So digging up lawn is a nightmare, particularly if that lawn is kikuyu which is very common in my country. Every patch you clear will rapidly become colonised again without constant vigilience.
In an ideal world you’d rent something like a turf cutter, clear everything, and landscape from there. Unfortunately that’s prohibitively expensive a lot of the time. Not to mention not always an option if you’re not physically able to optimise the rental time with continuous work.
Solarising is popularly mentioned, but for a quarter acre of lawn that would take a loooot of laid down stuff. Doing it patch by patch tends to lead to recolonisation by the grass.
Does anyone know of better solutions for someone who can chip away for a couple of hours a week at most reliably? Where it wont end up in using all that time policing the edges of whatever you’ve cleared with spades and tears.
Hmm yeah, a heavy wind influence will make lightweight mulches tougher to keep around without something like silage tarping similar to solarization, or thoughtful catchment. There are some interesting applications for windscreens are mulch trapping devices. I have a few resources for wind protection here that you may find useful if you haven’t come across them before. We’ve used semi-densely planted cuttings as mulch traps on the edge of one neighbor’s property where autumn winds tend to blow from.
Aussie confirmed. Given your soil situation heavy mulch and weighted tarps as weed protection and soil prep for additional bed space is the way I’d lean. Damaged tarps from your transfer station or local folks would be an inexpensive way to get enough material you don’t feel bad cutting to shape to suit the beds you’re using them for - heavy organic mulch, tarp, stones to hold it down. It would give some of your less aggressive plants an opportunity to grow, and then you’ll hopefully have additional propagation materials to grow the beds further. Some of our gardens grow like seasonal amoebas, growing out small clumps just on the edge until the area gets swallowed.