So digging up lawn is a nightmare, particularly if that lawn is kikuyu which is very common in my country. Every patch you clear will rapidly become colonised again without constant vigilience.

In an ideal world you’d rent something like a turf cutter, clear everything, and landscape from there. Unfortunately that’s prohibitively expensive a lot of the time. Not to mention not always an option if you’re not physically able to optimise the rental time with continuous work.

Solarising is popularly mentioned, but for a quarter acre of lawn that would take a loooot of laid down stuff. Doing it patch by patch tends to lead to recolonisation by the grass.

Does anyone know of better solutions for someone who can chip away for a couple of hours a week at most reliably? Where it wont end up in using all that time policing the edges of whatever you’ve cleared with spades and tears.

  • @Gravelsack
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    21 year ago

    Put down a layer of cardboard, and then cover that with wood chips. I’ve been chipping away at my lawn this way (get it? chipping away?) for about 3 years and am almost done. As an added bonus it improves the soil as well.

    • InsurgentRatOP
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      11 year ago

      Sadness. I was really hoping there would be a tool or method I hadn’t heard of.

      Guess I’ll have to front the 2k to rent a powerful cutter for a few days.