ARE YOU THINKING about the possibility of transitioning an area of your lawn into something more diverse, like maybe a meadow? A question I’m asked a lot is how to go about it—the actual preparatory steps. So I invited Benjamin Vogt, a specialist in natural landscape design, to walk us through the process.
Benjamin, based in Nebraska, is owner of Prairie Up, formerly called Monarch Gardens. And besides offering garden design to clients nationwide, he teaches online classes and webinars as well. He’s the author of two books, “A New Garden Ethic,” and more recently, “Prairie Up: An Introduction to Natural Garden Design” (affiliate links).
Plus: Enter to win a copy of “Prairie Up” by commenting in the box near the bottom of the page.
Read along as you listen to the July 15, 2024 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).
getting a meadow started, with benjamin vogt
Margaret: Are you sweltering out there or no? We’ve got the heat this year. Is that the deal?
Benjamin: Our sweltering starts on Friday and only lasts four days, thankfully.
Margaret: So before we get started: Congratulations on your new website, which is so loaded with information. It’s not just beautiful, but it’s got lots of great stuff in it. So you just survived that big process too, right? Making a meadow, making a website—they’re sort of the same.
Benjamin: Oh my gosh, yes, yes. That was over a four-month process to get that website going and make sure it actually worked. And there’s still hiccups as you know, that’s how it goes. But I just wanted to be sure that I did something really different. I felt like something that wasn’t out there just telling people, handholding them, “This is how you do it, this is how you convert from lawn and create a prairie garden of any size. And here’s a bunch of free stuff and if you want to go further, you can get online classes, or something.”
Margaret: Yeah, no. Well, it’s good. And I’ve been clicking around and learning things and that’s why I got in touch. And we’re doing this update today, another segment today, because there’s a lot of good stuff that I realized can help me to answer questions that I don’t have the firsthand knowledge on that you do by any means.
So one thing I just want to say is on the homepage it says, quote, “Lawn is a weed.” [Laughter.] So, is it?
Benjamin: I like to start trouble, but hopefully it’s good trouble. Well, I mean, so often we hear that a native plants are weeds or anytime you take a prairie plant or a prairie planting and put it in the context of suburbia, for example, especially when you’re replacing lawn, well then it’s suddenly a weed. But if it’s out in a wild prairie or grassland or meadow or savanna or something like that, it’s not a weed.
So that’s always very frustrating to me. And I know a lot of my clients, and especially talking with weed-control inspectors, their idea of weeds are a little bit outdated too often. Things are getting better across the country, but we still have this outdated conception of what a weed is. So I’m just like, lawn is the weed; t’s so artificial. We have to throw so much water and fertilizer and maintenance on it just for it to be maintained.
Margaret: So as I said in the introduction, a lot of people are probably eyeing their expansive lawn lately and thinking of making a change, because thanks to a lot of the education that people like yourselves have helped with over the recent years, and I know a lot of people probably think, “Well, but I don’t live in Nebraska like he does.” But there’s different types of plant communities. I say the word meadow, you might say the word prairie. In some cases there’s savanna, there’s fields. Well, what are all those things? Can we just start with that before we go and try to teach people to make a meadow [laughter]?
Benjamin: Yeah, this is exactly why I think it’s on page two of my book “Prairie Up,” that whole explanation. I think these terms are very interchangeable for most of us. It’s not interchangeable for soil scientists or conservationists or something, but we all have the same image in our head. I think if people say meadow maybe you mean an open glade full of flowers that’s surrounded by trees. But these ecosystems occur in every state. This prairie idea, this meadow idea, this savanna idea. We have the longleaf pine savanna remnants in the Southeast, the Piedmont along the East Coast, the Palouse in the Northwest, the Carrizo Plain in California, sandhills here in Nebraska. So we have these environments and ecosystems everywhere. So it’s not like prairie or meadow is just in the middle of the country. Not any stretch of the imagination.
Margaret: One of the first plants I met in quotes when I came to the place where I live and garden maybe 35 years ago or so, was little bluestem grass, which I had only ever seen previously when I was visiting in Wisconsin with Neil Diboll who owns Prairie Nursery. And I was like, “Why do I have little bluestem here?” [Laughter.] I was like, “What? I just saw that out there. It says prairie, it says, huh, what?” Yeah, exactly. There are grassland plant communities in many different places.
