Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Kill Your Lawn: A Homeowner's Field Guide to Replacing Turf with Native Plants, Surviving the Ugly Year, and Handling the HOA

Kill Your Lawn: A Homeowner's Field Guide to Replacing Turf with Native Plants, Surviving the Ugly Year, and Handling the HOA

Harrow, Dell

Paperback

General GardeningLandscapingLawns, Trees, & Shrubs

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN13: 9798170487127
Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 172
Weight: 0.52
Height: 0.37 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
There is a stack of flattened cardboard in your garage.

You put it there in March, after you watched a video where somebody laid cardboard over their lawn and forty seconds later stood in a yard full of butterflies. It is July now. The cardboard has a water stain on it.

You are not lazy. You are missing the part in the middle, and nobody has written it down.

This book is the part in the middle.

It does not spend sixty pages convincing you that lawns are ecologically expensive, because you already believe that. It starts on the Saturday you actually have, and it walks you through every step of converting turf to native plants: a two-hour site audit that produces a written description of your yard, a five-minute test that identifies which grass you have and why that single fact changes your entire timeline, a real budget with the second-year replacement money nobody quotes, and a calendar keyed to your own frost dates so it works in Minnesota and in Mobile.

Then it covers the parts every other book leaves out.

How to actually kill a lawn, with the three methods compared honestly: sheet mulching with cardboard, physical removal, and a calm, non-preachy chapter on herbicide that tells you what the label means and does not tell you what to do. Why bermudagrass comes back through your new plants in month nine and how to prevent it. How to build a plant palette from four structural roles instead of a wish list, and how to find what is actually native to your ecoregion rather than to a photograph in somebody else's climate. Where to buy plugs without wasting your first budget, and what to do the hour the box arrives.

And then the year nobody photographs. The ugly year, described honestly, month by month, with five cheap moves that make a young planting read as deliberate instead of abandoned. What to say over the fence, in three sentences, with no statistics in them. What to do when a certified letter arrives from your homeowners association, including two letters you can copy, an explanation of what a cure period actually obligates, and a survey of the state laws that limit HOA restrictions on native and water-wise landscaping, with instructions for checking your own.

There is a whole chapter on failure, because every conversion has at least one. The smother that did not work. The plants that died. The May when you cannot tell an aster from a weed. The summer when nothing showed up. The argument at your own kitchen table. Each one gets what it looks like, what caused it, what it costs to fix, and what to do this month.

By the end you will have a method you can run on your own yard, a maintenance year that takes about six hours instead of forty, and a plan for the fourteen months before any of it looks like anything.

The cardboard can wait one more week. Then go.

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