Whelp, it’s now been 10 years since I converted my driveway to a green one, and laid an infiltration gallery into the front yard. I’ve written about it in Harrowsmith Mag, and I’ve been interviewed about my yard and its expansion in Modern Farmer. And of course I’ve written about it here, sometimes just in passing while observing the progress of my endeavours, my pets and the creatures that use it, and the changing seasons.
Objectively, when I look at the house from the street, the yard, the landscaping right up to the front door, seems to have both vertical and horizontal depth. It holds so much more, it just feels bigger than neighbouring properties. But as…it holds more… the gardening is as necessary as housework. I find both rewarding, but gardening is like therapy or meditation or something productive and relaxing at the same time. It never ends (except for winter’s recess), and it never gets boring, because something’s always changing.
Plant community changes
The first few years after the entrenching and conversion work, I did as much food-gardening as the garden would let me. The plan was to maintain the box hedge at the sidewalk perimeter, have a long box garden down the property line with the welded wire fence, and regular yard in between. Other plants could grow where they wanted to, or where I had room to fit them. I got quite a bounty in my first year.
As the shade from the growing tree dwindled the harvests, I tapered off growing vegetables and just cultivated as many flowers as appeared. And they did, in fact, take over. I had, and still have, big pots and balcony planters for a small potager of vegetables and bunny food. I literally grow more for my rabbits than for humans. (And yes, I absolutely did get lazy about cultivating a potager garden.)
Letting wildflowers – both from a mix and truly wild – grow where they came up, I’ve had some very pleasant surprises. Bedstraw, longstalk starwort, sulphur cinquefoil, and Virgin’s Bower clematis. Beggarticks, with their green September flowers that squirrels eat (though you might want to deadhead them before the seeds come).
A few that had to be controlled
I learned a few that were great until they were not. For example, white Canada violets produce lovely pansy-like flowers in May, but they go to seed later in summer. It does not take long for them to spread everywhere, and when they do, they literally crowd everything else out. They also provide cover for slugs, so that what they don’t crowd out, the slugs will dispatch. For years I sowed clover and grass to try to keep the yard a mix, but they would not sprout. It became so frustrating, I tried to thin it out into clumps, like it grows in deep shade (though it still jumps and spreads).
Don’t even get me started on mugwort (non-indigenous!). The only good thing about mugwort is my rabbits like to eat it. If it gets a toehold, it crowds everything out and it takes a lot of effort to eradicate. It spreads by rhizome, which is a spaghetti-like root growing sidesways through the soil. Basically, if you find a sprout, lift it up with a small weeder or cultivator, find the rhizome, untangle it from the plants that you want to remain, and pull it out.
Even pennyroyal and ground ivy, which both have pretty flowers, are invasive. The ivy gets a little wiry and a bit stinky when you work with it (it has a characteristic smell). If left alone, becomes tenacious, forming mats. Pennyroyal just grows where it wants and puts down roots where it goes. Then it starts a whole new set where that happens, which is why it’s also called creeping Jenny. It’s the hardest one to uproot without harming its good neighbours. I find it works best as the “spill” in “thrill, fill, spill” container gardens.
The “yard renovation” = welcome more lawn
Last year, I decided I’d had enough of the uniform sea of violets in the front yard, and the mugwort and ground ivy in the driveway. I went on an intensive, long term campaign to weed them all out. I actually wanted (gasp!) to revert back to a bit more of a traditional lawn, albeit one I don’t mow very often.
Yes, “getting rid of lawn” is a good thing to do, where there’s too much lawn (only grass, always mown!) everywhere. But you know what I’ve noticed? Most people are so lazy (ugh, but apt word choice) that they don’t even have a lawn. Whatever isn’t dedicated to shrubs and flowers gets paved – and environmentally, that’s a good deal worse (only to be beaten by astroturf).
So I’ll say it: there is nothing wrong with having a yard with grass, if not only grass. In fact, grass, clover, and moss are ideal ground covers, hiding the true uneven surface that most yards actually have.
