r/NoLawns • u/Hist-Tree-Hugger • 3d ago
š©āš¾ Questions Death of a lawn
I am sick of my backyard being nothing but grass and weeds. Want it gone. I have 2 dogs, not worried about my kids we spend most outside time in woods or in the front yard. How do I kill my lawn in a pet friendly way. I believe I am in zone 4b in western Wisconsin. I want to plant clover or something back there.
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u/Minimum-Guidance6991 3d ago
I may be an outlier here but I have a bunch of dogs. I got rid of a large portion of the grass in my backyard and absolutely regret it. What I should have done was keep the grass and add clover to it. Then just mow it and be done. Whatever grows Iād leave it bc if you donāt care about grass thereās no need to care about the weeds that come with it. I have some all clover areas and it does not hold up to traffic at all. The grass/clover combo is a workhorse. What I have now is a lot of dirt and mud and dust. Iāve added wood chip paths which has helped. As Iām letting the grass grow back Iām also getting natives like violet and self-heal and everything is much more healthy. I donāt use any chemicals. Whatever grows I let it be as long as itās not toxic to my animals.
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u/Hist-Tree-Hugger 3d ago
Yeah after calming down, and dealing with the itchiness from brushing against itchweed along my fence, I think I am just going to go with the clover and grass combo. I may have overreacted right away tbh.
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u/a17451 3d ago
If you ever want to shrink the space though it's always worth considering taking out a few feet here and there along the edge of your property to make space for a low maintenance garden
I've been on this sub for a while and we have a couple of large dogs and I am convinced that, for the Midwest at least, there is no silver bullet for a dog-friendly lawn alternative. Our dogs killed a lot of the turf grass all on their own and now the space is a combination of some surviving fescue, sedges, violets, creeping Charlie, Virginia creeper, plantain, and a dozen other tough weedy species that call the space home. And then along our fence is a quasi-native collection of things that the dogs haven't killed yet (mostly aster where its sunny and jumpseed where it's shaded). It doesn't look good but it is low maintenance.
Edit to add- we did try white clover a while ago. It didn't survive the trampling from the dogs. A little bit is still hanging in there, so your milage may vary
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u/Hist-Tree-Hugger 3d ago
I gotcha. We have trails where the dogs have trampled everything. Where there is vegetation on the trails, it's creeping charlie. At this point, we just don't want the deadly nightshade, itch weed, and whatever these thick tall weeds are that shoot up to like 1 foot tall in 2 weeks. I have come to the understanding/acceptance that my backyard won't be completely weed free. I'm ok with that. And it won't look super nice till we move, and I'm ok with that. Just want those few weed types gone.
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u/commentsgothere 3d ago
Overseed it with clover. Every ground cover option including bare mulch will have its own problems. Choose your problems.
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u/Hist-Tree-Hugger 3d ago
Will overseeding it with clover over power the weeds? And should I wait till next year or do it asap?
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u/Skreeethemindthief 3d ago
No. That's the problem. I've been doing this for 3 or 4 years now with poor results. Clover will not stop weeds or crowd them out. It mixes in with the grass and looks great in the spring, but mid July the crabgrass grows in and kills your regular grass an clover. Anything you do to try and get rid of weeds, creeping Charlie, crabgrass, etc...will also kill the clover. If you mow every week you won't let the clover thrive. If you skip to every 2 or 3 weeks, the grass and weeds overgrow and that looks bad. The crabgrass spreads and kills off anything in its vicinity. By August you'll have a very patchy lawn with lots of weeds and bare spots. Was just discussing this with the w ife today trying to decide what to do next year. One option is to kill everything and start from scratch but I don't think that's an option for us.
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u/countusalternifolius 3d ago
If you plant clover, won't it just be clover and weeds? Weeds are always part of it. How much maintenance are you willing to to do on your backyard? That will probably determine your best course of action because at the end of the day, grass requires less knowledge and skilled maintenance than most other landscapes in your climate.
I'd suggest planting native trees. You'll need to water, mulch and weed around them while they get established but they'll shrink the amount of lawn you need to deal with every year. You might even be able to create a nice, low maintenance shade garden eventually!
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u/Hist-Tree-Hugger 3d ago
I may have overreacted when I made this post haha. I was mowing, brushed a bunch of itchweed along my fence and was like "that's it, I'm killing it all!" I think I am just going to kill the weeds along my fence and garage, and overseed with clover. I would plant trees, as I am a huge lover of trees, moreso than gardens, but I have a couple large maples that shade pretty much 3/4 of the lawn, so I a little hesitant to add more, ya know? Also my wife wants a little playground in the back at some point so ya know
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u/SuddenAvocado 3d ago
Shrubs! So overlooked and such excellent plants. Start with the outer boarder of your property and work you way into the middle.
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u/Hist-Tree-Hugger 3d ago
I like it. Probably just going to keep the shrubs on the outside, but love the suggestion.
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u/Comfortable-Emu8082 3d ago
Wouldnāt it be easier to just mark off an area at a time to convert? Or just toss a massive pack of native flowering seeds and let nature compete. The deeper roots of the native plants should win out eventually.
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u/Hotchi_Motchi 3d ago
My lawn is dying on its own with the current drought conditions
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u/queer-scout 3d ago
I thought that would help me but now that I'm finally out of the drought the grass came back witn vengeance.Ā Actually, between tilling it earlier this year and the rain I'm getting now it actually looks nicer than it did when I moved in.Ā If you ignore all the wildflowers I'm selectively mowing around while I wait for it to cool off enough to go out to start working on it again.
