Kim, Do you have existing vegetation that grows in the backyard already or are you starting with completely barren soil? Also, what sort of soil do you have back there and is the majority of the sunshine it received in the morning? Or it the sunshine mostly mid-day and afternoon sun? In your climate, anything you'd plant would likely have to be irrigated no matter what you plant, but with a better understanding of the type of soil and the time of the day when the yard gets most of the sun, we probably can come up with a few suggestions that would be most appropriate for your specific conditions. However, if the yard is too shady for veggies, it will be too shady for some of the things we'd otherwise recommend.

Dawn

There was a full garden back there last 2 years.Soil is rich from vegetation being returned to soil and compost added. I will be raking the raised areas back to the paths.
Water is not a problem at all. I am on city water.
And the sun hits 1/3 of the yard from 10-4
and about 1/2 of the yard from 11-3
and the rest is dense shade. nothing grows over there.
thanks for helping. I am hoping to get seed ordered in 2 or 3 weeks.
kim

Also at my acre in town I want to plant something to cut for mulch also. It would get full sun and less watering.
kim

I have been pondering this. It will be much easier to grow something for mulch on your acre in town in full sun than in dense shade in the yard, but I think you'll be able to do both. There's a lot less to choose from in terms of what will tolerate the kind of summer heat you have there in dry shade. Four o'clocks work best for me in dry sandy/silty soil in morning sun with shade the rest of the day. They are vigorous growers and provide tons of material. Sometimes I use it as mulch, mostly in summer, but put it on the compost pile otherwise.

In full sun, you can grow any sort of grain or grass. I don't specifically grow for mulch in the summer, but every time we mow the yard or the pastures (well, not every time, sometimes we let them keep their own clippings to enrich their soil), we catch all the clippings in the grass catcher and dump them into the garden on whichever raised bed, path or grade-level rows need mulch the most at that point in time. Because our garden plots are large, no one area gets very much added at once, which is good, because too many grass clippings piled on too deeply can turn kinda slimey and can create a lot of heat while decomposing, especially in a milder, wetter summer. So, when we are adding grass clipping mulch to the garden after our weekly mowing once the garden plants are up and growing, any given area rarely gets more than 0.5-1.0" of mulch added at a given time. Sometimes we dump the grass clippings more deeply in the pathways between the raised beds, but that's okay---nothing is growing in the pathways so the clippings can get hot and start decomposing quickly. And, about that mulch in the pathways....we add to it all spring and summer and it decomposes. By mid-winter, it isn't mulch any more. It is compost. I go out there with my compost scoop in January or earliest February, and scoop up all the compost out of the pathways into the adjacent beds. It sure beats hauling wheelbarrow loads of compost from the compost pile into the garden, though I still do some of that as well.

Of course, then our paths are naked, and cool-season weeds will begin to sprout almost immediately, so I do hurry to cover up all the pathways again as quickly as possible. Sometimes I do it with old spoiled hay or with straw piled on top of cardboard. The cardboard blocks the sunlight and the hay or straw will break down pretty quickly in summer, but we just keep adding more and more layers. It is such a part of our mowing routine that I don't even think about it. Catching the clippings and dumping them in the pathways and beds in summer is what works for us and it prevents us from having to go buy some sort of mulch and haul it home. It also keeps us from having to bring in outside hay or straw that might have been raised with herbicides that can leave a high enough level of herbicide residue that you end up with killer compost that kills your plants. So, if you can grow something on that sunny lot that you can mow all summer, there's your mulch right there. We have a push mower that I use on the lawn up around the house and it has the typical little grass catcher. It is perfect for me because I don't want to have to carry anything that is outrageously heavy into the garden. Tim uses the riding mower with its really big, heavy triple grass catcher to mow the pastures/meadows. The triple grass catcher looks like three big trash cans lined up side by side and it accumulates a ton of clippings for mulch. He can bring more mulch to the garden from the pastures in that triple grass catcher in one week than I'll bring from mowing the lawn all summer.

We haven't planted any grass here. When we bought this place, it was fallow farm land. The landowner had been leasing it out to a guy who ran a few cows on it. The former pastures, which I still tend to call pastures although meadows would be more accurate since we don't have farm animal on them, are a mix of all kinds of grass---we have a little bit of everything. If I had to guess, I'd say there's 15-20 different mixed prairie grasses, including buffalo grass, several kinds of bluestem, foxtail grass, Indian grass, sand love grass, barnyard grass, gama grass, sideoats grama, etc. In our clay, the purple sand love grass looks kind of pitiful. It doesn't get big and dense and thick and tall like it does in the sandier soils out west in our county, but it still grows and produces the pretty purple seed heads. I suppose I should be grateful it doesn't grow well in clay, because out west in our county where it does grow really well, it is a huge fire risk once it is dormant and dry as it just burns like mad and is hard to extinguish. They aren't all mixed together in every field in exactly the same way---each grass grows where the conditions are best for it, and there's oodles of native wildflowers mixed in, so we'll have one mix of certain kinds of grasses in full sun in clay and different ones on the edge of the woodlands in some shade, and yet other ones in the former swamp. It isn't really a swamp any more as repeated droughts dried up the springs that kept it swampy, but those water-loving grasses still grow there, so maybe that area has a higher water table beneath the soil surface even though it no longer is a swamp. We try to mow around the wildflowers until after they've had time to set and drop their seed, and when we mow after that, we skip collecting the clippings for the next couple of cuttings so the seeds can stay in the field, not in the garden. It gives us the best of both worlds----fields of lovely prairie grasses and wildflowers most of the year, but also with periodic mowings that bring a lot of mulch into the garden.

