Grow It The Lasagna Way!
The popularity of lasagna gardening has remained strong for several years, as successes have been touted across the country. This no-till, no dig method encourages gardeners faced with poor soil or even no soil. I’ve seen it demonstrated on gravel driveways as well as established gardens.
The name “lasagna” comes from the layering techniques, much like building a lasagna in the kitchen. Add layers of organic ingredients, one on top of the other, to “cook down” and provide a rich, fluffy organic soil that nourishes your veggies and flowers to peak performance.
This is easy. You don’t have to remove existing sod or weeds. You don’t need to double dig or even dig anything. You don’t work the soil at all. Begin by laying down five layers of very wet newspaper to begin the decomposition process. Then begin the layering process, layer by layer, until the area is as deep as necessary, at least twelve inches or more.
Courtesy of Savingnotebook
There is no strict recipe for building the lasagna, except don’t use any meat or fat. Mark the area off with a rope or garden hose, keeping it narrow enough to work from both sides so you don’t have to walk on it. Begin by covering the wet newspaper with about two inches of peat moss. Layer organic material on top of the peat. Leaves, compost, another layer of peat, barnyard refuse, composted cotton burrs, grass clippings, pine needles, spent blooms and trimmings from the flower beds, purchased top soil are good suggestions and lastly, end with peat moss.
You can make a lasagna garden anytime of the year, but fall is the optimum time thanks to fallen leaves and yard wastes. If you start in the spring, you will need more topsoil or potting soil so you can plant right away.
While there is no such thing as work-free gardening, this method is close. As you learn to think lasagna layering, you will stockpile your ingredients to keep your area deep and fertile. Fertilize with a slow release food such as Osmocote and watch plants for signs of fertility needs. Dark green foliage indicates adequate nitrogen. A bit of phosphorus will encourage deep rooting. Finish off the season with additional layering and let it cook during the wet winter months.
Courtesy of Dacres.org
Lasagna gardening is explained in greater detail in the book. It is actually just a variation of the old method of “sheet composting”. Instead of building a compost pile, watering and turning it for a year, hauling it back to the garden rows, lasagna gardening completes the whole process on location. Someone just gave it a name, wrote a book and probably made a few bucks in the process. We are once again intrigued with something new that really has been around for a long time.
Subscribe to the comments for this postSquare Foot Gardening
There are many reasons people garden. Some of us want the taste of fresh, chemical free food. Still others want to save money. For some it is a way of life, a comfort to be free from the large scale food factories. In the era of fast food, we yearn for slow food. Whatever the reason, gardening is a popular leisure activity.
What keeps a gardener returning to the soil year after year? Success! But for all the starters in the spring, not many are finishers in the fall. In fact, the percentage is not encouraging. If your garden stays producing, stays weed free and gives you bragging rights into the frosty days of fall you are in the minority. Full time jobs, vacations and household responsibilities all chip away at the time we have for leisure.
courtesy of blog.mindbites
One man’s slant on the answer to this challenge is square foot gardening. Mel Bartholomew has gone to great lengths, including a three hundred page book, to tout the virtures of this method. I think he needs to be heard. Square foot gardening works well in small spaces. No more seeding a whole packet of seeds in a twenty foot row, only to spend hours thinning the seedlings so others can reach maturity. From the first snip of spinach in the spring to the last plucked pickle in the fall, the project stays managable with reduced attention.
Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew from Rodale Press is still available on the internet and in many bookstores. If you are challenged with only a small growing space or little time, yet long for fresh food, take a good long look at this method of getting the job done. Thousands of gardeners are hooked.
This Is The Year, Let’s Grow It!
Someone once said “The richer we get, the poorer we eat”. I grew up watching my mother garden, not because she necessarily loved it, but because she didn’t want us to go hungry. That was then, this is now. After World War II, kitchen gardens faded, many actually replaced by a green patch of fescue that eats up an enormous amount of water and fertilizer. Now things are slowly coming full circle and it is once more fashionable to grow some of your own veggies, whether it is in a good sized patch by the back gate, a community garden plot or a couple of containers on the patio.
