Beds in progress

So, we decided to replace the bulk of our front yard with raised beds. Our target model was the English cottage garden. It's the gardening equivalent of an Impressionist painting. There is organization but it's kinda smeared out with one thing bleeding into the next. We began by marking out the borders of the beds. I looked at the lines of sight so as not to block them. Then I took the mower and mowed paths through the yard. I wanted to make sure that no bed was so wide that you couldn't reach deep into into it from the paths and that the mower would fit between all of the beds. I then took bricks and marked out the edges of the beds. Next, I used old packing paper to cover the grass and spread 3-6 inches of dirt onto of the paper. I finished each bed with a covering of paper and mulch.

In the beginning...

In the beginning there was grass. Well, not really grass but a dirt covering of short green plants. I would spend several hours every couple of weeks or so making it shorter with no personal joy what-so-ever. I came to view my lawn with loathing and resentment. The only obvious option was to hire a lawn service which seemed...like a waste of money. I have a hard time paying someone to do something that I can do myself for free. Kelly thought I was nuts.

I began to wonder about the time and money that people put into their yards. I have a neighbor who is doing something to his grass several times a week. He fertilizes it. He aerates it. He re-seeds it. He mows and edges it. Most of my neighbors have lawn services. They roll up about once a week with a truck full of gear and swarm out like ants at a picnic. It's an impressive sight.

As per my idiom, I started doing the research. To be sure, there is no recognized body of knowledge on this subject of which I am aware but I did stumble across the work of Cristina Milesi, a researcher at NASA who has used a combination of census data, satellite images, and aerial photos to create a very interesting picture of the American lawn craze. Every year we burn 800 million gallons of gas in our 50 million (or so) lawn mowers. One of the staggering finds that I came across several times related to the water that Americans use to keep their lawns perfect. Milesi's research (see Could the Grass be Greener? and Looking for Lawns in the links at the end of this article) discovered that we devote more water and land to our lawns than we do to growing food.

Acre-feet of water used in a year in millions

Lawns	59.6
Alfalfa/alfalfa mixtures	14.3
Corn	11.7
Orchards, vineyards, nut trees	9.0
Rice	6.9

Source

Some other interesting facts:

• We spend nearly 10 times more on lawn care than on school books
• In the Western states, up to 60% of a households water is used to keep the grass green
• Of the 18 most commonly used herbicides, seven cause cancer, six cause reproductive defects, eight are neuro-toxic, nine are damaging to the kidneys and liver (This adds up to more than 18 because some fall into multiple categories)
• Americans use more pesticides a year in home gardens than we use in agriculture.

Bibliography:
Could the Grass be Greener?. U.S. News and World Report, May 2005
Looking for Lawns. NASA'a Earth Observatory, November 2005
Lawns vs. Crops in the Continental U.S. ScienceLine, July 2011
Lose the Lawn. Middlebrooke Gardens, 2012
Study of Lawn in Our Gardens. Landscape Resource, Februrary 2010

Lawn to garden.

As some of you know, I'm not much on mowing. I know some people love it. Nothing like walking around sweating behind a loud, little machine while you get coated in tiny bits of grass knowing that in the end you will have shorter grass. Nah. Not my bag. I've been threatening to do this since last fall but it is now underway.

We are converting our front yard into a cottage garden. A cottage garden is, in actual fact, a romantic fiction invented about 200

years ago that idealized the happy peasant toiling in the earth who was able to produce everything that they needed from their surrounding fields and gardens. People--who were not peasants--imagined a green space surrounding the house filled with decorative plants, minor food crops, and medicinal/culinary herbs all planted in a nearly random jumble. The end effect being something like those opening scenes from the Lord of the Rings movies with Gandolf riding though the Shire. I will soon begin posting pics of the process but to date, I have converted about 60% of the yard into flower beds. Because I didn't begin work on this project last year, I am attempting to create beds and kill lawn at the same time. This mandates that the beds begin somewhat sparse due to my having to use lots of grass/weed barrier and mulch. Over time, however, I will begin to fill them in until they reach a critical mass.