Ashley Joy

My front yard is on a very steep slope that's difficult to mow. I want to replace the lawn with a low-care garden and was thinking of using a hybrid technique. I'd dig holes about 2 feet apart, like zai pits. Fill them with vertical sticks/wood. Fill gaps with manure and use soil from the hole to create a berm on the low side of the pit. Once everything's planted I'll lay down cardboard between the plants and mulch with wood chips.

Thoughts on this approach? Anyone tried anything similiar? Is there something I'm not considering?

Thanks in advance!

I'm not sure. My husband did a lot of research before he bought his, I can see if he has links I can post. I will say, though, that he's a pretty big guy (6 ft, 210 lbs) and can go 12-15 mph up a mile long, 7% grade with the Luna Cycle kit. Depending on where he's going, he might get a 15-20 mile range out of one battery charge, and he just bought a second battery to carry with him if he needs to go further.

I'm not familiar with the one you posted, but my husband has a kit he got from Luna Cycle and he loves it. Not too heavy, reliable, and unobtrusive. We live in a hilly area too and he's had no problems whatsoever.

K Putnam wrote: Pull up the unmulched cardboard if necessary and tidy the edges of what you have done so far...In smaller spaces, I think tidiness is an overlooked part of permaculture.  In areas where it needs to look good, a permaculture garden will only last if it looks good enough to inspire people to care for it.

I'm hesitant to pull up the unmulched carboard only because it's keeping the weeds in check...I've kind of been of the opinion that it can either be ugly because of the cardboard, or ugly because of the waist high, prickly weeds that I'll have to cut down over and over. Given the option, I always like to go with the lower-maintenance approach. Lol. I see your point about tidiness though... maybe instead of the haphazard way I've been doing it, I should concentrate on the area closest to the house and build from there. That way he'll be able to see one area come to life fairly quickly instead of several adjacent areas coming together SLOOOOOOWLY.

The places I've mulched so far don't seem to have much growing on top of the mulch. A few dandelions have poked through gaps/holes but I cut them down, rake the mulch back, cover the plant with another small piece of cardboard and replace the mulch. And the garden beds, where I planted directly in the double-dug, nasty soil, then surrounded the seedlings with cardboard sheets and topped things off with several inches of horse manure, had NO weed problems. I was expecting a ton because of what everyone says about horse manure... but I spent maybe 5 minutes per week weeding those beds all summer. It was the weirdest thing.

Oh, and I'll definitely post pictures eventually. I'm pretty embarrassed by how it looks now.

Kate Muller wrote:
Now that we are 2.5 years into the process my husband loves to be in the garden.  

I can't believe that only took 2.5 years! Your yard is beautiful and gives me hope! The veggie garden this year was mostly his favorites. Lots of herbs, tomatoes, and peppers. He cooks with the herbs a lot and made a vat of salsa to take to a fantasy football party and it was apparently a hit.

Anne Miller wrote:
Maybe you could cover the cardboard with mulch so it doesn't stand out like a sore thumb.  Then the mulch could be raked off when you are to the next step.

This is the biggest problem. That's exactly what I planned to do but it's not going as smoothly as planned. Cardboard is easy for me to lay down during the week before/after work, and its much easier to get than the woodchips or manure are. Mulch has to wait till the weekend, because I go to work before the place I go to opens, and don't get off until it has closed. And I have a subcompact car and don't have any friends with a truck or trailer, so I can get maybe 1/3 of a yard at a time. So what's been happening is that cardboard goes down, we get busy, and it sits there looking awful until I have a chance to get more mulch. I've been signed up with chipdrop since March but the network doesn't seem to be very developed in our area yet. I'm HOPING that in a few weeks I'll have enough leaves and pine needles to cover most of the cardboard and let stuff start breaking down and becoming good soil. I'd love to be able to pay for a big delivery of wood chips, but the house was just as neglected as the yard so all of our expendable income is going into making it a safe/comfortable place to live.