Courtesy of Sallysgardens.com
Foods grown commercially involving the heavy use of chemicals include broccoli, strawberries and potatoes. In order to successfully grow these favorites on a large scale, the grower must stay ahead of potential disease and insect infestations with routine chemical applications. Each season I can count on a generous harvest of strawberries, broccoli and potatoes with minimal chemical intervention. All three of these garden goodies grow well here in western Kansas. In addition to fresh tasting food, or enjoying the outdoors and exercise necessary to get it to the table, we are comforted in knowing our food is free of chemicals and additives so prevalent in “manufactured” produce.
Let’s face it. We don’t have the time to do it like Grandma did. Some of us leave home in the morning, returning in the evening faced with a hungry family to serve and a house to maintain. Is it really possible to grow some of what we eat? Yes, we can grow it, eat it and have energy left to brag about it. Armed with new information, machinery and gadgets grandma hadn’t thought of and determination to make some changes, our dinner table can include home grown, chemical free fresh tasting food to please the pickiest palate. The next few columns will explore square foot gardening, lasagna gardening and no-till gardens. While you may be stuck on the “straight row” gardening methods of the last 100 years, check back for some information that might be a worthwhile stretch in your garden of the future.
Winter Musings of A Restless Gardener
Some comfort has arrived along with the rising temperatures, we are now looking at daytime temps in the forties and even a fifty or two is showing up. Hopefully, the single numbers of the past weeks are just that, past. Cold temperatures are a gardener’s friend. The soil freezes and thaws and in the process we end up with a fluffy tilth in the spring that encourages seed germination and growth. Another plus is bugs die. Maybe not all of them, but a goodly number secumb to the cold, never to munch on our emerging garden again. Fruit trees need a specific number of chilling days to set buds. That is why you can’t pick apples in Florida. Tulips need a cold, cold soil to bless us with color in April and May. Our rewards for a frozen tush in January are real. Come spring, we gardeners pick our tulips, plant our seeds and plan for another great year, all because we endured the cold for more weeks than we like.
The cold spell has put at least six inches of ice on the koi pond. The fish don’t mind, they are sleeping on the bottom, oblivious to the elements only four feet above. The Reluctant Gardener has had to chip ice every day to keep a sufficient opening for the waterfall to function. Most ponders just pull the pump and close up the pond for the winter. Our birds depend on the shallow water in the waterfall for winter water, so we struggle to keep things going for our feathered friends, and even those with no feathers. The three squirrels come every day for a swig, then up to the feeders for sunflower chips, which we gladly share.
Water fall in our Koi pond
With catalogs arriving daily, it does relieve the sting of too many short, dark days indoors. These are planning days, opportunities to plot the veggie rows and plat the perennial beds. The new offerings for 2010 are tempting. Some new plants will fade away in a couple of years, public demand did not justify production costs. Other new varieties will have the staying power to grace our borders and beds for years to come. Plant breeders travel the world and work hard to keep our insatiable appetite for new plants filled. Gardening is big business.
Leaves, A Gardener’s Gold
Figuring out what to do with all the fallen leaves used to be a snap….fill a trash bag and set it out on the curb for the trash pickup. No more! Landfills are filling up and valuable organic matter is going to waste. It’s time to rethink our options for dealing with the fall litter, either spent flowers from the borders or leaves falling from the summer shade tree.
Composting is a great way to handle flowerbed left overs. Compost can then be used in next spring’s veggie garden and flowerbeds. But not everyone is going to build and maintain a mountain of organic trash while it cooks down to a useable product. If you do not compost, you can mow leaves with a mulching mower, and let shredded leaves filter down into the lawn. This method is best when you mow often enough that leaf litter doesn’t become too thick. Mow while you can still see turf peeking through the leaves.
Cherry Tree in Shirley's yard
Research at Michigan State University found no long-term adverse affects on turf when shredding up to one pound of leaves each fall for five consecutive years. In addtion to mulching with leaves, it still makes good sense to be on a fall nitrogen program and core-aerate in the fall. If it is a warm season turf, this mulching management is still useful but wait to fertilize and core-aerate in late May or early June.