Lasagna Anyone?

Some call it layered gardening, no-weed gardening, or my personal favorite lasagna gardening. The bottom line is that it comes down to a more sustainable, organic, higher yield, environmentally friendly, and ultimately less back breaking gardening experience.  How can you not like this!?

We have an area, that has been a veggie garden in the past but is now a prolific weed patch that is growing out of control!  How to handle it?



1. Rent a roto tiller($) and till it under then bury it in straw and wait till next year to do it all again.
2. Close my eyes and pretend that it isn't there but remember where to look when Max mysteriously goes missing.
3. Use some of the stuff we already have around, add in a few new items and literally bury the whole shooting match with LASAGNA!

As you can see in the demo photo, taken at the Nashville home and garden show, this is how it is done.  On the bottom you lay down card board that all over laps really well to make it nice and dark and creepy.  If you can't find that much cardboard, collect lots of newspapers and lay it down in 5-10 page layers.  It will achieve the same end.  Next you can use dried leaves, yard trimmings and clippings, kitchen scraps, bag-ends of potting soil, straw or hay—most anything organic creates it. Like compost, the lasagna should be roughly half "green" materials and half "brown".

Brown includes: Buckwheat hulls, Coffee filters, Corn Cobs, Cotton/wool/silk scraps, Grass clippings (dried), Hay, Leaves (dead), Paper, Peat Moss, Pine needles, Sawdust, Straw, Tea bags.  All of these items are high in carbon.

Green includes: Algae, Bone meal, Coffee grounds, Egg shells, Feathers, Flowers, Fruit and fruit peels, Grass clippings (fresh), Hair, Manure, Seaweed, Tea leaves, and Vegetables peelings.  All of these items are high in nitrogen.

When you first start you can use peat moss and paper and straw and manure to get the pile cooking then you can collect things you can use as you go.  Grass clippings, dead headed flowers, and prunings can all be added to the top of your soon to be garden.  They say to prep your lasagna the fall before you want to use it so that it can compost itself well by the spring.  Because of the way it has been created you should do little if any weeding and be able to plant earlier in the spring because it is literally "cooking" and will be warm inside your mound.  When you build it initially, it will need to be built up extra high to allow for shrinkage.  If you can build it in a raised bed, all the better but they do fine without the walls too.

Check it out if you are interested.  There are a ton of sites on the internet and I have a simple link at the top of this post.

Please always remember and don't ever forget:

"When we heal the earth, we heal ourselves."
David Orr