Ok, I just went to the FAQ and found the post on how to turn a lawn into a planting bed.

I think I'm going to try the spring method mentioned.

Wish me luck!!

Here is a link that might be useful: How to turn a lawn into a planting bed

Sounds like an awesome bed...I'm already swooning and jealous.
Look in the faq for instructions on how to turn a place in your yard into a bed... it involves layering newspaper, mulch and the such... round up works as well and will save you the cost of the landscape fabric which personally I've never used...the round up works quick and doesn't stick around long so you should be able to plant soon after the grass dies off... buy the generic weed/grass killer... works just as well and half the price... buy a small bottle in concentrate to save some money....

If you mulch and weed you shouldn't need the landscape fabric... that sounds like a big area to plant... maybe use some in areas... but you might want to grow some groundcover like vinca minor, ajuga, creeping jenny or the such... plus add some heuchera =) here and there.... or other hosta buddies here and there and eventually IMHO you'll think the fabric is a waste of money =)

On another note... you should take before pictures and start a thread and show us =) Then take pictures as your bed progresses and show us those too =) Then next year and the next year and the next year =) So we can see some bed making and hosta maturation =) Thanks for the post, Happy Planting!

John

Yes, pictures as you go along will be nice.
Have you considered renting a turf remover to strip the sod off quickly?

I did consider the sod remover, but it would be difficult for us to transport and probably wouldn't be able to do it all in one stretch due to time constraints.

I'll take the before pictures today, I like to do that with all my garden projects. :-)

A related question - Idiothe - you were talking about the horse manure... I found a source for decomposed cow manure, is this comparable?

First - the same advice my grandpa and every good gardener since has given me and that, if I set it aside in my hurry toward getting going, I have always regretted my folly...

You only get one chance to completely prepare a perennial bed. All the work you do later will be piecemeal... amending on the surface, moving a plant, etc. Take the time now. Do this right. You may be anxious to see the plants in the ground - aren't we all?! - but extra hours spent now will save extra weeks of amending later.

Now... some very unhumble opionions...

landscape cloth - absolutely don't do it! I won't give you all the reasons - check out this thread... put simply, I believe Satan devised landscape fabric to take gardeners, who tend to be close to nature and God, to the darkside. Voles and moles and rabbits and deer and slugs and various complaints might get a gardener to swear once in a while - but landscape fabric can drive a perennial gardener to making blood sacrifices by moonlight.

http://www.perennialnursery.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=53069&p=463105&hilit=landscape+fabric#p463105

Two techniques to consider.

For killing grass - and turning it into compost at the same time... solarizing. I haven't done this for a while, so you can google up some more specific directions, but the basic process is to water the area and then cover the part you want to kill with clear plastic and weight it down around the edges. It is going to heat up the soil, killing the grass and lots of the weed seeds in the top couple of inches as well. The timing is surprisingly short if there is direct sun - with the shade you are describing I'm not sure how long this takes...

I planned an oval garden for a family a couple of years ago... they cut the plastic exactly the size of the oval and they said the kill pattern was amazing... healthy, fertilized green grass right up to a sharp edge, then composted grass and grass roots, easy to dig up into the next layer they spread over it.

Second technique - lasagna beds... lots of good info if you google... layered construction of soil on top of the current soil. I think you could lay wet newspaper on top of the grass and do the lasagna thing and not even have to remove the grass. (I'd still do the solarizing first, just because you never get the layers thick enough at the edge and some really deep rooted grass always seems to fight its way up through the stuff.

In that oval bed I described, the folks tilled some leaf compost in with the dead turf and called that the first layer, then did some layering over the top. Eventually they mounded it some. I think mounds in island beds like you are describing are nice features, allowing a "presentation" of plants without relying solely on the height of individual plants to make those in the center or farther away from the viewpoints show. A Sagae or a Liberty in the center of a bed will be higher than a June in front of it... but a Sagae at the top of a one-foot mound in a lawn bed will be spectacular.

Caveat - I don't think solarizing would cause any issues for your established trees... you are providing extra moisture and you don't do it long enough to heat the soil very deeply... and I'm pretty sure maples won't mind having their roots covered if you do build up a foot of soil lasagna style - but I think oaks are touchy about soil over their roots... some trees really need oxygen to get to the roots and if you suddenly change the soil level - like building a house and backfilling a couple of extra inches over the tree roots - you can actually kill a tree. There are rules about how deep, and how much of the circle root zone of the tree can be covered before it becomes a problem. Again, I know the general idea but I don't have the specifics in my scrambled brain dump.