He doesn't care even a bit about plants, animals, or flowers, but it might work to let him do the engineering type stuff. He likes modeling things up with exact measurements and scale drawings and stuff. He was excited when they legalized rain barrels here and can't wait to do solar panels on our house, so I might put him to work on an irrigation system with a solar pump. And he'd probably like figuring out the contours for swales if I promised to not make him do the digging. And maybe stuff like researching the best grills, smokers, and hammocks.

Peter Kalokerinos wrote:You need to find some material, preferably good quality videos which show what the "end" result will be.

This could be very effective. I tend to not have the patience for videos, but he's always watching stuff online. Maybe I'll get my son hooked on her channel and encourage him to show his dad the cool parts.

I do think something is getting lost in translation because I can already "see" how it's going to be when I get things the way I want it, and it's hard to share that image without pictures.

I also think differing backgrounds have a lot to do with it. I grew up with a hippy mom and we did a lot of permaculture-ish stuff before it became popular. He grew up on a cattle ranch, so different perspectives entirely.

Scott Charles wrote:My dearest absolutely hates the way I start a project, get things all torn up and looking like a demolition zone, and then jump to the next project because I got inspired and needed to change focus for a while.

This is the story of my life, lol. I technically have full reign over the yard and we compromise on the house stuff and any hardscaping outside (built a deck this summer, doing a patio, paths and a firepit sometime in the near future). What gets me is I'll say something like, "Look, I got more mulch down, that area's going to look good soon" or "I just put in a bunch of new perennials" and he says "I'm still skeptical" or "but that OTHER corner still looks nasty, you need to get rid of the cardboard." Not demoralizing, because I'm confident in my vision, but annoying and rude.

Hi there! Long time lurker. I bought my first house earlier this year and I was lucky enough to get a huge backyard that's basically a blank slate. Tons of sun, slight slope but relatively flat, fully fenced to deter large marauding wildlife. I put in raised beds for vegetables this summer, and the end goal is a food forest with lots of fruit trees espaliered along the fence, a butterfly/bee garden, medicinal herbs, etc. BUT! I live in an area where it is hard to grow things. Windy, dry, cold most of the year. With horrible, depleted, nasty alkaline clay soil with no organic matter. The whole yard was horribly overgrown with weeds, and I spent the majority of the summer just whacking them down with the weedwhacker occasionally while I focused on the veggie beds and the neglected interior of the house.

I have unlimited free horse manure, leaves and cardboard, and from the end of April until the end of September, unlimited free pine wood chips. My strategy has been to cover huge swaths of "lawn" with cardboard, then lay down wood chips. I'll let it marinate over the winter, then plant winter-sown perennials in the spring, using horse manure as an amendment in the planting holes. I also want to plant a bunch of whips next spring along the fence and start training them into cordons since it will take a couple of years for them to mature.

I'm going to chop and drop the remaining veggies as soon as it freezes, cover them with cardboard to smother any volunteers, then top it off with a layer of manure and a layer of mulched leaves. I'm going to leave one bed fallow and use it for composting in place, then rotate the compost bed from year to year. I also want to double the beds this year. I have a bunch of slash/tree trimmings that have been piled up since spring, and I was thinking about doing mini hugels in the raised beds, laying cardboard down as the bottom layer, packing in as much wood and debris as I can, then topping it with horse manure, leaves, vermicompost, bokashi, and compost. I'll mulch the asparagus bed with more leaves.

I do want to keep some areas as lawn so my son and his friends have a place to play. I'm planning on broadcasting clover to start crowding out the weeds and getting some nitrogen into the soil.

My main problem right now is the sheet mulching is a slow process. I can get maybe 1/3 of a yard of mulch at a time because I just have a compact car, and there's no more free mulch for the year anyway. My husband is ready to kill me because it "looks trashy." He especially hates the exposed cardboard. He's also not a fan of yardwork. Has anyone here convinced a reluctant spouse to go along with their permie vision? How?