Benjamin: And well, and just take little bluestem. It’s pretty much in almost every state in the lower 48. It’s just a couple states I don’t think it’s native to. And I always like to tell people, especially folks on the East Coast, we share so many of the same plants. Right here in Eastern Nebraska, we have so many of the same native plants, and that’s all because of geologic history. Now, if we go a hundred miles west of where I am, then things start to shift a little bit.
Margaret: So if we want to think about getting started, and we don’t have to give it an exact name, but let’s just use the word meadow because it sounds to me in a way, the word meadow sounds the closest to gardening. Because there was all that commercial, I guess—and this is terrible that I’m influenced by it—but you heard of the marketing devices like “meadow in a can” or “meadow mixes” for seeds that are meadow mix for this area of the country, or that. They tend to market things like that as opposed to say a prairie mix earlier on to gardeners for… So let’s just use the word meadow for the moment.
There’s a lot of ways to get started, but if you don’t get started, whether you’re going to work with seeds or small landscape plugs or larger plants or however you’re going to plant the thing, you could waste a lot of money and a lot of time, couldn’t you, if you don’t prepare your canvas, so to speak.
Benjamin: Yeah, I mean there’s so many ways to look at this. I think one of the things we overlook is just site analysis. And especially if you are converting part of your lawn into a meadow type garden landscape, I always like to tell folks, well, what part of your lawnscape or any part of your landscape, where are things struggling? Maybe there’s too much shade so lawn can’t grow, or you feel like you can only grow hosta there. That’s probably a perfect place to think about doing something meadow-ish with native plants. Or we’re all experiencing cycles of drought and heat right now. Last year in Eastern Nebraska, we were in drought level 4. It was just insane and lawns were dying left and right.
So maybe in the really hot, open areas, or maybe you have sandier soil in those areas, that’s a perfect place to think about doing something more sustainable. It’s going to be more drought tolerant or resilient to the climate change that we are in, and that will only get worse. So that’s your first area to go to, the site analysis, what’s struggling, what kind of shade is there? How is water flowing from the site, what kind of weed pressures are there, all that good stuff. But then the practical, I know you want me to talk about practical lawn-.
Margaret: Sure, but I want you to tell us how you think before you dig in in any way, literally or figuratively [laughter]. Because again, if we rush, if people rush, if they just go order the plants or order the seed and think it’s just going to happen, I mean there’s a lot more thinking that needs to go into it, and a bunch of hard work, too.
Benjamin: And especially, and the hard work isn’t just in the prep, either, or the planting, it can be for a year or two afterward. Sometimes these sites have a lot of weed pressure that we just can’t anticipate. We don’t know what weed seeds are in the soil bank. So you really need to keep on top of some of those weeds. Some are more problematic than others. You don’t have to worry about all of them, but if you keep on them the first year or two, then you’re really helping the plants establish and get going. After that, it tends to be a lot less work, especially if you’re planting densely in layers in the native plant communities that are endemic to the area and fit your site and all that good stuff.
Margaret: So there’s prep and there’s aftercare, and we have to make a commitment to our planning prep and aftercare then.
Benjamin: Yeah, absolutely. And hopefully that aftercare and that management, it’s fun for you. You like to go out there and, “Oh, what’s that cool plant? Oh, look what that cool thing is doing. I never knew it was going to do that. That’s neat.” So just going out there and 10-minute walk every day and you just take care of one little thing during that 10 minutes every day. It doesn’t have to be a big, “I have to order 10 yards of mulch and spread it and blow up my back sort of thing.”
Margaret: Right [laughter]. So in terms of the prep, I mean if we do evaluate our site and we’ve chosen an area maybe based on one of your examples that would be good for transitioning. And we’re saying that it’s in turf; it’s in turfgrass right now. There’s a number of different ways to eliminate that turfgrass in order to give the new plants, the desired plants a chance. So what kind of ways are there to do that?
Benjamin: There’s four or maybe five ways to do that, and I’m going to preface this with some caveats by saying it sort of depends a little bit on what your ideology is as far as prep, and sort of how much time commitment you have. And if it’s a front yard or a backyard, because I don’t think you want to put plastic out in a front yard for an entire growing season. I don’t know how your neighbors would feel about that.
But then there’s also your physical ability. How much can you actually do? So the first, well, I already mentioned plastic, people will put out a sheet of plastic—black, white, whatever, blue tarp or something—to kill whatever is there on site.