Using native field grass/forb clippings in this way does mean that inevitably you bring "weed seed" into your garden, but I've always got a barrier layer of cardboard underneath so that any seeds that sprout are easy to pull out weekly before their roots work their way down through the cardboard, which by then usually is wet and decomposing (and attracting earthworms which seem to love the cardboard).

So, if you already have mixed grasses and wildflowers you can use them if you choose, or you can select a prairie grass that does well in your region and plant it.

Since grasses are seasonal, we usually even have grass clippings in most of winter---generally rye grass and poa annua, for example, in winter through late spring. Some years we overseed the lawn grass (which is about the same thing we have in the pastures but since we keep it mowed short (to discourage snakes around the house), that horrible bermuda grass that someone planted here long ago as a forage grass tends to dominate the lawn area. I hate bermuda grass. We don't treat any of our grassy areas with any sort of herbicide as I prefer lawns of mixes grasses and forbs that provide food and shelter for all sorts of wild things. I think that is why we always have bunny rabbits all over the place, but rarely in the fenced garden----they have a nice selection of food plants all over the place so don't seem to feel compelled to try to sneak into the fenced garden plots all the time. (Only occasionally....and they love peas and nasturtiums, so it is more common in spring than the rest of the year.)

Do y'all grow winter wheat there like we do here in my part of OK, where you sow the seed in the fall, it grows (and is sometimes used for grazing all winter) and then the wheat crop is harvested in late spring or earliest summer? I've always wanted to sow winter wheat and cut it for mulch all winter, piling it on the beds all winter long. Then, at planting time, I could pull back the mulch from an area and sow seeds, raking the mulch back up again the plants once they are up and growing.

There's all kinds of grassy plants you can grow for mulch. It just depends on what grows in your soils with whatever your soil pH is there (our soil here is very, very alkaline, and so is our water) in combination with whatever amount of rainfall/irrigation is available.

You also could grow many of the different cover crops, mowing them down and gathering the clippings to use as mulch. You can use alfalfa (a legume), buckwheat, wheat, rye, winter peas in winter and field peas in summer, etc.

I don't deliberately grow anything for mulch since we started out with meadows full of native or well-adapted imported plants.

I do grow carbon crops to feed my compost piles, and for that, my favorite is and always will be any sort of grain amaranth. I can gather the seed heads and use them for fall decorations, then thresh them after they are dry and gather the grain to eat. I clip off leaves and gather them for the compost pile and cut down the stalks and add them to the piles. I also sometimes grow sunflowers, ornamental corn (especially Red Stalker, which can double as autumn decoration), popcorn, etc.

If you are starting with bare ground, you can plant whatever you choose. I'd check at the local feed-n-seed places and talk to then about what is available. We have a bit of everything, and if it wasn't hear when we bought this land, I planted it. We have vetch, all kinds of clovers, etc. One of my favorite things that I've done since moving here was to buy wildflower seed mixed and overseed the pastures and meadows with them. The place I order them from also has grass mixes and grass/flower mixes. I usually plant Wildseed Farms' poppy mix every few years, and sometimes their TX/OX Mix and the Firecracker-1-2-3 Mix. When we first moved here, I sowed the poppy mix in the bar ditch, which runs for several hundred feet across the east side of our property, and people loved it. I met so many people that first year because they stopped to admire the flowers. A lot of the military veterans, including my dad, loved the poppies because of the red Flanders poppies that were in the mix.

When you use clippings from your own lawn or acreage to mulch, you are going to get some weeds sprouting. I'm not gonna lie and say you won't. I don't care. I love how well the clippings work despite a tendency to produce some weeds and, if some years, I have so many chamomile, poppy, larkspur and salvia seedlings popping up that I have to weed out a lot of them, I just do it. Mostly, though, I leave them as a beautiful blooming, living mulch.

