The easiest no-mow "lawn."

Fast and dirty

Simple steps to make your yard look fabulous–without a lot of work.

by Alisa Gordaneer
4/26/00

Making our yard a place you can enjoy.

Who has time to make their yard look like Martha Stewart lives there? Most of us barely have time to keep the lawn down to a respectable height, or to keep that citronella plant on the balcony alive all summer.

So you’re not much of a gardener. But you’ve gotta do something or your yard’s going to look like, well, dirt.

Begin with a few calm moments of contemplation, hopefully in the company of one or more of the following excellent gardening books: The Busy Gardener’s Guide, by Andrew Mikolajski (Time Life Books, $12.95, 112 pp) or the excellent but out-of-print Gardening Weekends: Strategies for the Busy Gardener, by Olwen Woodier (Michael Friedman Publishing Group, 1995 – check used bookstores for your own copy).

The books have one obvious drawback – they make it all seem so simple you’re tempted to jump immediately into projects such as building a deck or constructing a water garden. Otherwise, they offer a wealth of simple, manageable how-to tips (complete with handy step-by-step illustrations) and ideas for making your yard into a place you can actually enjoy.

The books agree on some basic principles of fast and dirty gardening, which follow here:

Instant garden

The author of Gardening Weekends clearly knows it’s the prize that counts when you’ve only got a few hours a week to spend on your garden. For an instant vegetable garden or flower bed, forget about all that tedious digging and cultivating. Instead, they suggest you figure out where you want your garden to be and mow the grass in the area down as short as you can. Spread about 40 layers of newsprint over the entire area, soak the newsprint with water, and pile on about 12 inches of topsoil amended with peat and compost. Level the top and plant your favorite veggies or bedding plants. If you want to make it extra fancy, edge the bed with stones, edging materials or gravel. Install a selection of bedding plants and you’re done.

Lazy-ass lawn

Ditch the putting green look and install a fine alternative lawn. This can be as simple as planting a meadow of wildflowers – check at your local garden center for wildflower seed mixtures, or, easier yet, a landscape cloth that you roll out, water, and watch sprout into a meadow.

If you prefer green, investigate the variety of ground-cover plants available. Chamomile, pachysandra and English ivy are all easy to grow, and will spread to cover the areas they’re planted in. It may take a little longer to establish a ground-cover lawn, but it’ll eventually choke out weeds and requires little maintenance.

If wildflowers make you sneeze, the no-mow gravel or stone option is a great alternative to the green stuff. Cover the existing lawn with black landscape plastic and haul in a load of gravel, slate chips, small stones or even wood chips. You can vary the sizes of the rocks (pebbles? boulders?) to create different textures.

Contain yourself

Even if your outdoor access is limited to a tar beach on the roof of your apartment complex, you can still do some pretty major gardening: Just fill containers (terra-cotta pots, plastic window boxes, even old boots will do) with a good mixture of soil, peat and compost (you can also buy ready-made mixes), add a sprinkle of water-retaining granules (available at garden centers) and plant away.

Container-grown plants need more fertilizing and watering than those grown in the ground, but they make up for it by having fewer weeds. Plus, they’re portable, should your landowner decide that the roof of the apartment building isn’t a good place to start a strawberry farm.

Mulch ado

To cut down on the amount of time you spend watering, be sure to cover bare soil around plants and under trees and shrubs with a good thick (2-to-4 inch) layer of mulch: Wood chips and gravel both work, but you can even use sheets of black plastic (which has the added bonus of giving your garden a kind of space-age, sleek look). Keeps the weeds under control, too.

Just fake it

If you’re still convinced your plants commit suicide when you look at them, why not fake it? The books don’t tell you this, but artificial flowers, plants and greenery look remarkably realistic, need almost no care and can be changed with the seasons. Ignore what garden snobs say. Install the AstroTurf, the silk hydrangeas and a few fake trees, and put your feet up. Remember, gardening is about relaxing, right?

Alisa Gordaneer likes playing in the dirt.