And what happens a lot is folks will do that just one time, and that’s actually not what you should do. You should do it for four weeks, take the cover of the plastic off for two weeks, let weed seeds germinate, let new things germinate so they’re not going to cause problems for you down the road. Then after two weeks, put that tarp back on again. And you do that a couple of times for an entire growing season, and that will really set you up for a lot of success. But again, tarps blow away. Your neighbors might not like to see your whole front yard in a tarp [laughter]. There’s microplastics coming off of that plastic sheeting, and then you got to dispose of it and it’s more plastic waste. So there are pros and cons to that.
Margaret: So solarization is one, or tarping, depending on whether you use a clear or a dark-colored piece of plastic. Solarization or tarping is one method, not to be just put down once and you think you’ve solved everything, because as you pointed out, and you pointed out earlier, there can be a really deep seed bank of weed seeds that want to have the next generation, the next generation, and the next generation. So we’re going to tarp, we’re going to let the next generation emerge, we’re going to tarp again, etc.
Benjamin: Yeah. And if you want to be really, really thorough, that’s what you can do for the next method, which is using a chemical application, a glyphosate-based product. Now, if you have a super-pristine lawn and it’s thick and lush and green, and you’ve spent a lot of money maintaining it, chances are this is not guaranteed. But chances are, your weed-seed bank is not going to be as crazy as something that has a lot of weeds already in it that you can see clovers and I don’t know, God knows what, right?
So with glyphosate, if you want to be really careful, you can spray and then wait a couple weeks and see what comes up and spray again and do that for a couple of months. Or you can do the one-time application, put down an inch of mulch, which is what we do, and that will help reduce some of those annual weed seeds from germinating because those seeds need sunlight before they can do anything. And then we put all of our plant plugs in the ground. So I hope that just made sense.
Margaret: So you have this on your website, you call this option—the use of chemical herbicide—you call this, “You’ll hate me for this.” [Laughter.] That’s your name. And it is true, and I always like to say whenever this subject comes up about using chemical applications in any instance, is that even conservation organizations do this, in the least-toxic method possible, for the greater good. Which is not to say broadcast spraying anytime they see one little weed in a crack in the sidewalk, taking out a gallon of something; it’s not willy-nilly. It’s focused. It’s according to the package directions. It’s with a purpose, and it’s for the greater good to then be planting something.
So again, conservation organizations that run properties, wilder properties, where invasives are taking over and so forth, they do use them because they want to bring back the native plants and so forth. So we’re not saying we’re in favor, we’re like big believers in herbicides. We’re saying this is one way that you can do it, that if you do it smartly, it’s a minimal amount and it can be for the greater good—that you can end up with a meadow, which is much more diverse than that lawn you got rid of. Yes?
Benjamin: Yes. Thank you. That was a perfect speech. [Laughter.] And I also want…
Margaret: I rehearsed it.
Benjamin: I also want to add, it’s not that expensive and it’s not that labor-intensive. So that’s a great boon for those conservationists, too. But also I think for us, and it’s the only thing we ever use, and it’s the only time we ever use it, so it’s a one-time shot.
Margaret: Right. So those are two possibilities. Solarization and the “you’ll hate me for this” herbicide method, yes? [Laughter.] And sort of like solarization, you could also smother it with other materials, right?
Benjamin: Cardboard, newspaper. Yeah, that’s the lasagna method, right?
Margaret: Do you call that what? Sheet mulching?
Benjamin: Sheet mulching, yes. That’s something-
Margaret: Tell us how you do that.
Benjamin: I mean that’s something I’ve never done because, well, I’m usually working on a larger project, so I don’t have 10,000 square feet of cardboard. So if you’re working in a smaller area and this fits your ideology, and your back and your knees are all in cooperating with you, maybe scalp the lawn really short, put down a layer of cardboard or newspaper, thick newspaper, wet it a little bit, put on some mulch or put on a little bit of topsoil. I guess it depends on what your site conditions are like. And you can let that sit over the winter so it mixes all in and biodegrades, or if you can wet that cardboard right away, you can just dig right into it and start planting.
Margaret: Yeah. Dan Jaffe Wilder at Norcross Wildlife Foundation in Massachusetts [photo above from his yard]—he’s been doing that in his own yard a lot. Again, on a smaller scale, not in his big restoration projects, but in his own yard. And he adheres to that, and I’ve heard other people describe it, that sort of smothering kind of thing, and kind of using recycled materials and so forth and then the mulch. So that’s another method. Now then how much longer would I plant into that, get my baby plants in there?
