What is the best way to encourage moss to take over and cover large surface areas in a relatively short amount of time? My goal is to replace my lawn with a moss garden.
Here are some links to information which may be useful to you:
Primitive Plants: Bryophytes, Ferns, and Fern Allies
Moss cultivation:
Mad About Moss: The Simple Art of Moss Gardening
There are two books I would recommend, Moss Gardening by George Schenk (Timber Press, 1997), particularly the chapter on “Moss Carpets,” and How to Get Your Lawn Off Grass by Carole Rubin (Harbour Publishing, 2002). Rubin gives directions for preparing your site, which involve digging out existing plants or–in your case–smothering the lawn with mulches of leaves (12 inches), bark (3 inches), or newspaper (10 sheets thick). Schenk offers several different methods for creating a moss garden. Briefly paraphrasing, these are:
- Work with nature, allowing self-sown spores of moss to take hold. (Prepare the site by weeding, raking, and perhaps rolling the surface smooth.)
- Encourage the moss in an existing lawn by weeding out grass. You can plant what the author calls “weed mosses” which will spread, such as Atrichum, Brachythecium, Calliergonella, Mnium, Plagiothecium, Polytrichum, and others.
- Instant carpet: you can moss about 75 square feet if you have access to woods from which large amounts of moss can be removed legally.
- Plant moss sods at spaced intervals (about one foot apart) and wait for them to grow into a solid carpet. Choose plants that match your soil and site conditions.
- Grow a moss carpet from crumbled fragments. This is rarely done, and only a few kinds of moss will grow this way, including Leucobryum, Racomitrium, and Dicranoweisia.
Another approach is to change the soil pH. Sulphur should be beneficial to moss and detrimental to lawn grass. The reason for this lies in the fact that moss grows best with a soil pH of 5.0-6.0, while lawns grow best with soil pH between 6.0 and 7.0 (according to The Lawn Bible by David Mellor, 2003). Added sulphur lowers the soil pH, creating a more acidic environment.