Turning lawns into gardens

Here's a recent example of how I converted a lawn into something much more exciting: food gardens!

I began with a lawn. Let's see if I have a photo from last summer... ah, we're in luck! I actually bothered to take a "before" picture:

So following Christoph's advice, last fall I did a single pass of the sod with my 5 HP front-tine tiller. It took a pretty long time, and really I don't think my tiller was meant for this kind of work (although my patience apparently is). After that I sprinkled rye and clover over the tilled area, and had Denie (the property owner) water it regularly for a couple weeks. It began to grow, even in cool weather (rye is good at that), and then we just let it be. Over the winter it was smothered by heavy snows and hard frosts, but that didn't stop the rye from coming right back up in the spring, looking like this:

The next step was to cut it all down, before tilling it in. By the way, in case you didn't catch on, planting rye is a great way of adding lots of organic matter (as well as nitrogen, a key component of plant fertility) to the soil. If you don't have a good source of compost, then rye may just be the next best thing. So anyway, here I am scything away:

And this is what you end up with:

Isn't that nice? Then a day later I started tilling it again. My patience was waning here, so I only got about halfway through, but that's fine because I'm only going to be planting about a quarter of the garden to start with:

Mmm... you end up with soil that looks as if it's had a couple bales of straw mixed into it (you can almost hear the earthworms licking their lips). Which is in fact exactly what it is—only the straw was grown in your own garden, rather than in some farmer's field in Creston or Alberta.

I waited a week or so before continuing to give the rye/clover a chance to break down a bit. After about a week, the next step I take in preparing a garden plot is edging it (to keep the grass and weeds from encroaching) and digging shallow pathways to form beds about 2½ feet wide:

Then I fertilize it with alfalfa meal (to provide some more immediate nitrogen fertility, which at this point is still caught up in the undecomposed rye and clover plants), and fork the beds to work the alfalfa meal in a bit as well as loosen the soil:

And then the beds are raked (somewhat) smooth:

There are still a lot of clods of roots and grass in there that make it a bit tricky to get completely flat beds, which is important for the Earthway Seeder to function properly. (I use that seeder to plant the majority of my crops; it speeds things up tremendously and seems to ensure more consistent germination.) Anyhow, I got it flat enough.

I then planted multiplier onion sets in the first couple beds, and three different varieties of radish in the next. Not much to see here, except the lighting is different because it's an overcast morning, and you might notice some stripes on the upper beds where I used the seeder:

I hope to have some shots of the veggies that come up there in the coming weeks!