Lasagna Garden: Layer your way to a green thumb.

There hasn't been much time to blog lately.  Weekends are about building the garden Emily and I have been dreaming about for years.  We have scrambled the yard - brings to mind the adage about breaking eggs to make an omelet.  The previous owners of our home built some nice raised beds, but some of them didn't fit into our vision, so now they are gone.  The landscape timbers from the beds are piled on the lawn and will become the posts for our garden fence.  A bony walnut tree has been reduced to a skeleton of its former self, a pile of firewood, and a heap of brush.  The remainder of the tree is waiting for a professional arborist to safely remove the crown from the electrical service line for our house, without collapsing our neighbor's shop roof.  Much of the shrubbery has been trimmed back to accommodate the 8-foot tall privacy fence/grape arbor that will soon provide us with trellising for the build up, not out, approach to gardening.  The final ingredient to this apparent disarray: tarp-covered rectangular heaps with soil-covered sycamore leaves spilling out from underneath.  We have been sheet layering compost and leaves, in an attempt to build rich garden soil above what was once only lawn.  We used this "lasagna garden" technique once before in Helena.  Our first year was good... we had some tasty veggies, but the second year was spectacular.  I can only hope this endeavor will be even more fruitful, now that we live in a place with more than 150 frost-free days.

How to lasagna garden?  The Internet is full of good advice, and there is a great book on the subject, but here is our approach. Note: We built these lasagna beds in the spring, but if you have the time, it would be best to do this in the fall.  Still, enough decomposition does occur before planting time to make this a viable spring gardening method.  When we did this in Helena, we built the beds and planted a week later.

We're playing our garden by ear this year, but our general idea is to break our 30'x 35' garden area into four beds of roughly the same size. We laid down heavy duty weed barrier to be the foundation for paths, which we will cover with straw or some other mulch once the beds are complete.

Then we put down a layer of wet newspaper on top of the grass within each "bed."  Each piece of newspaper overlapped with the piece newspaper next to it, the idea being that this should help keep at bay the Kentucky bluegrass underneath the bed.  We'll still battle some grass later on, but the newspaper really does help.

Next, we heaped on a layer (about 18 inches thick) of stockpiled fall leaves from our giant sycamore , which should produce abundant carbon garden fodder.  Note: We learned something interesting about stockpiling fall leaves.  Tarping your heap of leaves in the fall greatly improves the rate of decomposition, giving you a head start for spring use in sheet composting.  Before moving to the next step, we stomped down the leaves by marching methodically back and forth across the bed, compressing the pile a little.  

In order to alternate green and brown organic material, which apparently creates the Cadillac of composts, we then spread partly decomposed grass clippings (about 3 inches thick) that we had been saving from our late summer lawn cuttings.  Note: Alternatively, you could use partly decomposed material from your regular compost bin.  Since we ran out of grass clippings, we used the material in our earth machine for the "green" layer in our second bed. There were still recognizable vegetable scraps, green plant remnants from our winter pea crop, and the wilted remains of Emily's Valentine's bouquet. Next, we piled on another 18-in thick layer of slightly composted leaves, then topped it off with about 2 inches of good rich garden soil recycled from one of the raised beds we ripped out.  In the end, we had a beautiful raised bed, infused with various refuse from last summer's growth.

The final layer for this year will be a 3-in cap of commercial compost purchased from the local facility, but for now, we covered the bed in black plastic to encourage further composting while we wait for our starts to be ground-ready and the weather to warm enough for seeding our other crops. Note: Since we are new to the Lewiston gardening scene, we are relying on planting times this year from our neighbor who has been gardening in this area for 25+ years.  He uses his grandmother's method: it's time to plant seeds when you put your finger into the soil and it feels warm.

Throughout the summer, we will mulch the vegetables with grass clippings from the mower.  Next fall, after a (hopefully) abundant crop, we will renew the process of sheet composting by heaping leaves from the sycamore, as well as composted chicken turds (from our new flock), on top of the beds, covering them with plastic to cook away for the winter.