Benjamin: What do you mean, how much longer?
Margaret: Oh, I’m sorry. How much longer? How much later? [Laughter.] Sorry, how much longer? How much later? It’s hot in here. I’m sorry.
Benjamin: I know. I know. I’m sorry.
Margaret: How much later? I was like I want to make sure that I’ve done my job of smothering those, what was there, the turf and so forth. So then if I did that this summer or fall and I let it sit all winter, could I plant next spring? Or how do I know when it’s O.K. to plant? Or can I plant right away or what’s the timeline?
Benjamin: Both. I think you do it either way. If you plant right away, you want to make sure that cardboard is good and wet, so it’s easier to dig into. But again, as with any planting, no matter what method you’re doing, anytime you dig into the soil and disturb it, you never know what you’re going to bring to the surface around that planting hole.
Margaret: [Laughter.] That’s for sure.
Benjamin: Surprise, have fun.
Margaret: And then what’s another method that we could consider?
Benjamin: Yeah, I think this is the last one. I don’t know. I lost count, but now this one is a little bit more adventurous. This is something I’ve done on my private property, 2,500 square feet out back, where I had a lawn. I hated lawn, I just stressed it out. I never watered it, I never fertilized it. And when I mowed, I mowed really high. So that really stressed the lawn. So I had lots of patches open up, lots of open spaces, and I just started planting things here and there, in groups and masses. And then I threw down some seed and eventually those plants spread and took over and killed the last remnants of lawn that were out there.
Margaret: So you kind of direct planted, you almost overseeded your weakened lawn, is that the idea?
Benjamin: Overseeded and planted straight into it. Now, this is a fescue lawn, a tall fescue lawn I’m talking about. So there are differences if you have something, a more sociable, aggressive lawn like a zoysia or something like that.
Margaret: Interesting. And you said you mowed it really high to stress it out?
Benjamin: Yeah. Well, not on purpose. I’m a lazy lawn-taker-care-of-er [laughter], so I would let it grow really long, like 8 inches or 12 inches or something. It’s behind a fence, nobody can see it. And I just finally, it’s like, “Oh, I guess I should mow it.” So yeah, that stresses it out.
Margaret: And then, I mean, I suppose we could also rent a sod cutter, right?
Benjamin: Oh, yes. That’s another option.
Margaret: It’s he-man. Really, it’s a macho machine, excuse me for sounding sexist, but it’s not a lightweight machine, a sod cutter, is it?
Benjamin: I know people of all gender identities who are macho, so whatever.
Margaret: But all I meant was it takes some muscle to run a sod cutter.
Benjamin: A whole lot of muscle, and you got to have a trailer.
Margaret: That’s all I mean, yeah.
Benjamin: And you got to go to the hardware store to pick it up. And maybe I should go through the cons of all these methods in 10 seconds. So yeah, sod cutter.
Margaret: Yeah, we can do that but a sod cutter is another way, right?
Benjamin: Yeah, a sod cutter is another way, but then you’re spewing out all that exhaust from the sod cutter. What do you do with all that sod that’s left over, especially if it’s weed-infested, I mean, do you really want to compost that? Probably not.
Back to sheet mulching. There’s been some studies that show when you put that cardboard layer down, you’re actually impeding water and air transfer between the soil and the atmosphere.
With solarizing, you’re baking the soil, you’re frying it, so you’re frying all the soil life that’s in there. And don’t ever till, folks. Tilling is the worst thing you can do on so many levels. You’re going to have so much weed pressure, you’re destroying the soil structure, you’re killing soil life. It’s just the worst prep method ever.
Margaret: Yeah. So each one has its—and we know the downside of the herbicide. So each one, there’s pros and cons, and that’s why you said at the beginning we kind of each have to make our own decision weighing those, our sort of ethical, philosophical, what we’re comfortable with and amount of work we can do and the budget and whatever else. So there’s a lot of different ways.
Benjamin: Most important thing is just reduce your lawn, because we have too much of it.
Margaret: Right, exactly. Well, and so besides prep, I mean you kind of were just talking about tilling and about a few places along the way in our conversation you’ve mentioned about the weed seeds that are in the soil and so forth in the seed bank in the soil.
