HelpfulGardener.com

Hey guys! I'm pretty excited about my new garden. A local community garden went under, so everything in there was up for grabs and I took this pretty sweet raised bed and enough soil to fill it. In the past two days I have doubled fenced it and mulched 4 cubic yards of mulch around, among many other things. The only thing that's really stumping me is what to do with the grass inside. It's going to be too much of a pain in the neck for me to mow inside, and our string trimmer is a really old unreliable electric one with one string that you have to manually wrap around the spool. Long story short, I really don't want to keep the grass. Do you guys have any ideas about what I could replace in with? I'm trying to keep this as cheap as possible, free if possible lol. Let me know what you think!

Front view:
Left side (cut back lilac because of infection and new fig tree planted woop woop):
'Nother angle:
Right side (where the stuff from where the fig is went):

A little difficult to put the images together, but it looks like you have enough room to make another raised bed. Then just mulch around all the pathways.

Sorry about that. I don't think there's enough room. It's a little tight on either side and I already have stuff planted. I really just want to take the grass up and put mulch or some cool material I haven't found yet.

Don't bother taking up the grass. Just put down cardboard on top of the grass and put down choice of mulch (see below).

Once the grass is dead and cardboard has broken down, scrape up all the good composted sod top soil into the raised beds. This will lower the grade and tend to pool water so put down woody yard trimmings and tough weeds in the paths as mulch, then cover with decorative mulch if you want (I don't bother ). If any weed grows, hoe or pull and just drop on the path as mulch to break down.

This year, I didn't want to do the drowned weeds bucket, so instead, I put any questionable weeds with tendency to grow back or re-seed in the middle of the paths where I would definitely trample them into the mud. They all break down and become available as more composted topsoil to scrape up into the beds. I'm tossing corn leaves and tassles in the paths as they dry up, and corn stalks too cutting into chunks with hand pruners since these are coming out one at a time from my small patch of popcorn. Later on, I plan to smash the big ones with a hand sledge.

applestar, this is perfect. I was going to settle for "here's this cool and cheap rock you can buy" or something, but this is so much better. I'm all about the composting and there is a good chance I will not cover the weeds with much too lol. I'm so glad to have found this idea, thank you so much. I will be applying the cardboard and trimmings tomorrow.