In dry shade I mostly grow four o'clocks. They produce huge amounts of biomass for the compost pile. After their first year, once they have the big underground roots, you cannot kill them and they'll never die voluntarily. You can cut them back repeatedly all summer long (I cut mine back 3 or 4 times every summer, usually about the time they hit 4' or 5' in height) and pile them onto the compost pile. In between that, you can enjoy their beautiful flowers, and the flowers are very important for night-flying moths. Mine reseed vigorously in dry shade, so I have hundreds of them growing in the dry shade of the pecan tree near my garden. I didn't plant them to provide material for the compost pile, but quickly learned that they tend to get too tall and lanky in morning sun/shade for the rest of the day, so found that the fairly frequent cutting required to keep them from stretching and falling over was a bonus as it provided lots of organic matter for the compost pile.

You can grow mulch and compost materials year round----in fall through spring you can use fodder turnips or radishes or whatever, you can mow off the tops once they are nice and big and use that for mulch or in your compost pile. Then, the turnips or radishes decompose underground and improve the soil.

Once you get into a regular rhythm of harvesting and mulching, or harvesting and feeding our compost pile, it is easy-peasy. It did take me 3-5 years of trying first one thing and then another to find what grew best for me. Well, lambsquarters, ragweed ,bindweed and pig weed grow best, but I've tried to replace them with more desirable plants that will provide mulching materials in season and compost pile material year-round.

I do mulch my veggies, flowers and herbs with lots of weeds, which defies the conventional wisdom, but its all good. I don't think I get as many weeds in my mulched garden, even if some of them sprout from my mulch clippings, as my friends get in their unmulched soils. Mother Nature abhors a vacuum and will plant weeds in every square inch of unmulched ground, so I mulch with whatever is handy. It all feeds the soil as it breaks down too, which is just a bonus.

We're never going to have a tif bermuda lawn that is well-groomed, mowed low and looks like a carpet of grass or a golf course green. We're never going to have a perfectly wood-chip, pine-bark-mulched flower bed, or veggie/herb/flower garden, but we do have a remarkably diverse ecosystem that supports all kinds of life----not just the plants we choose to grow, but also the surprise ones that pop up here and there, and many little critters---beetles, butterflies, moths, bees, hummingbirds, turtles, frogs, toads, skinks, garter snakes, worm snakes, ringtail cats, whitetail deer, bunnies, foxes, bobcats (not the most welcome of visitors), possums, armadillos, skunks (definitely not welcomed here with open arms), etc. and birds of all kinds, including an occasional eagle flying overhead (they tend to nest closer to the river, but fly over us sometimes while hunting). Our landscape is alive.

I hope my description of the various things we grow and use and how we use them helps to give you some ideas. I don't know how different your rainfall is from ours, or how much you're willing to irrigate, so what grows well for me here might not grow well for you there. In general, though, whatever your local farmers or ranchers grow in their fields there should grow on your acre in town as well, and anything living can be clipped, collected and used as mulch. I've mostly just tried not to mess up the lovely meadows that were here when we bought the place, while at the same time adding more native wildflowers and sometimes collecting seeds from one spot and then sowing then in another spot in order to spread the wildflowers around more. We usually leave the tall grasses standing in the meadows in the fall after they've made seedheads so the wild turkeys, doves, bobwhite quail, etc. have cover and food. I try to always remain conscious that we do not live all alone on this place and that we need to use whatever practices leave plenty of cover and food for the wild things too.

Also, you can grow living mulch with some crops---for example, sowing one of the shorter clovers around your corn crop. I often grow C. moschata type winter squash/pumpkins as a living mulch in my rows of corn. The vines pretty effectively shade out whatever tries to sprout there in/between my rows of corn.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Native Grasses at Wildseed Farms

Wow wow wow
Dawn thank for pondering my problem and all the great info. I am going to reread that a few more times to get it all in.
The dilemma I have at home is my super wants the yard grass tidy and "manicured". He wanted me to move my garden last year to the ag area but they like to use a lot of chemicals I don't want to use. So I will have a few flower beds, one small raised bed for carrots for my little man, and grass to mow. I just don't know anything about which one to buy if one is better than the other.

The place in town which I'll call the barn since my grandson renamed it, I can do whatever I want. The area that I want to grow mulch is great sandy loam but I will get a test.
I was thinking alfalfa and buckwheat and plantain and clover and just mix it all up.
It had wheat planted many times there as erosion control before we bought it but hasn't had anything except weeds this last year.
In the veggie garden I am going to use cardboard also since I get 20 - 50 boxes a week at work it wont take long to cover the ground and I would like to cover it with mulch/ dry grass.
I too am concerned about using old hay from these farmers here. There is no telling what is in it. I got some good musty milo one time. It was fine but the stalks were huge.
I ordered quite a bit of amaranth and want to get more. The 2 I got to come up last year were beautiful.
I too want to leave an area for the visitors. But not the hogs.
I don't know if I mentioned my sons puppy. He is an 80 pound hog hunter and I forgot we have him at the barn. if I see any tracks of anything I will move his running chain and or pen to deter the pest. Hopefully next year I will be living on property.
kim

This is a picture of part of the property. NE corner. The dirt pile is neighboring property.