I have 3 acres of grass that’s been mowed upwards of 30 years. It was probably a mixed field prior to that. I’ve found flax, wheat and oats growing wild, not to mention a huge amount of wild diversity. The soil is heavy clay loam, turning to solid clay about a foot down.
I intend to turn it into a mixed food forest, herbs, and a standard garden/orchard, but at the moment it’s mostly grass. The guidance from the local “experts” is to roundup the whole thing, then till.
No thank you.
The alternative is to cover crop with something that will outcompete the grass, even if over a period of several years. I’ll be handling it in sections, so most of it will be 2 years or more.
The seeds I have are sugar beets, buckwheat, clover, wheat, oats, a small amount of barley, daikon radish, and vetch.
If it was early in the season I could add sweet potato, squash, corn, sorghum and basil, and I probably will next spring. But at the moment I need a system that will outcompete the grass. It feels like fall is the best time to do that.
I was thinking about vetch, clover and buckwheat for the areas where I already have trees growing. Beyond that, I am totally clueless.
If you use grain rye it will out compete alot. It’s fall planted anyways and will grow into the winter and be going again in the spring.
Possible draw backs. It will grow vigorously. It will want to seed out and the best time to kill it is at the beginning of heading out. So this may not work for all areas, especially somewhere you want to get things planted early the next spring. If done this way though it will lay down a nice amount of litter on the soil.
Another to consider would be sorghum sudan. It’s a hybrid, not just sorghum. It grows a ton and you could mow it down a few times through the summer and lay down alot of litter to build soil.
We have large areas of grass (40 acres) we want to convert to some sort of woodland. This is what we have done so far:
Rip several times to break up sod and kill off grass. Mow between these ripped lines to produce mulch. Plant into rip lines and rake mulch up to plants. This is a fair amount of work but it works.
To reduce the work we mowed an area and raked the mown grass (hay) into lines. We are letting this sit to kill the sod underneath then we will plant. If this works, and I see no reason for it not to do so, we’ll use this method wherever we want to convert grass to woodland.
We have the necessary equipment (tractor, flail mower, wheel rake) so large areas are doable. If I was doing this with hand tools I’d choose a variation of the second method, though in modest scale.
Is there a fast growing, short lived tree you could use? Plant lots and have them shade out the grass. Work your way through planting what you want using these trees as nurse plants. Chop and drop to create mulch as you go.
I fully support avoiding herbicides and tillage. I do think there are contexts where tillage is appropriate.
We have heavy clay soil. Most places there is nothing loamy about it, and there’s little to nothing I would describe as topsoil. I suspect in many places you could use it straight out of the ground to make pottery. Frankly I am sometimes amazed anything grows in it, let alone well.
I have suspicions of how it got into this state but I’ll leave them for another time.
Basically we are in a similar situation trying to make heavy clay soil full of lawn grass more amenable to growing food. We also acted similarly last season and this season by just planting into the grass. We’ve really only just started this year with converting maybe a sixth of an acre of tree-ringed lawn grass and wild ground covers into space for food growing. So we have a similar goal and are at a similar point - - I can’t say “oh we tried this and it worked great”.
About the only thing I can say for certain is that six years (since getting the house) of not using herbicides and planting very little new lawngrass (which we will not do again) has made a difference. Violet, clover, and dandelion have become much larger components of the lawn. We just had to stop the poison use and wait.
Last fall we planted a lot of rye, radish, and vetch around the property, though not in the area we’re converting. I let most of the rye complete its lifecycle as I’d rather have more of a locally adapted weedy cover crop. Most people will likely argue this defeats the purpose of a cover crop, but Fukuoka’s cover crops were his main crops in a temperate clay soil context. He planted into a perennial ground cover of white clover.
@MarkReed has had awesome results using root crops as soil builders in clay soil. He has inspired me to step up my root crop game.
The fall crops you mentioned sound great I just wonder if you’ll have enough time for the tender ones to make good root mass or biomass.
I would not recommend planting crown vetch (which I’m sure you’re not). I can’t recommend hairy vetch either. Like crown vetch it is non-native and very aggressive. It is inedible by most reports, the seed pods shatter easily, and I believe the seeds are of interest to wildlife and therefore likely to spread.
Skip next paragraph if further detail on hairy vetch is uninteresting:
Earlier this year I observed a small and beautiful riparian ecosystem with a history of heavy disturbance (but minimal ongoing) in Cincinnati Ohio. As I had planted hairy vetch as cover last year and am very fond of the pretty flowers, I recognized its presence. Shortly after I realized that it was everywhere, followed by multiflora rose. Granted the native vining legumes that should have filled the same niche were absent, but it seems to me hairy vetch does not behave well when growing conditions are good and adjacent ecosystems are vulnerable.
I support rye being a great option for the cold season. I planted a lot in September this year and will plant still more mid-October or later.
Barley and non-green revolution wheat seem like good choices too. I’ve grown barley in or adjacent to lawn grasses and am trying wheat.
I’m not sure any cover is going to displace fescue, bermuda, violets, dandelions, etc. if that’s an aim. If Fukuoka’s methods are interesting to you, you might consider introducing or tolerating some native perennial legumes to cover the soil in the off season and serve as living mulch during the growing season
Along with the things you mentioned, I’ve personally added Brassica juncea, peas, and lentils to my cover crop mix. I used it to oversow the grass that I want to replace. (It’s pretty much pure bindweed and foxtail grass.) My hope is that they’ll grow through the winter, which will give them a huge head start over those two weeds.
I’m seriously considering adding yellow dock seeds in that space. It’s a common weed out here, and it grows two feet tall, which may not be ideal for a ground cover, which is why I’ve hesitated. But it’s edible and tastes quite good in spring, the seeds can be eaten like a grain, and it’s pleasant to walk near (all soft leaves, no prickles). Plus, the fact that it’s huge might be nice because it would provide a lot of biomass. I haven’t decided yet if I want to invite it.
Purslane and hoary cress, I’m definitely including.
Dandelions, violets, wild onion, etc., I couldn’t care less. There’s lots of yarrow out there, and I’ll be cultivating that as well as other wild plants. It’s the non-native rhizomous grasses that are my concern.
The sweet potatoes don’t crowd out the grass, but I’m using them mostly for soil conditioning. Bush type squash works pretty well, or vine squash if it’s planted thickly.
I’m hoping the combination of buckwheat and clover will come up sooner than the grass in the spring, and crowd it out.
I have high hopes for clover as a lawn replacement. It’s more drought tolerant than grass, it doesn’t get tall, it’s pleasant to walk on, the flowers are pretty and nice for pollinators, and it’s even edible! Seems like a really nice ground cover to me.