Lasagna Gardening for Vegetables
Lasagna gardening is a form of raised bed gardening. It is sometimes referred to as sheet mulching. The advantages of this raised bed are no digging, no frame, and easy-to-find materials. Place the bed in a sunny spot with access to water and you are ready to go. After you build the bed, the materials will slowly compost, yielding rich, fertile soil.
Gather Your Materials
Before you start, you will need to gather your materials.
- Cardboard or newspaper
- Brown materials — dry leaves, straw, hay, wood chips, sawdust, shredded paper, shredded cardboard, and similar material
- Green materials — grass clippings, food scraps (no meat, dairy, fat, or bones), plant clippings (no woody stuff), manure, coffee grounds, and similar material
- Garden soil (from a bag, not from your yard)
- Compost
- Nitrogen fertilizer
The Recipe
The recipe for your lasagna garden is as follows:
- Cardboard or newspaper in a one-inch layer. This blocks weeds and grass from getting into your raised bed from below.
- A two to six-inch brown layer
- One cup of Nitrogen fertilizer
- A one to two-inch green layer
- A one-inch layer of compost
- Repeat steps two through five until the lasagna garden is two to four feet tall.
- Finish with three inches of garden soil.
- Water the finished structure until it is wet from top to bottom.
What To Expect Next
Over the next two to four weeks, the material will settle and begin to compost. Keep the bed moist but not soggy. The microbes and worms need water to digest the material in the bed.
When To Build
While you can build a lasagna garden any time, building one in the fall is best. Let it settle and compost over the winter so that it is full of rich soil when spring planting rolls around.
When To Plant
Because you put a layer of soil on the top layer, you can plant as soon as you finish the bed. However, fast-growing plants might grow into the layer below the soil before it has been composted. If you are going to plant immediately, use six inches of soil on top instead of three.
Yearly Maintenance
You will need to add additional layers of brown and green material each fall so that it will compost over the winter. This will renew the bed for the spring. If you do not do this, your mound of fertile soil will gradually sink and disperse into the ground around it.
Want to learn to garden? My first attempt at gardening ended up in failure. The weeds took over and squeezed the vegetables out. I was very frustrated by this waste of good seed, time, and money. So I became a master gardener and spent a lot of time helping other people avoid or overcome problems in their garden.
In order to help others garden successfully, I have written a book, Vegetable Gardening from the Ground Up, available in an ebook or a paperback from Amazon. It is also in Kindle Unlimited.
