One of the first hurdles to planting a garden is the land: often hard, rocky, compact, dusty, weedy, and dry.
Tilling the soil — churning up the ground to mix the dirt and soil layers and soften up the plot for easier digging and root growth — is hard work even if you have an electric tiller. Unless you’ve got the upper body strength for it, tilling isn’t going to happen.
For those who can’t, or don’t feel like, tilling, there is another way to garden: lasagna-style, and it’s just as easy as it is delicious sounding.
Lasagna gardening is a method of building soil from the ground up, instead of in the ground below. A gardener need only find a plot of unused, sunny land and start laying down layers of mulch, compost, and straw to create a raised bed of premium gardening soil.
Lasagna gardens are “super easy to create,” says Master Gardener and Florence resident Charlotte Vesel. “I’m in my 50s now; I don’t like a lot of digging and a lot of effort planting and dealing with hard-grown soil.
“It takes more time to gather all the stuff than it does to spread it out,” she adds. Lasagna gardening is all about “building up the soil.”
Vesel, who has been lasagna gardening for 10 years, teaches L-garden workshops through the Western Massachusetts Master Gardener Association. She has a front yard covered in about 10 vegetable, herb, and flower beds.
Most of the supplies for a lasagna garden can be gathered or purchased at a discount.
The supplies needed for starting a lasagna garden include: newspapers and/or cardboard, old leaves, manure, compost and/or grass clippings, hay (if it’s old and rotten, all the better), straw or sawdust, wood chips (if you have some old ones around), and hay.
The one item no one needs for their lasagna garden, Vesel says, is peat moss, an absorbent material found in bogs. The moss is widely used in horticulture as compost and packing. Using peat moss is controversial because harvesting peat damages the environment. To collect it, miners drain bogs and surrounding wetlands, then rip up the moss. In the process, carbon dioxide, long trapped in the bog, is released.
“Peat can hold air in beds and moisture, but there are other things instead of that, that can do that,” Vesel says. She suggests using pine sawdust, composted manure, and/or leaves.
She also has some great tips on how to collect the necessary garden ingredients on the list.
Tips: Create a layer of compost by running your mower over some fall leaves. If a mower is not available, spread the whole leaves around.
Save your grass clippings and gather some from neighbors for compost.
Buy hay from a farm. Often farmers will sell their hay at a discount if it’s wet. Put it at the bottom of the garden to smother the seeds.
Save and collect old newspapers.
Compost.
Head over to a stable to get some manure.
Check out the local department of public works to see if they have any wood chips for disposal. Municipalities start generating wood chips in spring. If the department has some wet, rotting chips — all the better. “When wood chips have been aged for a couple years,” Vesel says, “they start to develop mycelium, which is a really good thing that attaches to the roots and increases the roots’ capacity.”
To assemble a lasagna garden: Chose a plot in your yard that’s sunny, and mow the grass or weeds down low. If no mower is available, stomp down the grass.
Lay down a thick layer of newspapers or large pieces of cardboard. Make sure to overlap the layers so that nothing of the ground can be seen. This layer is meant to block the light and invite worms into the garden. “The plants will become worm food — it’s an amazing smorgasbord for the worms,” Vesel says.
Get this layer soaking wet.
Add a layer of leaves — either chopped up by a mower or not — a couple inches thick.
Now layer it with manure.
Next add a layer of compost. If no compost is available, use grass clippings. Vesel warns that any grass clippings used should be from an organic lawn — not one that is treated with weed killer or other chemicals. “You don’t want that in your vegetables,” she says.
Next up, drop a layer of straw or sawdust — but not from chemically treated wood. Wood chips can be added to this layer.
Put some straw down.
Another layer of leaves.
Compost.
Water.
Add a layer of straw.
Over the next four to five months the lasagna layers will decompose into healthy soil — and planting can begin! Or, says Vesel, an eager gardener can purchase a couple sacks of nutrient-rich soil and spread three to four inches of that on top of the garden. To make her garden beds look nice and tidy, Vesel edges them with a garden spade
“You can start this in the morning and by the afternoon have an awesome herb garden,” she says. “Gardening is meditative and soothing. … To create something so fresh, a flavor you can’t get anywhere else. It’s amazing.”
Kristin Palpini can be contacted at editor@valleyadvocate.com.
