There are benefits and detriments to the suggestions being made here.
It is best to preserve the soil in the turf layer instead of ripping up the grass, yes. The root systems of the grass creates very nice aerated soil as they decay.
But the topsoil layer formed by turfgrass is pretty minimal. An area being managed as a lawn already has practically no topsoil and it’s already getting severely compacted and eroded with every passing season. This will be worse the more heavily managed the lawn has been.
So removing the sod entirely can be an initial setback in establishing a meadow, but turfgrass’s ability to create a layer of fertile, living soil is so limited that I wouldn’t mourn over the idea of ripping up sod.
Now, I personally don’t till or rip up sod and I try to remove as little as possible.
My reasons for this have as much to do with disturbance as soil health.
I don’t know how, I don’t know why, but plants…KNOW when it’s time for them to sprout according to ecological succession.
Ecosystems have some sort of “clock” counting the time since disturbance. I don’t know what it is, but it’s real. Severely disturbing soil, like obliterating the existing plant community, sets the clock to zero. So when you rototill or totally tear up existing sod, you get a WEEDSPLOSION. Amaranth, crabgrass, pokeweed, prostrate spurge, purslane, nightshade, rhomboid mercury, and dandelion, in my area.
These plants ONLY grow in disturbed soil. Some are perennials, so they can persist a long time past the initial disturbance, but when soil is tilled or dug, they sprout immediately and in great numbers, and their sprouts are totally absent everywhere else. It’s a gradient: Dandelion will pop up in a spot where you’ve only dug up some dirt with a shovel, but Amaranth sprouts with the most severe disturbance, like the soil needs to be pulverized to bits for Amaranth to get started. (But when it does, HOOOO BOY does Amaranth get started. THOUSANDS of them. EVERYWHERE.)
In r/lawncare, people would regularly post photos of lawns with purslane, prostrate spurge, and other plants in the above list, and it was very strange to me, because I had never seen those plants growing in lawns, only bare areas, gardens, and pavement. I gradually figured out that the lawncare guys were, in some way, disturbing their plant community more severely than the caretakers of the turf I knew, enough so to trigger the growth of these weeds I associate exclusively with more disturbed environments.
Disturbance in ecosystems doesn’t typically represent a catastrophic reset. It also looks like more minor, more regular activities that push the clock back to some extent, but not all the way back to 0. So fire is one of those low-intensity disturbances, and so is grazing.
And, I reasoned to myself, so is mowing, and the frequency and height at which you mow matters. So I looked at the forest succession diagram and thought, huh, all the aggressive weeds are here at the very beginning, and asters and goldenrod are supposed to show up in Year 2.
So I recalled how the area I turned into the Meadow grew asters and goldenrod, as well as various marginal areas in the yard. Huh, I thought, those areas where we use the weed-whacker instead of mowing, and less frequently.
So perhaps a lawn could be understood as hovering in an equilibrium state somewhere towards the beginning of the ecological succession process—much like canebrakes are kept in an equilibrium where they don’t succeed to forest. Because it really looks like the less often and less intensely you mow and manage an area, the more the volunteer plants in that area are characteristic of later in the ecological succession diagram.
So, jumping off of point #3, volunteer plants are a big part of starting and managing a meadow, or of changing a lawn into a meadow. But most of the plants that make good meadow volunteers, will probably not show up until it’s been 1.5 to 3 years since the last severe disturbance—or a cumulative “level” of disturbance over the last 10 years or so that “adds up” to that (?). For example, I had 3 milkweed plants volunteer this spring, but only in places that hadn’t been mowed at all in over a year, and that historically once had been a spot where a tree was and a flower bed. An old melon patch that went weedy for a year or two grew purple passion flower. The corners of what was once our garden patch, which were only ever weed-whacked instead of mowed and which often overgrew for months, sprouted asters and goldenrod.
Those are my observations, anyway.
However. There are serious negatives to the approach that minimizes disturbance to the existing (lawn) community.
In the U.S. state of Kentucky, most common lawn turfgrasses are invasive species—including Kentucky bluegrass, which was introduced from Europe. And like any invasive species, they do damage.
Specifically, turf grasses have a tendency to choke out other plants and form layers of rotting dead thatch that stops new plants from sprouting.
In addition to the maladapted relationship to our native species, lawn grasses were selected for their adaptation to mowing (grazing, which is different but grazing-adapted plants do well being mowed) and if you let them grow without any cutting they will form thick, dense growth with an understory of dead and dying Plant Gunk that is otherwise almost sterile. Spreading seeds in that crap doesn’t do jack. These lawn grasses have in some cases been bred for the dense, hypercompetitive growth habit.
The advice above about composting on top of lawn grass, or tearing up the sod and flipping it over? I do both of these things when trying to establish a new planting, but grass can survive it and shoot up new stalks THROUGH the layer of soil and compost you’re planting in, at which point you can’t do much except trim the blades to dirt level where they emerge and hope they die sometime soon.
This I think is an example of “anti-lawn” advice being tailored to arid areas where turfgrass has to be kept on life support to survive. In areas where turfgrass *is* well adapted, it can be ridiculously aggro.
I’m not saying “rip out your grass"—most of my meadow was established through simply adding plants in among what was already there. But this method gets REALLY time consuming, because if you live in a wet climate where turfgrass does well, that stuff will wreck your shit. I spend a lot of time pulling grass by hand or trimming it with grass shears. (Highly recommend grass shears.)
Native sedges I leave be, it’s the lawn grass that’s horrible. A good place to start is learning how to tell your native grasses and sedges from non-native lawn grasses.
The cardboard thing I’ve tried, and I’m not very impressed with it; cardboard is just too heavily processed to break down quickly and it doesn’t hold in moisture at all.
Now, here’s what I would recommend for composting a lawn and starting “from scratch” in terms of the plant community: (keep in mind I am located in the Southeastern USA) Scrape the sod up from a large area in the fall, stack it into a pile with the root side facing up, and pile more soil from the site on top of it. In the spring, spread it all back out. If you leave the pile alone and let the weeds do their thing, they’ll help minimize erosion, and most of the sod will have decomposed into soil you can use.
As for the bare dirt where you scraped it up? Fallen leaves. Just spread a shit ton of fallen leaves. Fallen leaves are magic for this stuff. The ideal thing to do in the spring, IMHO, is to burn them. Wait till spring is in full swing so all the bugs have emerged from hibernation, soak the ground down around the outside edge of where the leaves are so the fire stays put, and light ‘em up.
In my experience (living in a rather wet climate) burning a leaf layer creates a very polite low creeping fire that spreads slowly out over the ground and is harder to keep going than to contain. You will want to avoid this if you live in an area of extreme fire danger.
But it’s undeniable that fire is basically THE essential fundamental tool of terraforming in North America. Just be smart about it.
If you’re making a meadow right up next to a building or flammable trees, I reckon you could move leaves into pile offsite, burn them, and spread the ashes on-site, for similar results.
Either way, spread your decomposed sod on top of the fresh ashes, and now you can plant to your heart’s content.
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