Tips to create more living space by reducing lawn
A new area in the garden created around a fire pit, takes advantage of removing unused turf grass to create a more useful garden area.
Adding a fire pit, water bowls and a great place to relax
Reducing or even eliminating your lawn is one of the most freeing endeavours you can do for yourself. Not only does it free you from having to spend hours cutting, weeding and fertilizing turf, it opens up a wealth of opportunities to create more useable areas in a garden.
It doesn’t matter if your yard is an acre or a postage stamp, reducing or eliminating the lawn creates opportunity to add quiet sitting areas and secret gardens spots that become places you want to go to rather than another patch of grass that demands attention on a weekly basis.
The fire pit is the perfect place to relax during the cooler months. Built away from the house and trees, it creates a more useable space than the turf grass it replaced. More changes are to come including the inexpensive plastic adirondak chairs that are being replaced with green higher quality chairs.
Interested in creating more living spaces in your garden? Check out my other post here about creating a backyard that fulfills all your needs.
For the past 25 years I have been reducing our lawn to the point that it now covers only a tiny fraction of our property and requires only about 5-10 minutes of cutting on a weekly basis. That beats the up to two hours of cutting that was needed when we first moved into the home. In those days I often turned grass cutting into a two-day project.
Even back then, I new that spending that much time cutting grass was neither sustainable, nor something I wanted to do in my retirement years. Slowly, over the first few years the lawn in the front yard was removed and replaced with a large meadow/woodland garden with a separate Japanese-inspired garden.
In time, the backyard grass began to disappear as new gardens took shape. A massive fern garden planted with dogwoods, redbuds and serviceberries took care of a huge swath of useless turf grass and created a cool oasis for animals and birds to escape from the summer’s heat.
A larger view of the garden shows the fire pit area in the centre looking back at the house and gardens.
More recently, I decided I needed a separate area in the garden to finally make use of a long unused Weber fire pit to enjoy an open fire where I could relax and cook over an open flame during the approaching cooler months.
Time to get rid of more grass.
Whether it’s one of the newer and very impressive Solo smokeless units, or an older one you already own, a fire pit can be an outstanding addition to the garden.
First step: Decide on a design plan.
Since the remaining grass was contained in a circle with gardens all around, we decided to create a secondary circle that intersected the previous circle resulting in a circle that protruded into the original one and kept the circular theme.
The biggest mistake people make is to create a garden space that is too small resulting in an area that doesn’t sit comfortably in the landscape and restricts them from either giving plants the room they need or making the area appear too cramped. In this garden area, four people could easily sit around the fire pit with as many as six if necessary.
• Once we had the design concept, it was as simple as digging in a plastic edging in the circular form.
• Rather than removing the grass, we simply set the battery-powered mower to its lowest setting and scalped the grass to within an inch of its life. That made laying black landscaping cloth over the grassy area much simpler.
• With the black landscaping fabric down, ensuring the grass would be killed off over a period of time, all that was left was to put down a Thick layer of shredded cedar mulch. A word of warning, spreading a thin layer of cedar mulch will only lead to problems down the road when the black landscaping is exposed allowing grass and weeds to grow up.
• A solid two- to three-inch layer of mulch is a good start. The thick layer will not only hold the landscape fabric in place, it will also further reduce any chance of light getting through to prevent grass and weeds from growing up. It should be topped up over the years. (At some point, the black landscape fabric can be removed leaving a thick layer of mulch to keep weeds at bay.)
• It took about 36 bags of mulch to cover the large area. Thankfully, the mulch was on at firesale prices and although I thought 26 bags was more than enough we had to add more. Unfortunately, the store ran out of natural cedar mulch so an edge of black cedar mulch was added. Although I would not have originally used the black mulch to edge the project, I have grown to like it over time.
• A fire pit, a few water bowls, some comfortable seating and fresh firewood and we have turned a useless patch of weedy grass into a useful and interesting part of the garden that uses the garden as a backdrop for enjoying the garden with friends as the cooling days of autumn approach.
Another idea that would work in this space
If a real fire pit is not allowed in your area (you could use a propane fire pit), or its something that does not interest you, the area would be perfect for a quiet sitting area that provides a new view of your garden. Add a nice birdbath, a small tree a side table for a glass of wine and a couple of comfortable chairs. A bird feeder – maybe a hummingbird feeder – with a couple of large containers filled with some of their favourite plants would be a great place to relax with your children, grandchildren or friends.
The area could also be the focus of a bubbling rock feature with a sitting area. Don’t have electricity? Today’s higher quality solar pumps are capable of moving enough water to create a lovely sound and enough water to attract birds and wildlife.
Author Profile: Vic MacBournie is a former journalist and author/owner of the award-winning website and newsletter Ferns & Feathers. He writes about his woodland wildlife garden that he has created over the past 25 years and enjoys sharing his garden photography with readers.