autumn (she/they)

she/they

  • 5 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 11th, 2023

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  • i have photos somewhere on my phone, but we began clearing the back section of our yard for the eventual meadow installation in a year or so! we raked up all the leaves/sticks/junk and got about 1/3 of it covered in cardboard to kill everything off. i need to read back over my materials, but i think the idea is to uncover for a month every few months to let the weed seeds germinate, then cover it back up to kill them off.

    actual seeding will happen in early october of next year, likely with a mix from prairie moon.






  • I think posting about your plan would be a good starting point for some conversations and might encourage some other folks to emulate you

    once i actually start doing the work, i definitely will!

    Did they talk to you about solarizing next spring using tarps?

    they did, but this area of the yard is pretty shady, so the guy leading the workshop specifically recommended using cardboard and mulch for maximum annihilation.


  • the plan itself isn’t that difficult, just takes a lot of time to kill all the invasive plants off so the native plants have a chance to grow. you completely clear the ground first, let the invasive seeds germinate, kill them again, then seed it with native grasses and plants (prairie moon has a lot of US mixes, so i’ll probably use them). you won’t get blooms for at least two years, i think. and you need to cut everything down to about 1.5 feet the first fall to get the invasive plants before they go to seed. unfortunately, that means you’re also cutting down the plants you want to grow, so they take another year of seeding before things really get going, but they should help keep out the invasives at that point.