Maples... not all maples are created equal. If they are silver maples - no kidding here - I would cut them down now or forget the whole idea. Silver maples and perennials are incompatible. You can get things to grow, but if you want to grow hostas under a silver maple you will either spend an inordinate amount of money and time, or you will see the hostas dwindle as the tree grows. You aren't talking about dropping in a plant or two that you can containerize - you are talking a lot of square footage here.

I speak from experience. I watched my silver maple grow from a seedling. Loved the increased shade it was giving my hostas. They loved it too. Abba Dabba Do about 25' from the trunk went to about 66" diameter for a couple of years. Then every year after I watched every hosta in the root region of that tree... I'm talking over a hundred plants now... shrink and shrink and shrink. They suffered from incredible competition for nutrients and water. It wasn't possible to water enough. I dug hostas and found the wirey little maples roots actually grown into and running the length of hosta roots. It was something out of a scifi movie. Digging through the surface roots was a nightmare. The Abba DD dwindled to about 36" before I cut the tree down.

Believe me, I wish I'd done it when the tree was smaller - by the time I could bring myself to cut it down, it was 26+" diameter at 6' off the ground where I made my cut (I kept the rest of the trunk as a garden feature. Even getting it dropped before most of the hostas came up in the spring, it did a lot of temporary damage.

So... no silver maples or no perennial bed in their root zone. Other maples? Other folks can advise you better... I know people have said all maples tend to have the surface root nets, but I believe some are much less invasive than the devil's spawn silver maple.

There's a start...

Sorry... worked on that last post over a longer time period, before any of the other responses were posted... don't want to sound like I was ignoring the other input...

Horse manure versus cow manure... Neither one should be used without composting - I don't remember all the science involved... grandpa just said you'd "burn" the plants.

Cow manure is much, much stronger than horse. Horses don't digest the material very much, so after a short time it is pretty much back to compost. Cow manure is different in character - the animal has a bunch of stomachs and digests the material a bunch of times. What is left is highly concentrated. Horse manure composts into a fairly friable material. Straight cow manure compost is more like dense black mud.

Both are good stuff... you just have to make sure they are really composted, then amend properly. I think you can pretty much just use well composted horse manure as your soil. Cow manure - you'll want to ammend with stuff that can loosen it up... sand, pine bark, perlite, whatever you can do to create air pockets and better drainage.

The Canterbury horse stuff I was talking about isn't even, really, horse manure. It is the sweepings from the horse barns, meaining it is more wood shavings than manure. The mixture of woodshavings and manure and horse urine composts quickly into what may be the best garden material I've ever seen. In a perfect world, I'd build all raised beds and fill them with this stuff and plant in it - no amending or tilling necessary. Not even many weeds as the horses are kept in air-conditioned barns, fed on grain, bedded on wood shavings (no hay, straw, to add seeds). The only weed seeds come from the air as the piles compost in the fields.

About your composted cow manure. The advantage of cow manure is that the cows are able to digest long enough to kill a lot of weed seeds. A cowboy friend of mine claims God created horses to spread seeds around... they eat green stuff, walk a mile, and poop out some mild fertilizer to surround the undigested seeds, making little gardens wherever they go.

But check the source... a pile of manure left to compost for - in the case of cow manure, preferably, a couple of years - will collect a lot of weed seeds that germinate in the pile, grow, set new seed that falls into the pile, etc.

I got some year-old horse manure about 15 years ago from a pile that was just out in a grassy field behind the barn. I had to dig away some thistles to get down to the good stuff. I wish lightning had driven me to shelter so I'd never gotten that stuff. Garden grew great - thistles grew even better. I still am trying to eradicate thistles from that load of manure, even after building elaborate composted bed over the original problem area.

I got some great city compost, but one batch had some mint seed in it... danger, danger, Will Robinson. I'll be fighting that for a while - I planted before I'd solarized or RoundUped for a while... now its tricky to try to kill that stuff off.

So... well composted cow manure is black gold... could be the most important element in your new bed. Just keep an eye on the structure of the soil - the manure compost gives you excellent nutrients, you just need to keep an eye on the drainage and friability...roots need air as well as soil and water.

Ok, my turn. I'm also in zone 4 and here's what I do. It's based on what Ken advised a few years back.

Determine where the edges of your bed are going to be by laying out garden hoses. Once happy with that, kill the grass using RoundUp. The regular stuff, not the extended stuff. Go up to the edge while the garden hose is still in place. Followup by spraying again in about 7-10 days to make sure all the grass is dead. Depending on weather, it'll take 2-3 weeks for the grass to completely die.

notice the caps here:
DO NOT USE LANDSCAPE FABRIC NO MATTER HOW 'GOOD' YOU THINK IT IS. All you have to do is a search on it and you'll see us all strongly advising against it. I used it in my first bed and was ripping it out within weeks. The stuff has one foot in hell's door. It's a gardening nightmare. Grass and weeds grow thru it. You don't know misery till you try and remove a hideous thistle that's growing thru the fabric. Are ya getting where I'm coming from? And no matter how permeable they say it is, it really isn't. Just do your own test. Take a sheet of the stuff and have 2 people hold the 4 corners. Angle it slightly. You'll see more water sheets off than goes thru. Permeable my @$$!

k. Grass is dead. You don't have to worry about removing the sod, but now is the time to decide if you plan to amend the soil. I'm dealing with this right now in a bed I started last fall. It's got lots of clay and I'm now trying to figure out how I'm going to amend a bed that I've already planted half of!

