Inadvertent Hippie The riveting tale of converting my front lawn to an edible garden (and other epic adventures)

I’ve mulched the vegetable beds on the left side of the front yard because the soil dries out quickly and I’m too lazy to water the plants, like, every day.  I decided to use cocoa shells because they were on sale and, while I’m not a chocolate fiend, I definitely appreciate a front lawn that smells like a candy bar.  Cocoa mulch is generally much more expensive than other types of mulch, but because of the microscopic size of my yard, it’s still a pretty tame investment.  To cover the beds on the left side of the yard was only one bag of mulch.

And, I have no idea why, but since mulching the beds the squirrels have not made their requisite daily visit to dig up root vegetables and kill my transplants.  That would be awesome if my affinity for chocolatey goodness was also  squirrel control (and, please understand, I am by no means minimizing the importance of Mac in this squirrely battle).

The conversion of the right side of my front yard has also been progressing, and I’m just about done.  Naturally, the right side went much faster than the left side because 1) it’s smaller and 2) even though I still don’t know what I’m doing, I know how to do what I’m doing with a little more efficiency. 

This time around as I laid out the newspaper over the grass, I used many more layers. The 4-5 layers that I used on the right side was too thin, and I’m getting some very-determined grass poking through to the sunlight. I have to specially thank my friend Mandy who apparently keeps up with the news much better than I, and saved stacks and stacks of newspaper for me.

Also, instead of keeping the newspapers weighed down with rocks this time around, I just used the hose to dampen the newspapers so they wouldn’t blow away. Much more efficient.

Finally, I filled the holes with the soil, peat moss, and vermiculite mix before I mulched the newspaper, so that not as much mulch would fall into the holes.  I did run out of vermiculite, though, so I guess I will need to buy more.  *sigh*  Running to gardening stores imposes on my planting time.

The plan changed substantially from my drawn-up plan and now looks something like this:    As I was digging, it just seemed to look better and give me more space. So it goes.