This week we present to you the lasagna garden, a very easy way to get your feet wet in organic gardening. Organic gardening, often associated with the “expensive aisle” at the grocery store reserved for health nuts and hippies.

While at the grocery store organic typically means expensive, in the home gardening world it usually means cheaper, easier, faster, and more healthy gardens. It takes the principals of composting, looses the “heap” and lets you get into green gardening right away.

The most common beginner lasagna gardener starts out as a homeowner looking to add a garden to their property. Not keen to using a tiller or using a grass killer they begin a search for alternatives. Lasagna bed gardening comes to the rescue.

One of the biggest benefits aside from the delicious veggies, is the fact that there is no digging required. The first step in lasagna gardening is layout out your garden over a section of grass using cardboard or newspaper (newspaper should be about 5 layers). Then wet this layer of paper. This layer Serves several tasks. It effectively cuts off light from the grass and weeds, preventing them from taking over your garden. It also jump starts the decomposition process, the grass below with decompose quickly under the wet paper. It also attracts earthworms (beneficial to gardening) who will also help speed the decomposition process.

Now we want to consider our layers, we’re looking to alternate layers of “brown” and “green” compost and watering in between, we’re looking for sponge like moistness. The brown layers consist of things like dead leaves, pine needles and newspaper. The green layers consist of salad scraps, grass trimmings and the like.

There are an almost endless number of things you can use in your layers; chopped leaves, stray, hay, sawdust, ash, manure, are just the beginning, coffee grounds are one of my favorites.

Pile up about 1.5ft of 1-2 inch layers of compost. Don’t let the size fool you, we’re creating a very productive stew of ingredients here and the speed at which the mound shrinks will surprise you. Once you have a respectable pile,

From here, I like to let the bed set for a while, if you are reading this in the fall, go out and start your bed now. Starting your lasagna in the fall will net you some very nice soil in the spring. If it’s not the fall, I like to give my beds a few weeks to get going before I plant but others have had success planting right away.

If you’re interested in learning more about lasagna beds, I’d pick up the book, Lasagna Garedning by Patricia Lanza, she’s been doing id for years and “wrote the book” on the subject, litterally :P

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