Small scale organic gardening is a rapidly growing pass-time with <a href=”http://eco-needs.com”>ecological</a> benefits that outweigh the efforts needed to create a garden. Anticipating better tasting healthier food gathered out of your own yard is gratifying and also the satisfaction of selecting your personal fruit and vegetables is enormous.
The first stage and the hardest part of making a vigorous garden is to provide good soil. ‘Lasagna’ gardens, also called layered gardens are among the quickest and easiest ways to do this above all in a new plot. A lasagna garden is easy to arrange since it can go anywhere, over a lawn or even on blacktop or concrete. Healthy soils are created right before your eyes using waste cardboard, newspaper, drywall, and other compost to make a soil bed which will sustain unusually healthy plants with extended bearing seasons and abundant produce without ever turning the soil.
In Syracuse, NY the soils in are generally full of lead and arsenic from industrial sources. Tilled gardens in the city are labor intensive and grow poisons. Raised bed gardening keeps the plants in clean garden soil but necessitate a large amount of work to maintain and also the soil needs to be acquired from third party resources.
Raised beds whether traditional or created using the lasagna garden method, require a barrier between the garden soil and the substrate to discourage weed growth. Commercial barriers often prevent natural processes that are required maintain plant health and soil quality. For example, commercial landscaping barriers that will kill the underlying weeds but also keep out worms which keep a garden soil aerated soft and rich. They also prevent other organic processes that are necessary for good soil health.
My wife and I live in a house with a normal 40×100 foot city lot with atrocious soil conditions under the grass and some decently maintained soil in a few flower beds. Our ground is so hard and stony we probably couldn’t turn it using a tiller or fork regardless of whether we wanted to. We heard about layered gardening from our daughter and decided to give it a try without knowing what we were taking on except that the first layer of our garden was to be made from newspaper. Wet newspaper will prevent weeds from growing underneath but will cooperate with the passing of worms and support other organic processes. We were stunned at the results.
We chose a spot and size (about 12 ft. x 16 ft.) and then covered the lawn with 5 or 6 layers of newspapers. We soaked the newspaper and spread a thin layer of peat moss followed by straw then grass clippings covered by leaves from a nearby woodland and with dirt from our compost pile to provide some weight to the upper layer. We then saturated the garden to help the composting process. We didn’t use boards for edging around the sides. Confining barriers aren’t needed around lasagna gardens unless you want them for ascetic factors or in demanding terrain. We waited a few days for it to settle down.
The garden went from about 18 inches deep to about 6 inches deep in the waiting period. We added more grass clippings which we still do at every mowing. We added more straw because it makes great compost and doesn’t have seeds to generate weeds. We’re always throwing weeds from the lasagna garden itself and from our flower beds onto the top layer of the garden with their roots exposed as long as they haven’t yet gone to seed. We add more leaves from our wooded area and fall cleanup. The process goes on continuously, more newspaper topped with layers of more grass clippings, more straw and compost and onward. In fact the garden is a widespread composting mass with plants growing in it like they were in heaven. The soil remains loose and gets deeper all of the time.
Planting in such a garden is interesting because you don’t have to rake the upper layer smooth. You put the seeds or starter plants slightly below the top layer layer of compost and their roots discover the nourishment they require. The health of the plants that come up can only be described as amazing. Weeds do pop up inside the garden, but weeding takes little time and almost no labor since the roots are so free they pull out effortlessly and also the stems never brake off in the pulling process
All in all, layered gardening is the simple way to develop a home garden. It’s a healthy and worthy <a href=”http://eco-needs.com”>ecological</a> project that consumes waste to generate soil. It is satisfying to say the least. Edit this text Edit this text Edit this text Edit this text
