Transforming Turf into Native Plants and Abundant Gardens

With the ferns happily rooting in their new homes, Cristi planted a few veggies and flowers to get the patio bed started. Tithonia went in next to the fence, along with a few rows of ‘Clemson Spineless’ okra. Moonflower seeds went in the back corner along a trellis nailed to a fence.

The previous owners had left planter boxes filled with succulents. We replaced these with a quick-growing herb garden of thyme, lemongrass, oregano, and pineapple sage. We rounded out our patio garden with a banana plant we’d brought back from a visit to friends in Georgia.

Our approach to the yard was flexible. We wanted to get plants in the ground and growing, but we didn’t have a firm plan. We planned to watch the yard for a few months and see how the sun moved across the space before making our next move.

Side Yard Prairie

One spot we knew got full sun was the south-facing strip of grass in our side yard. This seemed like the perfect place to plant a native prairie garden. We’re fortunate to have Prairie Moon Nursery here in town. We decided to dig up the sod and plant Prairie Moon’s Colossal Pollinator Garden, a 50-plant kit of native wildflowers and grasses.

I spaded up the yard and transported the turf to a compost bin we built from reclaimed pallets. Within a few hours, I’d prepped the site. We planted the starts in a random pattern, protecting each one from rabbits with a small tube of chicken wire. Prairie Moon warned that too much nitrogen would cause these native plants to grow leggy and weak, so we did nothing to amend the soil.

Front Yard Fall Garden

Our front yard has full southern exposure and is significantly warmer than the rest of the lot — perfect for a fall garden. I built a raised bed with reclaimed lumber and added three PVC hoops for a low tunnel. A series of wire wickets support a secondary frost cloth that we hoped would allow us to carry cold-hardy varieties, such as ‘Rouge d’Hiver’ lettuce, well into winter. We planted this bed with collards, kale, tatsoi, and lettuce so they could get growing before the cold weather closed in.

Backyard Beds

With the front bed in place, we turned our attention to the backyard. The drip line near the garage flooded when it rained, so we thought we might install a rain garden there. Out came our Gulland Forge broadfork, and up came the sod. Next, it was on to the garlic bed.

Cristi found a pile of scrap lumber on the side of the road, so we decided to use it to build a large raised bed just behind the house in the path of the summer sun. After the first hard frost, we planted hardneck garlic cloves we’d purchased at a farmstand across the river in Wisconsin. We covered them with a heavy layer of straw and left them to sprout the following spring.

Winter Watch

Our winter bed was humming along as we rolled into December. On bright, sunny days, the temperature inside the plastic rose well into the 60s, and our cold-hardy plants under their low frost covers resisted overnight temperatures well below freezing. Not until nighttime temps plunged below zero for the first time did we see a significant frost kill. By then, we were dreaming of spring.

We were excited to see how our prairie plants would fare in spring, and we decided to give the prairie a boost by sowing seeds over winter. We ordered a pound of PDQ (“pretty darn quick”) Seed Mix from Prairie Moon, mixed it with sand and soil as recommended, and sowed it onto the frozen ground and snow. Many native seeds need to go through a freeze-thaw-scarification cycle before they’ll germinate, and we hoped winter sowing would speed the process of turning our yard into a prairie.

A New Year

In early 2022, as winter eased into spring, we began to think about the layout for our backyard garden. We knew we wanted to eliminate most of the grass and install raised beds, but we weren’t sure what the final configuration would be. We set up grow lights in the basement to start some tomatoes and collected pallets to turn into raised beds. And we waited.

By the beginning of April, we were tired of waiting. With the traditional tomato-planting date of Mother’s Day still almost two months away, we had plenty to do in the yard. I cut apart the pallets, and we started making runs to the city’s stump yard for free wood chips. Over the next several weeks, I built six more raised beds and positioned them in the backyard to catch the sun. We carried load after load of wood chips and filled in the area around these beds and at the rear of the yard. We then filled the beds with a 50-50 mix of black dirt and compost from our local mulch yard. We were ready to plant.

On a cold, rainy day in mid-May, we found ourselves at Bronk’s Gardens, dreaming of summer and looking for inspiration. Spring had been colder than usual. Trees were starting to leaf out, and the first shoots were coming up in our prairie garden. The slow start to summer was frustrating. On a whim, we bought some seed potatoes, onion starts, tomatillos, and a couple of tomato plants. Our tomatoes were coming along slowly, though they were still tiny. We made a note to start them earlier the following year.

We put the potatoes into the raised bed closest to our compost bin and the tomatillos into the bed near the garage. We’d changed our mind about the rain garden and decided to plant this space with tomatoes, tomatillos, and annual flowers. A few gifted castor bean seeds went into the bed, along with marigolds, zinnias, and spider flowers. We interplanted the onions with our garlic, which was sprouting healthy green shoots, and we planted rhubarb in a bed at the shady end of the yard.

Toward the end of May, Cristi planted the patio bed with corn, sunflowers, and okra. Our banana plant had been resting all winter, cut down to a stump and allowed to dry. We revived it in spring and returned it to its home in the corner of the bed, along with moonflowers, ‘Scarlet Runner’ beans, and marigolds. Our neighbor gifted us a whiskey barrel that became home to pineapple sage, lemongrass, and a sweet potato we’d sprouted over winter.

Out front, our covered bed was already producing a bumper crop of greens. The prairie seed mix had sprouted, but so had hundreds of weeds, so we set to work weeding the bed. We spent about a month pulling out any undesirable plants that poked above the ground. Our hard work was rewarded later in summer when the bed exploded into a riot of Rudbeckia. Most of the plants we’d installed the previous fall survived winter, and we were treated to a succession of blooms from asters, coneflowers, goldenrod, and blazing stars.

Summer Abundance

In early June, the weather switched abruptly from cold temperatures to full summer heat. Cristi planted the last of our ‘Cherokee Purple,’ ‘Sun Gold,’ and ‘Matt’s Wild Cherry’ tomato starts and gave them a liberal side dressing of compost. In less than a year, our bin had produced several wheelbarrow loads of rich, dark compost. We built a second bin next to the first so we could build compost in one while pulling it from the other.

As expected, we learned our yard is filled with microclimates. The fern garden on the west side of the house stays cool all summer. The beds near the patio fence and the garage reflect the intense afternoon summer sun to supercharge growth. This makes up for the beds being in shade all morning.

By late July, the garden was in full swing. The tomatoes took off in the summer heat. The bed near the garage was filled with flowers, tomatoes, and cucumbers, along with a castor bean that towered over the edge of the patio. Corn and sunflowers were topping 12 feet along the fence in the patio bed. The patio was turning into an oasis of greenery.

As August faded into September, we spent our time canning salsa, sharing tomatoes, and getting the fall garden into the front bed. Our project has come full-circle. It’s been a wonderful year, and we can’t wait to see what the new year brings.

Brian Day has spent more than 30 years exploring the outdoors and telling stories. Find his outdoor writing and photos of Cristi’s gardening adventures at Kitchi-Gami.