Lasagna Gardening
No digging is one of the best things about lasagna gardening is how easy it is. The first layer of your lasagna garden consists of either brown corrugated cardboard or three layers of newspaper laid directly on top of the grass or weeds in the area you’ve selected for your garden. Anything you’d put in a compost pile, you can put into a lasagna garden. The following materials are all perfect for lasagna gardens. Peat moss just as with an edible lasagna, there is some importance to the methods you use to build your lasagna garden. Just layer browns and greens, and a lasagna garden will result. You can make a lasagna garden at any time of year. You can let the lasagna garden sit and break down all winter. Also, fall rains and winter snow will keep the materials in your lasagna garden moist, which will help them break down faster. If you choose to make a lasagna garden in spring or summer, you will need to consider adding more soil-like amendments to the bed, such as peat or topsoil, so that you can plant in the garden right away. If someone told me years ago that he or she had found a way to do an end run around the sweat equity of traditional gardening, a way around digging, weeding, and rot tilling, a way to produce more regardless of time constraints, physical limitations, or power-tool ineptness well, I would have checked that person for a head injury.
By spring, the lasagna bed will have composted to ideal soil conditions for asparagus. Once I have a lasagna bed in place, I plant bush bean seeds along the edges. In late May, I transplanted sweet peppers and basil starts to one lasagna bed and planted cantaloupes and flowers in the other. Those two lasagna beds outperformed the traditional beds in every way. Pat Skaggs, president of the Memphis Herb Society, started her shady lasagna bed about three years ago after Lanza spoke here. I’d refer you to the Composting Forum but sometimes a simple project like building a lasagna bed results in much excellent but often complicated answers. No digging is one of the best things about lasagna gardening is how easy it is. I am sure many of you have heard of lasagna gardening I know most of you have eaten great lasagna but how many of you have eaten vegetables, herbs and grown flowers from a lasagna garden? This can also be referred to as no dig gardening or even the term sheet mulching has been used in identifying this style of gardening. This type of gardening was eventually called no dig gardening. How compact is your base soil which you are about to cover? If the soil is badly compacted you may have to deviate from no dig gardening to just a little digging. Instead, lasagna gardening is a timesaving organic gardening method developed by gardener and writer, Patricia Lanza, which requires no digging, no tilling and no sod removal. Due to the kind of gardening it is the weeds are minimal. It sounded almost too good to be true – no digging, no tilling, no weeding? What was the catch, I asked myself. Have fun with your new Lasagna Gardened. For more information on gardeing go to www.Teegoes.org