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.
No.
You’ve explained away every option so I think you’re back at Square 1. Tough grass to remove and persistent for a long while into shade.
My style of gardening is reforestation so my plan would be fast-growing natives that could get over the top of the grass and start suppression. Then I’d work in shrubs and other native grasses as the Kikuyu weakened. I’d start them in strips or patches and chip/hoe away at edges if I had to.
There’s probably no recourse but expense or tears.
Sadness. I was really hoping there would be a tool or method I hadn’t heard of.
Guess I’ll have to front the 2k to rent a powerful cutter for a few days.