Sheet Mulching! Smother Grass with Cardboard and Newspaper

hey this is Joe with girl at building today I'm going to show you how to smother your grass using cardboard and newspaper out of all the ways to remove grass or build a flowerbed on top of an existing lawn this is the easiest way to do it this takes the least amount of effort and it's also a very cheap in that generally the cardboard or newspaper is free you only have to pay for the mulch now this basically gets you the benefits of landscape fabric without the cost and it'll break down in a compost eventually whereas landscape fabric is forever and don't use landscape fabric outside of cost and money it also doesn't allow worms to move up and down or organic matter to transfer up and down it's generally bad stuff but let's get started this is my area and before I did this obviously just some trees we had landscaped and the first step you're gonna do to is to mow the grass extremely short you want it very short so the cardboard sits really close to the ground it'll help everything break down a little quicker so drop the mower to lowest setting mow for the materials I use for this is regular brown corrugated cardboard there's no tape on it no ink no nothing I try to keep as close to that as I can newspaper I use only regular paper newspaper what I'm not going to be using is the plastic inserts here that are kind of high-gloss like you can see the light reflecting off of them a little bit that stuff takes forever to break down I do not recommend that you use it so once this is done once you've got your supply of that your next step is just going to be to start putting the cardboard and newspaper down overlap the sheets so that you have no gaps because anywhere you get a gap you're probably going to get some grass or perennial weeds to poke through this by the way this method should work on pretty much anything except for I can't member its Bermuda or zoysia grass one of those two will will punch through the cardboard but check the shownotes I'll put the answer in there but anyways this is a great way to build a flowerbed though it's so freakin easy it's so much easier than using the shovel or any other way to remove grass but you got to have the supply for newspaper put whole sections of newspaper now don't be stingy with this if you go too thin on your newspaper it's not going to be effective I'm speaking from experience but I've also got an article that I'll put a link to in the notes that it's basically like all the ways to remove grass and the pros cons cost so on and so forth you might want to check that out if this doesn't seem plausible for you and we should talk about where you can get cardboard at the one of the best sources I've ever found for getting cardboard is to go talk to grocery store managers and just ask if you can go through their cardboard like because they get boxes all the time and a lot of times they'll let you take some now me I hoarded this stuff for like a year it's like basically a place that I built for my kids but talk to your friends neighbors know anybody that's moving or has just moved you know the Craigslist free section you can get free moving boxes sometimes there's a lot of different ways but if you can't do that and you're still trying to build a little flower bed or garden I'll put a link to this video here which is the easiest way to move grass with a shovel and this is instant results no weeds it works it just takes a lot of work but anyways back to this once you've got your area laid out you just got a dump mulch on it yes it's as easy as this just put a whole bunch on there I would say at least six inches because this stuff compacts quite a bit what is 4 inches today maybe 1 inch in a few weeks you'd be surprised so I'm putting around 8 to 10 inches down on this and try to keep the edges neat I still need to edge the area here so that grass doesn't start going into the mulch you know from runner roots but by and large this is done so it's looking pretty good we haven't put any flowers in just yet but we will be doing so you know watering it in can help a lot too with keeping the as long as the cardboard stays moist it's going to start breaking down I did a little test here we had a little bit of rain the night before and now I'm just kind of digging into my mulch and the out layer outer layer of mulch was wet but underneath it was dry as you can see but as I keep getting deeper I eventually get to the cardboard and the cardboard is soaking wet so I didn't water my cardboard before I put the mulch on but it is has plenty of moisture there so that's a good sign but when it comes time to actually start planting flowers in here the process for doing that's pretty easy all you need to do is kind of just rake away the mulch area and take a knife or sometimes you don't even need a knife and you can just tear with your fingers but cut a hole where you want to plant your flower or a bare root or bulb or whatever it is you're doing dig your hole plant your stuff cover it back up with cardboard and then mulch that's all you got to do so it's pretty darn easy but yeah if you guys like this give me a thumbs up subscribe and if you got any questions ask them in the comments and thank you guys very much have a good one

Channel: Growit Buildit

Views: 18,937

Rating: 4.9856629 out of 5

Keywords: remove grass, sheet mulching, smother grass, smother grass using cardboard, cardboard smother grass, landscape fabric, make garden, build garden, build flower bed, build flower garden, remove sod, how to remove sod, how to remove grass, smothering grass cardboard, get rid of grass, how to remoe sod, how to remoe grass, how to dig up grass, sheet-mulching, sheet-mulch, sheet mulch, lasagna garden, how to build flower bed, how to remove grass to make garden, cardboard mulch

Id: wksGGlA_2IA

Length: 5min 10sec (310 seconds)

Published: Sat May 16 2020