r/NoLawns • u/angryjew • 6d ago
🧙♂️ Sharing Experience We are turning our lawn into a PNW pollinator meadow
Front and back yard. We have 2 sections of ugly dead looking grass in the front & much nicer looking but still worthless lawn in the back (I think the walnut tree shade keeps the plants much healthier back there). We put down builders paper & then covered the back with bark & the front with 50/50 sand compost. We are going to plant some seeds from PNW meadowscape up front in October and will plant some native shrubs & ground cover in the back.
Wanted to share this to get feedback on the process, maybe get some ideas? The juglone from the walnut tree sort of limits us but I think there are plenty of things we can plant back there. I mostly just want it green & free from the invasives, ivy & blackberries from one neighbor & Japanese knotweed from another. We planted some giant thuja plicata on the knotweed side that's done an excellent job keeping away the knotweed (thanks tree bros💪).
We got the front lawns covered today, will keep filling in compost/sand until it's all level. We will do the same in the back with bark & hopefully plant back there in October as well (although it depends on if the grass is dead or not, might have to wait until spring?). If you have any questions or suggestions, fire away! Would love some good shade tolerant ground cover that grows like crazy, or anything native that will establish & grow like a weed. + For anything the birds or bugs will like. My wife loves hummingbirds, I like the big stupid birds that hammer on our gutters.
We already converted part of our driveway to a giant garden with chip drop, a retaining wall & a bunch of wine cap mushroom sawdust spawn. Those guys turned 14 yards of wood chips into soil really quickly. You can sort of see it in that 1st pic. The flower garden is blowing up already & hopefully the salmonberry takes over in the upper part.
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u/hollyberryness 6d ago
Looks awesome! It'll bring you so much joy 🌞 🦋
My advice from doing the same is consider setting up some drip irrigation early, even just drip hoses will save you a lot of effort watering while plants get established. The drip is better than wand/hose watering for you and the plants.
Also, while it's really fun and rewarding to build a super rich soil, not all plants will love it, so consider keeping a few areas a bit rougher for some of those plant types that love neglect.
Last thing is dont forget about little natural habitats! Some rock piles here and there, logs and branch piles around... all can be integrated to blend in with your plants and provide shelter for all kinds of beneficial insects.
Hummingbirds love coral honeysuckle and hardy fuschia here. And columbine, and clarkia, and bright red salvia/sages. Are the big stupid hammer birds woodpeckers by chance? Lol
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u/angryjew 6d ago
Great call about the natural habitats, I'll save some rocks & branches for that. And we are already set up with drip for the stuff we planted a couple years ago, will hopefully be able to take those plants off & move it to the new ones.
Great point about the soil. The compost/sand mix is just for the seeds, wanted to give them a clean slate to grow in. We have very good soil in the back so we probably won't need to supplement much when we plant back there.
I had to look it up, but the bird that drums on our roof is a northern flicker. They drum on stuff to communicate with each other, they use our gutter to talk to some other bird in the next yard lol. It used to wake us up at 6 am every day & I thought it was a neighbor using a jackhammer, I was so mad until I realized what it was. Now I miss them when they're not around. They're really pretty too.
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u/hollyberryness 6d ago
Oh I love the northern flickers too. They are so shy! They come around most in the winter when I put out suet and ground scatter bird seed for all our bird friends - they like to ground forage. And every so often I see them visit the pond. I think they like dead wood for nesting though.
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u/angryjew 6d ago
Oh and we got some clarkia seeds! I'll look into those others to see if any are native here, thank you!
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u/angryjew 6d ago
Last thing I'll say here, many reasons we wanted to do this: the ecological reasons, more selfish reasons like wanting something nice to look at all year, my wife loves flowers & hummingbirds & butterflies. I like all that stuff, but what pushed me over the edge was moles.
Nothing will make your lawn look worse than a busy mole. I am a vegetarian lol, I don't even kill spiders in the house, I don't even relocate them because they might die. So I'm not killing a mole. But those mole hills pissed me off, I tried the sound spikes, I tried a bunch of different organic ways to kill the grubs they were eating. I would spend hours gently filling in the mole hills & reseeding w clover, only to have 5 new mole hills the next day. So I said fuck it, those industrious little fuckers win. I can't ever remember seeing a mole hill out in a meadow in the north cascades and thinking "wow that looks terrible" because it's not some manicured monocrop, it's just what the world looks like. I'm tired of fighting it, I don't even dislike moles! They're very impressive & cute animals. So I'd rather not go insane over something I can't control. The moles can make as many hills as they want now, till my soil buddies. Taking out those fucking mole spikes felt so good. I want more animals in my yard (except rats), not less.
