Love seeing your pictures! You two are an adorable couple. My husband and I bought our homestead in July and we're experiencing a lot of the same exciting firsts as you! Check out my post Our First Month Homesteading. But we're expanding our garden area and was wondering about laying down plastic. We have rolls of clear plastic...do you think that would kill the grass enough? At this point I'm thinking we may as well try it over the Winter and see. What's there to lose?
Clear plastic wouldn’t work too well. It would scorch the soil and damage some of the soil life. It would set the weeds and grass back a bit, but as long as they are getting sun, they’ll survive. I would use landscaping fabric, preferably non woven geo textile fabric. It would need to be left on for a full growing season to turn grass into plantable soil. A second option would be sheet mulching using cardboard/paper and compost/straw/grass clippings. If the area isn’t too large, it’s doable, but it requires a ton of materials and work, and isn’t guaranteed to kill grass. So I no longer use this method.
We're planning on doing the back to garden method, so will be mulching and composting, etc. In the garden we have now, we scrapped the grass up by hand and laid a few inches of compost down before planting. The grass came up in some places...mainly where we got tired/lazy I think. But this is our first year doing back to eden gardening, so I'm hopeful.
Yeah back to eden is a great method. Makes it difficult to plant smaller direct seeded plants, but it’s perfect for transplants. If the wood chips are 8” deep you won’t have much of a problem with grass surviving. Otherwise, you may want to make sure it’s all dead before laying down any mulch.
Checkout this YouTube series it’s really informative.
Thanks! I will!! We started it this past weekend. We laid down cardboard to help kill the grass and are laying down manure/compost under the woodchips. I've heard the first year or two doesn't give you great results because the woodchips haven't decomposed enough - but I'm hoping the manure/compost will help!