gaining acceptance for something different as a lawn. Honestly I have heard some really bizarre things about HOAs over the years.

What part of the country are you growing in?  A whole lot of gardening information is highly climate dependent  There are lots of other alternatives out there.  I think there's a famous chamomile lawn for castle in the UK for instance.  My climate is far to hot and dry for that.  Frogsfruit on the other hand might be ideal if you are near me or south and east.

There may even be regional cultural pressures that can be helpful.  It be much easier to justify letting nitrogen fixing, native legumes to seed in your front yard in Texas than over most of the country.  That's a fair description of our state flower, the bluebonnet.  We really do love those flowers braving fire ants and potentially rattlesnake infested fields at random roadsides every years to photograph our children playing in them.

I'm your northern neighbor in Central Oklahoma. it's Zone 7, but pretty dry in my "city" location.   Probably similar humidity and heat to the Austin area, but drier overall.  

These are some of the ground cover plants I have found today as I research options.

Front lawn
1. Corsican Mint
2. Creeping juniper
3. Snow-in-summer ground cover
4. Creeping thyme
5. Blue start creeper
6. Barren Strawberry
7. Moss rose
8. Brass buttons
9. Wild violets

I agree that a uniform, crisp edge look is desired for my initial purpose. I did join the HOA as secretary last week as step 1 in transforming how we view lawns.

Seems odd that they mow your backyard, which I would have thought was private space, but leave you to do the front, public facing area.

This is the great Permies thread on lawn care: cheap and lazy lawn care

It does look like your lawn mower may be set a bit low. Paul explains why slightly longer setting is better for the grass and actually leads to fewer weeds. I must admit I've never been a lawn person, and certainly not the bowling green look. The grass cuttings can be useful though!

I did find one thread on alternative lawn plants: https://permies.com/t/173644/lawn-edible-polyculture-works. It is the lawns at Buckingham Palace (where the Queen holds her garden parties) that allegedly have camomile growing in them.

Casie Becker wrote:

I enjoy your rocks. We harvest those by the truck load here and use them all around our garden like that!

I'd probably start with gradually expanding the current "planting" beds while maintaining the streetside grass/lawn and just keeping it a bit longer.   Keeping crisp edges on the planting areas will go a long way to keeping it looking like "landscaping" and pruning and deadheading edibles can make them look more like ornamentals as well.   Strawberries do really well in wood chip/mulch and make nice groundcovers.   Many herbs, like sage,  come in variagated varieties that are just gorgeous and you can fill beds with those too.   Things like nanking cherries are used anyway for landscaping and people often forget they ARE edible.

I just did something similar with my front "lawn" area and woodchipped a third of it.    In the spring I"ll flower plant the edge facing the street,  put some cut stepping stones through it, place a  "fancy" trellis as a focal point...  and then I'm planting flowering and fruiting perennials in it.