Kate Rinder

This will be for primarily vegetable beds, though we will also have fruits like blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, kiwi vine, etc. Potentially some grain, too, since it will be a large area. But vegetable beds for the majority of the area. We are planning to bring in a garden bed soil mix for a portion of the area so we can have some garden this coming year. But for about 2/3 of the space, our plan for this year was to just cover crop and try to enrich the soil (and potentially give time for the sod to rot) for future years.

We are newly living on a property in Northwest WA state, with goals to grow as much of our food as possible. Last November we used a sod cutter to strip/then flipped about 3500 sq ft of lawn. We are noticing grass starting to sprout from the surface of the (flipped) sod. Our plan has been to plant a mix of daikon radish and mustard cover crop over most of this area for this coming growing season to start breaking up the sod and improve soil quality and drainage. From an organic matter (and labor) perspective, we'd rather leave the flipped sod in place. However, we're concerned about the grass starting to sprout from the root mat. And we also don't know how well our planned cover crop will germinate/establish from broadcast seeding onto the root mat.

It's such a large area that covering it with cardboard would be a huge project (plus I'm not crazy about using cardboard in areas where we'll be growing food since I assume there must be some residue from the glues). Any suggestions? Would it be safest to just pile up the sod, let it break down, and then put it back in the garden? If we plant our cover crop soon, might it be able to get established enough to outcompete the grass trying to re-grow from the bottom? Thanks in advance.