With all the violets and a few “unruly” patches of broad-leaved grass, my yard looked, well, lumpy and bumpy.1 No one wants to lounge on a patchy, lumpy, overly-leafy yard. It’d be like sitting down in a half-baked flower garden. On the other hand, grass and clover, with a bit of strimming or occasional mowing, is highly welcoming to lounge on, on a summer’s day.
Bonus for me: the rabbits eat grass and clover and a few more besides (but not violets), when they’re out in the yard.
First, the weeding and the mulching
While weeding violets is time-consuming, because there are a lot of them (I’ll need to repeat the job for the next three years or more), it’s very easy to do. I give them credit with improving the soil, as they make it very loamy and pleasant to handle. Every time I weed violets, I give them away to others. (You can see my ad for them on Facebook Marketplace.)
After that, I spread the remains of an old bale of hay (bonus: hay seeds!) and the dead foliage of that year’s Christmas tree around the yard. This would serve as mulch, suppressing more weeds until they all decomposed and the grass and clover grew up.
Here’s a pic of the mulched yard (with a beach chair) after the violets were taken out:
A better view, when Parker was out exploring:
This spring, I focussed my effort on the opportunistic pennyroyal, which made a nuisance of itself where the new grass was struggling to grow. I had a multi-week campaign of removing and transplanting it to the back yard where it doesn’t thrive nearly so well. Only a few patches remain amongst the flowers in the driest part up against the house – where some ground cover is needed. Once the grass comes back, I’ll see what to do there with a native plant.
As for the mugwort: I worked over its expanse in “hourly” patches, first taking out the big plants, then the sprouts and all the rhizomes. Once down to bare soil, I transplanted and seeded new clover and grass. Then, a month or two later, I inspected and reworked the same section. I did my final work-over this spring, and now, it’s been a few months since I’ve seen any mugwort there. I’d call that a success – especially as where the mugwort was thickest, is now thick with red and white clover.
The pay-off
Indeed, the grass and clover that I seeded the rest of the season and throughout this spring took root, and both the yard and the driveway look incredibly lush. (There’s a pic posted below!) In fact, the grass is going to flower right now, and then to seed, along with the timothy grass. I probably have six different grasses in my driveway. At least three. I cut and dry them for hay for my rabbits.
I’ve also participated in a bioblitz and documented the other plants that took up residency in the yard and the green driveway. You can see the plant community I have in my life list here: https://www.inaturalist.org/lifelists/janerette.
More changes: old fence, new fence
I also decided, in 2024, that with my aging, complacent rabbit and a change in neighbours, I no longer needed to have a fence running down the middle of the front yard . Still, the Virgin’s bower vine was growing through the fence, and if you cut Virgin’s Bower, like the hydra’s head, it will grow many more. I had to wait until fall to remove the fence entirely.
So I removed just the three sections down the middle. This was easy, because I’d transplanted the box hedge over there when I took the box garden out in 2021. When fall approached, I rolled the fence back from the front corner of the yard to stand in the other corner until winter arrived. And when late November came, and the vine was done, I took the fence out.
And what did I replace it with, in November? Well, I reused the existing fence posts, but took one of the long boards from that old box garden (which I’d kept, despite their condition), and split it down the middle. And this was the fence I got:
And so in spring, the fence – and the yard – looked like this:
And today, with full summer in effect, it looks like this:
As for the driveway: Mugwort gone, it’s exactly what we want. Well, two of us, anyway.
The yard is so full and “busy,” in fact, that it needs a bit of work to present it, strimming, pruning, weeding, seeding, transplanting. It’s also undergone some abuse as the site of a roofing job, so it needs to rest and recover before I start cutting and pruning and such. And today’s a hot day, with coming rain. So I’ll leave it alone, and leave this blog post for your perusal. And maybe emulation.
Advanced yard hack:
- Going rock–hunting under the bare spots in a yard will help even out the lumps and patches. Where you find a thin patch, use a garden fork and a trowel to find and extract those rocks, often the size of baseballs. ↩︎
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