The Sod Squad

Our mission: to stealthily remove a section of the front lawn, under the watchful eye of neighbors, and prepare it for planting edibles.  Food not lawns, people!

I took on this project a couple of weeks ago, just me and a shovel on a Saturday morning – it only took two hours for my back to rebel against me.  At first, I was trying to save the sod in order to transplant it to a walkway in our back space, so I was digging out 2′ squares of sod, about 3 inches deep, and lugging them out of the ground using a tarp to drag them across the yard.  That’s some heavy stuff.  I got about 1/3 of the way across the lawn, and decided it was time for some rethinking.

On my second attempt, I brought in reinforcements – my awesome neighbors are all very into gardening, and they came through to help us.  This time, we were brutal – all of the weedy, water-sucking grass would go straight to compost, so our methods had to change.  We initially went through and broke up the sod into easily manageable sections, probably about 6 inch x 3 inch rectangles.  From there, it was down on our hands and knees to pull out the roots and shake off any usable dirt.  I was amazed at how invasive the grass was – we spent most of the day searching out roots, and there are still a ton of little buggers fighting their way through the soil.  It looks like the next couple of planting seasons will need to have their share of weeding time.

We plotted out a curved bed to allow for maximum garden access, and because, well, it looks cute.  We biked to the Home Depot for landscape edging in the mid-afternoon – I’ll post a picture of the XtraCycle under the weight of our purchases when I can figure out what’s wrong with the camera!

The finished product is beautiful – so much bigger and nicer than I could have imagined.  In order to make sure that the bed is ready for planting, we’ve been turning the soil to dry out any remaining grass roots and adding tons of good compost.  I figure that, since we’ve physically touched every square inch of this plot, it’s been infused with so much TLC that it can’t help but be a productive area.

The next step will be to transplant our tender seedlings and see how they do – Happy Spring!