My first garden

This weekend I will be helping my dad get started on our first garden ever. This is going to be a fall garden with seeds to be sown in early August. We have decided to use the lasagna gardening technique advocated by Patricia Lanza, author of Lasagna Gardening- A New Layering System for Bountiful Gardens: No Digging, No Tilling, No Weeding, No Kidding!

"Lasagna gardening is a nontraditional, organic, layering method you can use to create better soil while keeping your gardens neat and attractive. Based on a commonsense approach and readily available natural ingredients, lasagna gardening is an easy, time-saving way to install and maintain any kind of garden without removing the sod, digging, or tilling. Close planting and generous mulching greatly reduce the time needed for watering and weeding. And because of the healthy growing environment, lasagna gardens are plagued with fewer garden pests."

The basic technique is as follows:

Layer 1: Smother grass with overlapping thick pads of wet newspapers and/or cardboard
Layer 2: Add 2-3 inches of peat moss
Layer 3: 4-8 inches organic mulch (like animal manure, compost, grass clippings, hay, chopped leaves, peat moss, sawdust, newspaper, etc.)
Layer 4: more peat moss
Layer 5: more mulch
... and continue adding alternating layers of peat moss and mulch until the beds reach a height of about 18-24 inches. Optionally, you can scatter bone meal and wood ash on the top for added nutrients, as you would parmesan cheese on lasagna.

You can plant directly into this bed, or you can cover with a black plastic bag for 6 weeks, allowing it to cook in the sun, to speed up decomposition.

I've watched gardeners work so hard removing sod, digging up the earth, and weeding, and though I had never gardened before something inside me told me that all that work is unnecessary! This is why I've chosen to lasagna garden, because it saves work, energy, time, and money. "After you make the beds, all you have to do each year is plant and mulch- no tilling or digging required. The ground stays cool and damp under the layers of mulch, so regular watering is a thing of the past. Setting all the plants close together encourages them to fill in faster, so weeds don't stand a chance, and the few that do pop up are easy to pull from the loose mulch."

It seems that lasagna garden, especially when companion planting is used, is a superior method of gardening.

For information on how to create great compost, refer to my post Compost Changed His Life...