We got sick of maintaining grass and wanted to grow herbs in our front yard so we decided to give the Back to Eden method a try!
http://www.mysticmoonshop.com
Okay so we had dirt delivered uh yesterday or day before and we’ve been working on this all this outside edge that’s all dead grass I okay uh is all going to be microc Clover and then the center part and this part up on the front up there that’s all
Going to be herbs so literally like the entire front is now going to be herb garden and right now we’ve just got the dirt down and there’s a nice big fat pile of mulch over there I’m going to have to get another one already uh but I’m going to get a good
Part of this done and plant in it I don’t know if I’ll plant this front part yet but maybe so yeah it’s coming along pretty good and that we got a couple trees to pull out or bushes to pull out that up there is a Russian sage I got a big ass rose
Bush right there um yeah so all herbs mint chory uh everybody’s driving around me sorry about that so we got to move this Pile still and we got to finish this pile here and then uh the microc clovers on hi guys okay so I’ve tried to do this video a couple times and I just keep messing it up um I recently this is my front garden area front front
Yard and it’s on a hill I’ll show you the hill it’s very difficult to care for it’s it’s always been grass with the exception of this little area right here uh was a garden bed with irises and some paper whites and various other things in
It and I don’t want to try to keep grass growing anymore and I don’t want to mow it anymore I am sick of it so I learned about the Back to Eden Garden and it just made sense so a couple weeks ago we ordered uh some materials uh compost and wood chip
And we had that dumped in our front yard basically uh you can do this with cardboard or newspaper we opted for cardboard uh we put down a layer of cardboard and then because we wanted to plant this year uh we had compost brought in and we put down several inches of
Compost and then on top of the compost we put about 6 in of mulch and you can see it’s pretty thick now these Pathways uh on here and this uh grass area along here that is normally what our grass looks like this time of year it’s brown it looks like it’s dead and
Then all of a sudden it comes back up so what I decided to do on the edge was microclover uh microclover stays green longer into the season I they say that it’ll stay green all winter long I seriously doubt that but we’ll see so I purchased a bunch of
Microclover and have seed it and it is coming up finally it took several weeks for it to uh take hold and start sprouting and it’s coming up very slowly uh but it is coming up so I’m grateful for that um I am looking forward to not having to mow not having to take
Care of it I do need to do some weeding um one of the things that I noticed was when I water um I would I would run the sprinkler or hand water one or the other and afterwards I would dig down into the soil to see if the water was penetrating
Because it’s so thick I was really concerned about the penetration and you know the water actually getting down to the cardboard and keeping the cardboard moist there are areas that it’s a little on the dry side but for the most part what happens is you water
It and the water sits on top and then as the hours go by after water ing it soaks down in so if you come out a couple hours later and you dig down into the soil you will you’ll see wet all the way down to the cardboard um which made me really
Happy so the the the problem with the whole soaking in thing was do I have to put in plants or can I put in seeds I opted for putting in seeds just to see how it went and what I did was I pulled back the wood
Mulch down to the soil I wet it planted my seeds put the soil back wet it again and then pulled the mulch back over and then wet it again uh basically did the whole thing and I wasn’t sure for a long time if it was actually going to work it is
Working uh the seeds have taken a long time to to sprout so like when you plant a seed in a pot and it’s about a/ an inch deep it comes up 3 to 5 days because it only has a/ an inch to travel but when you’re planting a seed 8 in
Down it’s like okay is this seed actually going to come up and it did in fact come up uh I’m going to do another video on the seeds or the the seeds that have actually come up and germinated but I this is so difficult to talk about I wanted to do it
Separately um it took us sorry my neighbors have like the noisiest cars I swear anyway it took us like I’m going to say a couple days uh of pretty consistent hard work to put down this piece over here and this whole area here um maybe maybe two days total and on the
Second day at the end we actually did have a little bit of help getting it done oh and we have like this area here look at that bush isn’t that beautiful um anyway cardboard or newspaper soil if you want to plant like right away I have talked to a lot of
People who don’t do soil they just do wood mulch on top of the cardboard but they’re also not planting immediately I did talk to one girl who said she put down cardboard newspaper um or cardboard or she did newspaper I guess so she did newspaper and then wood
Mulch and then when she would plant she would would move back the mulch put down soil plant in the soil and then put the the wood mulch back I would think that would work whether you were doing seeds or plants um obviously plants are easier and you you know it’s more instant
Gratification and I’ll show you instant gratification in the other video but I just wanted to talk about the process of putting down a no dig garden and what our experience was with it and I hope this helps uh anybody who’s thinking about doing it I’d highly recommend it I
Am not doing this in my garden area and in the back uh and the biggest reason for that is because I don’t want to drag all this stuff up a hill and you can see in our other videos um that we live on the side of a mountain basically and um
We would have to drag all this Mulch and stuff up the hill that’s not to say that I won’t supplement my yard with some mulch uh and my garden area but I don’t want to do a massive no dig Garden on a hill on a quarter acre um hope this helped
Bye so I forgot one important thing on these like this stuff is really thick and initially when I water if I stick my hand down in here it’s very dry and I was really concerned about that um the further down I go the more moist it gets and initially I was concerned
Because I was thinking the water wasn’t getting down to the seeds but I watered really heavily what are you doing come on thing watered really heavily this morning and I checked it and it was bone dry so what must happen is that the the water must sit on the surface at
First and then as the day goes it drops down because down by the compost that I put in it’s very wet um oh yeah I going to show you this so like the day after we got this in look at this a bunny rabbit you can’t even tell if I’m
Pointing in the right direction here a bunny rabbit dug a hole and made a little home in the front yard they said oh look at all that mulch that’s really fabulous I think I’ll have a little hole so yeah there’s a rabbit living down there and
I’m going to leave him anyway sorry I forgot that part