So What is Lasagna Gardening?

I first heard about lasagna gardening last year, but I don’t remember where. I have always wanted to garden as naturally as possible and to use what nature has provided me; so the theory behind lasagna gardening was really appealing.
The theory is  fairly simple: layer your organic materials with a ratio of 3 parts brown to one part green into a mound…the same way you make a lasagna! Layers!!
I mentioned lasagna gardening to someone recently and they asked if that was planting the herbs, etc. needed for preparing a lasagna. Although that’s not what it is, the question has inspired me to plant a lasagna style garden bed of lasagna ingredients! I usually do a “salad bowl” bed. So this year, I am going to plant “lasagna” next to my “salad”…I think it will be fun!
Back to the original topic…lasagna gardening.
This is a picture of my  very unkempt garden at the beginning of spring. I started out with raised beds. The lumber for the sides was probably the most expensive part of my garden. The next most expensive and time consuming part is the topsoil that it took to fill the beds.

Lasagna gardening does away with these two “expenses”, by simply building a mound (bed) in  layers of organic materials and planting directly into the layers!
I have put some lasagna layers on top of my raised beds in the past, but I have just finished my first real lasagna bed.  Our ground is extremely rocky, even where it doesn’t look rocky, rocks  are hiding everywhere just under the surface.

This type of gardening does away with this problem too. Instead of removing all of them, you just move the big ones and garden ON TOP of the smaller ones!
So I started with cardboard and piled old hay on top of it.

I threw several inches of topsoil on top of the hay.

Next I piled on shredded leaves and hay and since I want to put sweet potatoes in this bed, I included some sand.
For the next layer I put on last years manure and then covered everything with more shredded leaves and hay.

TAA DAA! My first real Lasagna Bed!!

I planted my sweet potatoes right in this bed. I’m going to test the idea put out by the author of the Lasagna Gardening book that you don’t have to wait for everything to break down before planting.

Looks good to me! I’ll keep you posted on their progress!
Back out to the garden for me!


Sharing this at :