Mulching to Kill Grass

All the gardens I have ever had have "evolved" over time.  Rather having a plan, I tend to pick a spot for the garden and dig up an area, starting small and enlarging it each year.  Sigh.  I know this goes against all the garden books and magazines, but that is just the way I work best.  It is difficult for me to "imagine" what something is going to look like until I actually get the area worked up and put plants in it.  If something doesn't work out, then I can always dig it up and put it somewhere else!

To me that is the great thing about gardening.  It is like an oil painting.  I've heard that underneath certain paintings by some of the great artists, they have discovered areas that have been painted over.  So, perhaps even da Vinci and Rembrandt made mistakes or changed their minds and had to redo their works.

Anyway, to get to the point, this past weekend, my garden experienced another evolution.  There is an area between the raised beds that is covered in grass and is difficult to get to with the riding lawnmower.  So, we have to use the push mower to mow it and it just did not get mowed as often as was needed. 

All winter, I pondered what to do about this area and decided to try to smother the grass out with mulch and newspaper.   Here is what it looked like about a fourth of the way into the project.

I had a stack of newspapers I'd saved over the winter.  And, Tom had some bags of leaves he collected last fall that he was willing to donate.  I laid a layer of newspapers 5 - 6 papers thick on the ground making sure that I overlapped them at least 6 inches.  Then I dumped bags of leaves on top of the papers.

I figured out pretty quickly that I could only work a small area at a time.  Otherwise, the papers would blow away, even with just a light breeze, like this:

I used bricks and whatever I could find to weight the papers down to keep them from blowing.  It took a couple of hours and here is the finished project.

There is still a small strip at the far end I want to cover with mulch and I haven't quite figured out what to do as an edging between where the leaves end and the grass begins.  But, that is something I can ponder on this week and work on next weekend. 

Like I said.....a garden is a work of art in progress.