How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden | Grow Food Not Lawns

Rob Greenfield teaches how to turn your yard into an abundant garden that produces delicious and nutritious food for you right at home. Two years ago this garden was just a lawn, and now it is an abundant food garden. It was the first lawn he ever turned into a garden, which shows what can be done.

He is in Central Florida, where you are working with straight sand. Wherever you are, you have a different situation and you will have to adapt this to your climate and your region, but the model shown today can be generally done across the United States. Just two years before filming he had hardly grown any food, and all of this came from learning the basics shared here.

The six basic ingredients to this method are cardboard, mulch, soil or compost, Sun, water and then plants. This is Robin's method, but there are many methods out there; this one is focused on working with nature rather than against it.

Cardboard: get cardboard and do a layer all across the whole area you are going to turn into a garden. You do not need to buy it — get it from recycling dumpsters such as grocery stores or liquor stores, or to make your job really easy, from appliance stores where they have huge boxes. Ideally take off the tape or the staples. The cardboard suppresses the grass, kills it, and breaks down along with the second ingredient.

Mulch: get a thick layer, ideally about a foot, and lay that down over the cardboard everywhere you are turning the yard into a garden. Again, this is not a resource you have to buy — the idea is to do this inexpensively and use mostly wasted local resources. The best way to get mulch is from tree cutting and tree trimming companies: their waste product is the shredded trees, and a lot of the time they take that to the landfill. Instead you can get them to dump it right on your yard and get it for free.

Why mulch: this is the method that kills your lawn so you can grow food instead, but mulch does more. It holds in moisture — every time it rains, rather than running straight off a lawn, it has all this area to soak in; the ground stays moist even without irrigation in dry weather. It creates an environment for important micro organisms and mycorrhizal fungi — just as people or a wall need protection in the blazing heat, the bacteria and fungi you want in your garden need protection. Over time all of this mulch breaks down into the nutrients you need.

Soil or compost: the third ingredient is what the mulch turns into — soil. Depending on where you are you have very different scenarios; where Robin is from in Wisconsin there is a lot of rich soil already, so soil would not need to be brought in. But where he started in Central Florida he had a sandy lawn and needed to bring in compost or soil. You ideally want to get organic if possible. In Florida he used spent material from a mushroom farm or mushroom factory nearby, which makes great compost, and got a lot of it inexpensively dumped by the truck rather than buying bags. You can often get it from your municipality — the ones that pick up yard waste often turn that into compost that can be picked up for free by residents. This may be one of your main expenses in getting the garden going, but it depends on where you are.

Sun is the simplest and easiest of all the ingredients, but there are still important things to know. For beginner gardeners, Robin recommends full Sun. In Central Florida where the Sun is really hot, that can be five to six hours; in more of the temperate areas you are talking seven to eight hours. Ideally you get morning Sun and less of the hotter afternoon or evening Sun. His garden works because the Sun rises in the east over the garden and then follows behind the house in the afternoon.

Water is an absolutely essential ingredient and can be free. Robin shows the two systems he has: rainwater harvesting and drip irrigation.

Rainwater harvesting is absolutely recommended and extremely simple. Collect the water off the roof down a downspout like it normally would, and instead of sending it off into the street, have it collect into buckets, barrels, whatever that may be. You can rainwater harvest in every climate, even in the desert — in fact that is one of the most important places to do it.

Drip irrigation can be connected to rainwater harvesting units, but it is a little more complicated. Generally you just have it connected to your hose, your spigot — this is pressured water, whether it is from the city or a well or something of that sort. Drip irrigation is super efficient both in water usage — it uses a lot less water — and it saves a lot of time. You can either have it set up without a timer, where you come out and just turn it on and off, or with a timer you can set the days and times that it waters, and you can even go to town and your garden is still being watered. Water comes out through the black pipe and over to the drip irrigation line. On the drip lines, about every six inches there is a little hole and the water literally just drips right out, so it is targeted where you want it rather than spreading water across the whole area.

Big keys to watering well: water in the morning, ideally before it is even light out, rather than the water evaporating in the heat of the day, and water directly rather than overhead. Overhead is the most wasteful way — watering lawns with sprinklers is the most wasteful way to use water.

When you are establishing a garden like this, generally for the first 30 days to 45 days that is when you need to water the most, as you are establishing the plants. But if you set things up well, you can do this with very little irrigation or even no irrigation, and that really comes down to what you are planting.

Plants are ingredient number six. To plant with this method, for perennials you simply pull back the mulch you laid down, then amend the soil you have there with compost, plant into that, and keep the mulch away from that plant. If you are doing annuals, you are generally going to have much more compost that you are planting into. Robin really recommends perennials, and recommends the book Perennial Vegetables by Eric Toensmeier, along with books designed for your area.

Key tips: plant densely and then you can thin out later, which does a similar thing to the mulch — it prevents weeds.

When you do have weeds, do not ship them off to the city to the landfill. Robin takes them to his banana circle, his banana spot. What a lot of people do is bag up their weeds and throw them away; instead, he makes a pile there with bananas — in different climates you can do this in different manners, but he does it with the bananas. Everything from the garden gets piled up there, so all those nutrients stay in the garden rather than getting rid of them. By building up this soil and keeping the organic matter on-site, you are actually sequestering carbon — taking it out of the air and locking it into the ground.

Lawns are actually the most irrigated crop in the United States. They use an incredible amount of water — seven billion gallons of water per day — incredible amounts of fertilizers, much of which run off into our waterways and cause huge problems, and huge amounts of pesticides that end up in our drinking water. Lawns, as beautiful as they may be to many of us, actually cause a huge amount of destruction, and instead we can use that space to produce food.

During the World War 1 and World War 2 era of the Victory Garden movement, when the United States government was actually promoting people to grow food, close to half of all of our fresh fruits and vegetables were grown right in our own yards rather than being shipped all over the world. We have seen what could be done in the past and know this can continue to be done, which would reduce our dependence on big AG, on a system that is causing so much destruction to people, to the planet, and to other species. At the same time we can improve our communities and have healthy, delicious meals with our family and friends, right at home and right in our communities.

That is how and why to turn your yard into a garden. Robin thanks the Live Like Ally Foundation for supporting this video and helping spread this message to help you turn your yards into gardens. If you gained education or are inspired, subscribe to the channel, hit the like button to spread this, comment, ask questions, and turn your yard into a garden.