Eat Your Lawn

We love our lawns for play and getting together. For the remaining 90% of lawn that make up our suburban landscape, we believe we can do better.

We once again turn to one of our best native plants: Wild Strawberry.

Its potential for a lawn replacement became quite clear once we saw its characteristics as a ground cover for our Edible Forest Gardens.

• Quick to establish and fill in gaps

• Produces a wonderful diminutive white flower

• Produces one of the sweetest edible berries

• Host plant to over 80 species of moths and butterflies

• No mowing needed!

Foreground strawberry ground cover planting in front of a suburban meadow garden during its first season.

Adaptable to most soils, enjoying full sun to partial shade, Wild Strawberry has the potential to convert large swaths of low functioning landscapes into low maintenance, food producing, and wildlife supporting gardens.

Because it doesn’t need mowing, Wild Strawberry can be planting with other low growing edible and flowering plants to deepen its function and aesthetics.

One of the other benefits of using wild strawberry for a lawn replacement is that the process works very well by using wood chips to kill the existing grass and suppress weed growth as the strawberries establish. As the strawberries spread and fill in over time, the wood chips decompose to become organic matter to feed the strawberries. At the apex of this cycle, the wood chips have decomposed completely and the strawberries have covered the ground.

This is the best waste-free option to transition lawns as no herbicides or landfill bound plastics are used. A true zero waste approach.

Our most successful installations of wild strawberry used this method as pictured below.

Join us in reprogramming the lawn matrix into a bountiful garden for eating!