And I find that with maintaining a meadow, the sort of weeding, even if I know how to identify what I wish to reduce or get rid of as the meadow evolves and changes, I have a much older meadow, and so I have woody things that want to live in it because succession is happening. And so I have a lot of brambles, like Rubus species and so forth that want to be in it. And I always have that question of, well, do I dig them out and open up? Well, you know how the roots of Rubus are, blackberry or raspberry [laughter]. It’s like, do I open up all that soil and potentially end up with more things sprouting up? Or how do you do that? What is your sort of tactic for aftercare?
Benjamin: There’s so many ways to approach this because disturbance can actually be a beneficial thing. It sets some new things in motion. Out here in Eastern Nebraska, a lot of our meadows, prairies, they tend to get grass-dominant. So we have to bring in a little bit of disturbance. And that can be through grazing, it can be through fire. In a smaller landscape that can be through digging up trees or berry shrubs or weeds or whatever.
And then you have that gap, and that gives you an opportunity to introduce a new forb species in there, or to let other plants sort of self-sow in there. So I think disturbances can be really helpful in sort of resetting things a little bit, especially to… I mean, it can also be negative [laughter]. You don’t know. You could have some really bad stuff move in.
But I always like to tell people this, too. And again, this is site-dependent. It depends on if you’re trying to do a front yard, really highly designed landscape that your neighbors are going to be won over by, or if it’s more backyard, larger acreage and you just can’t go in there and maintain every square foot. Because if it’s this larger backyard, more wilder space, then you don’t need to be anal-retentive about the weeds. And there are weeds like crabgrass and foxtail, they’re just annuals. As long as we have the good stuff growing fast and dense and thick and outcompeting and shading the soil, those annual weeds are going to go away, and they’re not a problem.
I tried to explain this to a weed inspector once [laughter], but we lost and we lost the garden and just didn’t want to be patient because it was a front yard space. So in a front yard more designed space, you want to keep up on that weed management, even if they are annual weeds. But if it’s a thick landscape, most people walking by probably aren’t going to notice what is a weed and what isn’t.
Margaret: Right. Right. Is there another question besides this sort of aftercare weed thing? Is there another little tip or something that you’re asked all the time that you, besides the prep and what you just said about the weeding, any other one that’s like the hit parade of questions [laughter] that you find yourself telling people all the time?
Benjamin: Yeah, I’m married. I’m not available. I’m sorry. No.
Margaret: You with your jokes, you have some pretty funny jokes on…you have elevator jokes and all kinds of jokes on the new website; you’re cracking me up.
Benjamin: Elevator jokes press all my buttons. I don’t like them.
Margaret: Uh-huh.
Benjamin: One of the things I get asked top 5 at least is, or this is a comment: “I have a really shady urban lot, so I know I can’t have a meadow garden.” And I’m just like, “No, I’ve got 20 plants I can list off the top of my head. We can create a wonderful shade meadow in that landscape.” You don’t just have to have hosta and then a bunch of wood mulch or just bare soil. We can get a bunch of sedge in there and get that matrix groundcover layer going with a bunch of different sedge species. And then we have so many woodland for perennial and ephemeral and biennial species that we can bring in there. And you can have a shade meadow [photo above]. Absolutely.
Margaret: Oh, that’s a good one. Well, that’s a good one to end on too. That’s very optimistic and it kind of widens the, “Ooh, I can do this,” kind of possibilities for people. So I could talk to you a lot more. And also I could have you just come on and we could do a whole segment on your telling jokes, elevator jokes [laughter], but we won’t do that. But thank you, Benjamin, for making the time. So I hope I’ll talk to you again soon. And congratulations on doing the new website, which I’ll give links to of course and everything as well. So thanks.
Benjamin: Awesome. Thank you, Margaret.
(All photos from Benjamin Vogt except as noted.)
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MY WEEKLY public-radio show, rated a “top-5 garden podcast” by “The Guardian” newspaper in the UK, began its 15th year in March 2024. It’s produced at Robin Hood Radio, the smallest NPR station in the nation. Listen locally in the Hudson Valley (NY)-Berkshires (MA)-Litchfield Hills (CT) Mondays at 8:30 AM Eastern, rerun at 8:30 Saturdays. Or play the July 15, 2024 show using the player near the top of this transcript. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes/Apple Podcasts or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).