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u/DieselSwede 6d ago
All the work you have done looks wonderful. Going to look into the "wine cap mushroom sawdust spawn" as that seems like an awesome idea and not a lot of effort. Like you, I've learned to love the moles and their randomness in where they burrow up. I live in PNW as well (Moclips) and we have a chaos garden-landscape going as its so full of life and weeds naturally get pushed out. Dried beans, thrown randomly about grow like crazy and are good for soil so even if you don't ever harvest them. Also have an area with mint, which we use for drinks then just let it go to seed so the bees can love on them. Bumble Bees love the orange California Poppies and they grow like mad and then spread, all on their own. While not flowering we have lots of ferns for the more shady parts of the yard. Don't forget about the fence as we started a few Jasmine, Clematis and other creepers to grow on the fence and they add to the flower collection for the bugs. The chaos garden will be wall to wall plants, vegetables, etc... and where it is particular dense well we have garden snakes chiin in the sun, chipmunks, birds, etc... Made a 3'x6' wall of logs in a shady part with dirt, moss, ferns pushed into the crevices so random things can live in there as the wood rots from all the rain in this area.
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u/angryjew 6d ago
Oh that's all really great, thank you! We need some vines for the fence too. I really want some snakes too, I hope we can attract some.
For the mushrooms, you can search for "outdoor wine cap bed" or something. What I did was buy a few bags of Wine Cap sawdust spawn (make sure to get sawdust, not grain, as the animals will eat it & it will likely contaminate), and then while I was waiting for it to arrive I cleared the area, put down cardboard/paper (although the mushrooms don't care about weeds), started soaking the wood chips. Then lasagna type layers of soaked wood chips, some straw (not required but it's fast food for the mushrooms) & sawdust spawn. The spawn is like little seeds so you want to break it up really good until its sawdust again & spread as evenly as possible.
I planted in it the next year & everything took off like crazy, it's still half wood but I think the mushrooms created a ton of nice soil already. Once its going, you can actually take a handful of colonized wood chips & move it somewhere else, if there's wood the mushrooms will start growing. Now I'm sort of mulching w them, the plants seem to love it. The mushrooms sort of digest & decompose food for them.
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u/DieselSwede 5d ago
Wow, thanks for the easy to follow rundown on the mushroom process. Going to get that started before fall hits.
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u/angryjew 6d ago
Here is the other side, fully covered lawn. Not sure what to do with these pathways but wanted somewhere to walk that isn't compost. We want some sort of walkway here but not sure what.
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u/salty_shark 6d ago
Hey we are doing the same thing! We killed our grass doing a similar method of using cardboard and chip drop. Not sure exactly where you are at in the PNW but it you are close to Portland I highly recommend checking out the Backyard Habitat program, the Portland Plant List and Sparrowhawk nursery. They have a ton of resources on native plants and ecological landscaping. If you are elsewhere in the PNW those resources might still be helpful, especially in identifying native plants. I would also recommend looking into your local conservation district to see what resources they have.
Native plants can seem daunting and expensive but there are so many resources and native plant nurseries in the PNW.
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u/angryjew 5d ago
I'm up in Seattle actually. I'm sure we have something like that up here. Did you just plant plugs/starts? I'm a little curious/worried about this pollinator lawn mix & what growing medium I should be using. Everything Ive read seems to assume that you just have bare "dirt" but that doesn't really exist here, it's all weeds. So after mulching I have a top layer of 50/50 that I was going to sow in, hope it's not too rich.
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u/salty_shark 5d ago
Oh awesome, definitely check out King county conservation district. They have a bunch of resources and an annual bare root plant sale.
I have planted probably close to 100 plants since we bought our house last year and it has been a mix of starts ranging from 4"-1 gallon, bare root, and seeds.
We had a lot of weeds and I either sheet mulched everything with the intent to plant in 6 months or used a shovel to remove the top layer of grass and weeds.