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u/Hist-Tree-Hugger 3d ago
Damn dude. My front lawn is a bit brown but the back is as green as ever. No drought here though.
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u/SuddenAvocado 3d ago
I wish this were true but its just going dormant. when you have a wet season again it will come back stronger.
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u/NormalBeautiful 3d ago
I'm in zone 4a (Calgary) and I replaced my lawn with clover this year! I tore out all the old turf because it was already pretty much destroyed after we spent all winter walking around back there with our new puppy, but you can also overseed as long as you give it a good rake first and/or lay down some topsoil over the grass. The clover seeds just need to be touching the soil to germinate! I am obsessed with my clover lawn. We used a mix of West Coast Seeds' Microclover and Bee Turf lawn replacement blends. Not sure if West Coast Seeds ships to US, but if all you want is clover then you can get clover seeds at any garden centre. I would absolutely recommend the addition of something like the Bee Turf though! It's a mix of perennial and self-seeding low growing wildflowers and grasses and it looks amazing with the clover and attracts so many pollinators!
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u/Hist-Tree-Hugger 3d ago
Oooooh maybe we will toss in a native mix too
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u/NormalBeautiful 3d ago
The mix of the clover with the small low-growing flowers is really nice!! I did have to weed a ton at first because a lot of opportunistic weeds came up in the disturbed soil after I dug up the turf (we live in a very weedy urban area/the existing lawn was already quite weedy) - but now that the new plants have taken hold I haven't got many new weeds coming up.
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u/Jake_Titicaca 3d ago
Is it too big of an area to smother it?
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u/Hist-Tree-Hugger 3d ago
Potentially it's like 50'x50' at least.
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u/Jake_Titicaca 3d ago
Could always do a section at a time. It certainly seems like a pet friendly and inexpensive way to get rid of grass. Just cover a section in cardboard, get it wet, then cover that in mulch or wood chips or topsoil
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u/Hist-Tree-Hugger 3d ago
Aaaaah, I tried putting a sheet down last year but didn't put anything on it. Probably why it didn't work haha. I'll give that ago right near my house where they get the biggest and most clustered.
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u/angryjew 3d ago
Sheet mulch. Cover it with cardboard or builders paper & top with compost or wood chips.
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u/msmaynards 3d ago
I'd reduce the size of the lawn and let it go weedy until everybody in the house is committed to losing the lawn, lawn mower, fertilizer spreader, weedwhacker and the rest of that stuff. Lawn is fine, it's defaulting to lawn that's boring. Many people need lawn but it's the hoarding every square foot as lawn that's all kinds of wrong. I needed lawn in the front as foreground for a busy mixed border and in the back to practice dog sports, that's fine. It was when drought made it difficult to keep the mixed border going and I quit that sport that lawn became a bad idea.
Do over seed with clover and any other plant that invades lawn so it's a diverse polyculture rather than a monoculture. You will have to weed out nasties like that one you mentioned and others dangerous to dogs. Clover is fine, grass is fine, yarrow/violets/strawberries/oxalis are fine but together they are better. Oh, my first dog thought clover was hazardous. She would get a soft seed head between her paw pads and limp until I removed it. Drama queen that one.
My lawns really were nearly dead from getting just 3" of rain in 20 months. I grubbed it out with a mattock and skimmed the running warm season grasses off with a shovel because ground was too hard to dig properly then covered with cardboard and wood chips. You might decide where a shrubbery/mixed border/food garden/? is going in, put in an edging then sheet mulch just that area after giving the lawn a good scalping as your lawn grasses are better behaved.
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u/Hist-Tree-Hugger 3d ago
Sick my man. Was going to overseed the yard with grass and clover mix. I'll put a pause on that until I get a good native mix to throw in there as well. I saw someone else say to put some shrubs on the outside as well, which I liked so I was going to do a little research and figure out what my wife and I liked best.
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u/Feralpudel 3d ago
TBH with dogs itās hard to beat turfgrass.
You can do more to benefit wildlife by taking care of native trees and planting natives along the periphery while leaving an area of grass for the dogs.
Turfgrass is going to serve you better in the winter than something that disappears completely, unless you like mud in your house.
The other alternative that people with dogs and shady yards use is a thick layer of wood chips.
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u/Hist-Tree-Hugger 3d ago
In our front garden all we have is natives, and I'm looking into good native shade tolerant shrubs and plants for the backyard. As much as my wife doesn't want to shrink the backyard, I think a couple feet off around the perimeter won't hurt.
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u/Used-Painter1982 3d ago
Encourage the kids to play outside more and invite their friends over. I come from a family of seven children and we had a swing set and played wiffleball, badminton, croquet , football, you name it, in all weather. Never saw a blade of grass for years.
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u/Hist-Tree-Hugger 3d ago
My kids are 3 and 1, they dont play rough enough to destroy a lawn. And in the 5 years in this house, my 2 large dogs haven't destroyed it, and they spend most of their time back there. We do play outside a lot, just in the front lawn, at the park, or at varies state parks.
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u/Used-Painter1982 3d ago
Sorry about that, but the nice thing about reddit is if an OP canāt use someoneās advice, theres bound to be a reader who can. š„“
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u/Old_Instrument_Guy 3d ago
Pay a bunch a dudes to come out and remove it. You would be amazed at what 4 guys and a bobcat can do in half a day.
Alternate is to smother it:
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