Once you've amended, you can start planting!

I will say, however, if you start this process in the late summer and use all your leaves in the fall as mulch (I chewed them up really fine with my mulching lawnmower, but I have maple leaves and they compress terribly... oak leaves are better), then you will have lovely soil to plant in next spring. HOWEVER, if you're like me, with clay, you'll still want to amend. I have a post from this weekend ... something like, 'Need Advice for working with clay' where I got lots of good advice. It's worth reading.

Now, for the edging. 2 suggestions: edgeless or Victorian edge. There's a GREAT tutorial on this on Fine Gardening's website. Or, for a great black edging tutorial, check out the link below. I have a tool called an Edge Hound. Got it from Home Depot. GREAT TOOL. LOVE IT. I use it ALL the time. Stand outside the garden. Step it into the soil like a shovel. Push it all the way down to the ground to lift up the first few inches of sod in the garden bed. Do the same thing on the inside of the garden about 4-5 inches in, so you're effectively creating a 4-5" wide trench. If you rock the edger back, you're kinda lifting the sod in the trench so that you can pick it up by hand. 2-3 foot long pieces are easy to lift.

From here, you can decide whether you want to do a victorian edge or use the plastic edging. You're ready either way.

Once the grass is dead, you can consider cutting it way down close to the ground or not.

You can plant at any point once the grass is dead and you've amended the soil as you please.

Here is a bed I started this spring. You can see, grass is dead, edge trench is done. Planting has started, but I've yet to decide on black plastic or victorian.

Here is a link that might be useful: Black Plastic Edging Installation

So who's delivering a truckload of Canterbury gold to Eau Claire, Wis. for me? :-)

THANKS So much for all the great ideas and feedback, everyone. I LOVE the "Don't do that" blog!

Now, to condense the strategies into a workable plan to discuss with hubby!

Candice... I love the Canterbury gold... but if you can get the decomposed cow manure, it is black gold... really excellent stuff! No need for the fancy pants race horse poop if the cow stuff is well composted.

Should you want to remove the sod - you don't need a big machine. There is a manual tool - we call it a sod kicker - that is a simple tool that you shove and kick along, cutting the grass into a sod strip you can roll and even use as sod someplace else. Simple, and a pretty inexpensive rental tool. It does remove the need to wait for the solarization or Round Up to work... you can plant the same day.

If you don't need the sod, if you find a spot to lay it upside down in a pile, it composts rapidly into really nice soil...

NOT ME!
I'm just trying to figure out where at Canterbury I can go to get some myself!

are you in a college town? if so, get yourself a good lookin' yardboy

~ freshair

i would start by cutting down the maple.. is that an option???

then you said: I'm planning to edge it with (for now) just plain black plastic. ===>>>> PLEASE DONT.. if God had meant for you to use plastic.. all the plants would be plastic ...

now... i didnt read what the others said.. but frankly.. if grass.. the most invasive weed in the world grows poorly .... then you are going to have a hard time with thirsty hosta ... ergo.. the maple removal ...

good luck

ken

The maple is probably not going to budge - we engraved our initials on the tree, under which we became engaged :-) The only way it would be moved is if you folks think it would be a hazard to either my house foundation or cement sidwalk. I will post a pic tomorrow. It is sort of close to the house. Wouldn't surprise me if it was a bad planting placement (was here when we moved here).

I know black plastic edging is not ideal, but it seems like the lowest level of maintenance and the cheapest option at this point. I am sick of fighting with grass day after day after day in my beds out front. Any other edging options besides the victorian trench thing? How often would i have to retrench?

Grass grows under the trees, but isn't lush and thick because we don't fertilize it. Our soil is fairly sandy, and light, but in most of my gardens i've amended it with a combination of peat moss and mulched oak leaves, which we have scads of. Several hostas randomly planted near the oak trees are doing nicely with minimal soil additions.

Here's what I'm thinking if we keep the maple tree - thick hardy ferns under the maple tree, and omit it from the three-leafed arrangement which was my original plan. Plants nearest the maple tree (which is about 7" in diameter now) are probably going to be placed in spinout bags to keep the roots at bay.