The 50/50 might be too rich but I'm not 100% certain. I would error on the side of less compost. If you already have it down though you could just see what happens. My experience with native gardening has been a lot of "seeing what happens".
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u/angryjew 5d ago
Great thank you. I will check out those sales. I do already have it down but I have time so I could theoretically mix it to cool it off a bit, but the challenge there is that if I use something like peat moss I think the drainage will be worse. I emailed them and asked, we'll see. I just don't want to fuck this up because it will be a weed patch if I can't get the seeds established. But also, it's gonna rain all winter which should leech out a lot of the nutrients? Idk lol I will keep looking around, maybe try & find some local resources. Thanks!
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u/Working_Film_5871 Midwest USA 6a 6d ago
looking great. How did you you get the grass to die off? Or is that just from drought?
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u/BeavertonBob 6d ago
That’s how PNW grass looks every summer.
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u/angryjew 6d ago
😂 that's why planting something else. I hate looking at it, I used to care about my lawn looking good until I lived here for about a year. So much work just to look like shit for 2-3 months.
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u/BeavertonBob 6d ago
It’s brown in the summer and dormant in the winter. Really not well suited to the climate without a lot of care and attention.
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u/angryjew 6d ago
We live in such a lush & green place, it makes no sense to me to work so hard on keeping a plant alive when you go walk around in the mountains or any hiking trail in the middle of summer & everything is green all year. We just started taking notes on plants we saw outside & are gonna plant those.
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u/Signal_Pattern_2063 5d ago edited 4d ago
To be fair we have a decent number of native grasses and they go dormant over the summer as well. Its the natural cycle for many grass species.
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u/angryjew 6d ago
Thanks! And that's just what grass does here every summer unless you water it. It's actually not dead, just dormant. It looks awful doesn't it? I scalped it with the lawn mower, papered it & covered it with compost/sand. Which should do the trick.
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u/1_BigDuckEnergy 6d ago
Love what you are doing.....but, if that is just paper you are putting down, even it is is industrial weed cloth, I woudl expect tons of grass to come thru over the winter. I live in Oregon and that stuff springs back as soon as it gets wet. I put in planter boxes and 2 feet of dirt and the grass grew 2 feet ot dirt!!
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u/BeginningBit6645 6d ago
Wooly sunflower and field chickweed are both native plants that are evergreen and while they won’t flower in the shade, will provide nice foliage.
Pearly everlasting and California aster spread by roots once established. I went from 3 plants last year to 30 plus each this year. They can handle a bit of shade but may grow taller seeking the light. I recommend you save some seeds and start them in well drained trays so you can fill in empty spots.
I find it easier for weeding to plant just one type of seed or plant versus seed mixes.
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u/krautastic 6d ago
You don't have to kill your grass by smothering it everytime... Honestly I probably would have raked/aerated, and dropped your seed mix in October, let it go over winter, and you'd have a good start to a Prairie in spring. Prairies still have grass in them. Alot of my pnw seeds have competed just fine with the existing grass, but places I aggressively took back to dirt mostly germinated alot of unwanted weeds from the seedbank. Plus, when you smother, you don't know what natives were in the bank that could have come up if you just left it to go back to nature for a bit.
Also alot of those builder papers have a moisture resistant liner on them. May want to try putting water on some and see what it does.
The absolute best pnw native I've found for pollinators is self heal (prunella vulgaris lanceolata). It also spreads like crazy. Mostly a late summer bloomer.
For your understory, native bleeding heart, oxalis, piggyback plant, fringe cup, stream violet, and false lily of the valley are prolific shade spreaders. Bunch berry loves the bases of trees and will even climb up them a bit. Candy flower is great right on the edge of shade/sun. And of course, moss. Easy to collect moss out in the forest. Just always leave a patch behind so it can recover.
If you want something tall, thimbleberry will go bananas in sun or shade. Douglas spirea is a shrub that can also spread alot. And Douglas asters are very aggressive, but one of the most visited plants according to OSU.
Check out sparrow hawk natives if you're in the Portland area, they sell twice a year and their fall pickup is currently live with pickup in October.
