Kill the grass?? Why-ever for?

If you want a thick border of trees, plant them. As the trees grow, the grass will get sparse in the heavy shade and you could then mulch it thickly with your pine needles. (Actually, conifers would be great for at least a portion of your tree border - and you’d have even more needle-mulch available.)

You might check to make sure your municipality doesn’t have a weed ordinance. In my little town, an unmown “meadow” over 8” tall would garner you a ticket (for harboring a nuisance).

This is what I bought this year. Mowing is fun! (Got kids? They'd think it was fun too, on one of these.)

Thanks for those suggestions. I actually already have a good mower that I use at work and can bring home when needed, so the mowing itself really isn't that big a deal. It's more that we'd like more trees scattered around out there, and mowing around trees is kind of a pain (especially if they're not planted in a neat row), plus I feel like it would look better with a more normal-sized lawn and the rest looking more natural with the pine needles. The main thing that worries me, I guess, is not letting regrowth get real noticeable under the needles. But it seems like half an hour a week walking around with the backpack sprayer should be enough to keep it under control. We're in western North Carolina, Zone 7 I believe, so if we planted mostly pine trees then cleanup of leaves shouldn't be an issue either. Maybe the suggestion to plant the trees first and then decide about the grass makes sense but if the trees are going to eventually kill the grass anyway through shade, might as well just get it out of the way?

If your end goal is a mulched shaded border with nothing growing beneath it, then you can kill the grass, plant your trees and put out your pine needles thick. You will have to add pine straw annually and spray or pull weeds into perpetuity. It will only slow down as the trees make more shade. It will never end. In WNC, shade is no guarantee your tree border won't be invaded by any number of obnoxious, thuggish invaders that pine straw or mulch of any kind is no match for. It will have to be maintained to stay weed free long after the grass is a distant memory.

Treating the area under the trees as a meadow (Yes you can have a meadow in the shade of the forest in WNC) is another matter. Doing that can lead to no spraying, no mulching and a simple annual cut down which long term is lower maintenance and better for the environment. To get there from where you are now it will take some real upfront work over several years and you will need to know or learn about the plants that want to live there. It really depends on what you want from this space and how big is it. Is your tree planting really just going to be a very large flower bed type border to eliminate lawn or is the space so large you are wanting to let it be truly more natural?

The trees you choose to plant are just as important as how you decide to cover the ground. Give that a great deal of thought and investigation. Trees have a lot more to offer than just hiding the house next door. Cleaning up and disposing of leaves is nonsense. They are either mulch for the beds or ground up with the mower and fed to lawn.

This is a forest meadow in WNC.

I don't think your property can be well understood from the single photo. YOu might start with a Google Earth Image showing your whole yard. Then a pictures from the street so we can see the street appeal and how your property sits with the neighborhood.

To add to Yardvaark‘s suggested photo request, the warping and shrinkage in panorama photos make them more difficult for me to understand, so I prefer seeing a series of slightly overlapping photos not joined into a single panorama.

How many acres are we talking here? Lot sizes vary quite a bit based on zoning, so you could have anything from 1/2 acre to 10 acres.

As Christopher said, there is a middle ground between a set of trees manicured with ongoing herbicide and acres of lawn. We mow a chunk of our property as lawn, have several large shrub and tree borders 15’-20’ deep, and maintain other areas as rough field which have some trees, and keep other areas as woodlands . The field areas get mowed after the ground nesting birds have hatched and then about now after the grasses have seeded and are fading. We do use a bit of herbicide in the field on persistent woody invasives like buckthorn and bittersweet, as well as on poison ivy, but in general, just seasonal mowing takes care of woodies by not allowing them to become established. As long as you aren’t trying to maintain the look of a manicured lawn, mowing around trees isn’t an issue at all.

The issue with removing all grass across a large area is that nature abhors a vacuum, and even the densest mulch will slow but not stop plants growing, not only woody plants such as native oaks and hickories, but also invasives and various herbaceous plants. You will be spending quite a bit of time for the first 10-15 years while the trees size up and the area still has a good amount of sun spraying herbicide, not a choice I would make. Also, if there is any slope at all, having bare ground covered with pine needles can leave you with massive erosion problems.

You can start by planting a thick band of trees with an understory of large shrubs, well mulched, perhaps 15 feet deep and see how the maintenance works for that before committing to removing more lawn. The reason most folks have lawn rather than other plantings in the eastern half of the US is because it is the easiest to maintain.

When it comes to eliminating grass, only create as much bed space as you can (realistically) keep clean and weed-free if they're not immediately being intensively planted. That's why (like mentioned above) we recommend starting with trees in individual mulched rings, and as they grow, or as you decide to fill in understory plantings, expanding the beds. The whole purpose of weeds is to stabilize bare ground and make way for the next size up of plants. If you fight nature, you're always going to be two steps behind.

It may be worth chatting with a local nursery or a local designer to put a planting plan together, because you can decide what to do now, what to do later, and get an accurate picture of what your maintenance will end up being.

Why did you buy a house with a big yard if you just plan to kill all of the grass?

The earth can be far more productive and rewarding than the constant hissing of summer lawns.

lawns hiss?

Must be snake in the grass.

Joni Mitchell