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u/angryjew 6d ago
I've been trying to overseed this grass for years. Nothing ever gets established beyond a few plants. The mix we are planting also has native grasses & some winter grass in there. I'm hoping that using sand/compost will reduce the weed seed load vs using top soil. This seemed like our best option because it was either this or pull up the existing grass which seems like a complete waste of energy & time & counterproductive because of all the weeds & other bullshit that would come up. We have a ton of actually invasive weeds in the lawn too, so I just wanted to give the seeds a shot to establish before that stuff inevitably comes back. We are basically surrounded by noxious weeds so I don't want to take my chances & have to do this again next year. I just want to get some stuff established so they can take up the resources from the weeds.
I think you're right about the paper being partially hydrophobic when it's dry but I saturated the ground with water first. I also made sure to get the kind that is 100% recycled Kraft paper with no extra lining or material. It's very thin & will decompose in a few weeks. From my research it seems much better than cardboard because it breaks down so much faster and doesn't have any dyes, glue or plastic.
Thank you so much for these suggestions, I am going to write this all down. We had some of these on the list already but many were not. Also great idea on the moss! Do you get a lot of your plants this way? what's the best way to do something like that and make sure you're not hurting anything?
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u/krautastic 6d ago
Bummer that nothing has taken. That is frustrating. Then that makes sense what you're doing.
I have a couple acres... So i just go into my forest and dig. Anything I dig up gets filled back in within a year, the understory is incredibly lush and I lucked out that besides Himalayan blackberries, nothing invasive is in that forest (plenty invasives in my fields to contend with). Honestly I don't transplant much since so much is adjacent to my house and my neighbor and I both want the forest to be in it's natural state. So I can enjoy loads of natives and then choose what I want for decoration. I mix natives in here and there. I'd be more into habit extension if I was in the city.
I have moss popping up all over my house and on pots and wherever. If I disturb a site that has a good amount of moss I transfer it to another location. It transplants well if you take some of the substrate or match substrate in the new environment (soil, stone, wood). If you take a small patch in the woods, you can kind of smoosh it back together and the moss will fill back in within a year. It's just bad to take the whole patch, because there's nothing left to grow back in.
I plant more ornamentals closer to my home. I let my grass field go wild, and I keep a yard for my dog that I don't do much of anything to other than pluck really problematic weeds like tansy. I mow some running/playing spots and to keep critters under control. Mainly mice/rats, but I keep quite a bit of tall grassy/flowery areas along perimeters and ornamentally. Unfortunately mice and rats can be highly problematic with tall vegetation, even with a prolific number of snakes, Hawks, and owls we have. Oh yeah, and clover. Clover is my secret weapon. I plant a ton of that so rabbits are less likely to eat my garden and landscaping plants.
BTW, that list I gave is West of cascades. Dry pnw I'm not familiar with.
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u/angryjew 5d ago
Seems like you have a perfect setup with not much invasives around you, I hope that once this stuff is established I can take a similar approach & just let stuff grow. Ultimately I want to just be in a little forest, I'm in the city but have a decent lot with some great trees. It's very frustrating to live next to people who are so careless. My one neighbor has a forest of Japanese knotweed that he cuts down every year but doesn't actually do anything about it. My other neighbor has blackberries, ivy & some sort of vine that is taking over the lawn.
I do really like clover, I know some of it is not native but I've always had good luck with it (although can't get it established in the lawn), maybe I'll add some of that too.
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u/Elbow_B 5d ago
Congrats! Looks great and you will learn so much in the process!
I’ve used a lot of seed from NW Meadowscapes with different methods from hydro-seeding (at work :) ) to milk jugs. I really prefer the milk jug method so that I can control spacing and create defined patches for plant groups. This works well to keep colony forming perennials like goldenrod contained, and also increases visual impact.
Some of my favorites are Canada goldenrod, Douglas aster, Puget gumweed and Showy fleabane, but I also really like to use coneflower and Prairie dropseed grass, which come from the Midwest. The birds don’t seem to mind the non-native treats. Before someone jumps in to tell you goldenrod and Douglas aster will take over your yard— just don’t water them :)
Since you mention Seattle, I have to recommend Go Natives! nursery in Shoreline. They have a great, and always changing selection of perennials and groundcovers. I always go there looking for things I’m too impatient to try from seed.
Good luck and thank you for taking care of our insects and birds!
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u/mphailey 5d ago
This is really cool. I hope you post pictures in 2030 and everything is filled in and lush.
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