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IF you are looking for an easy fun way to garden take a look at Lasagna Gardening:. It is a layered gardening system that requires no digging or tilling and due to the kind of gardening it is the weeds are minimal. It is great for people with knee or back problems, kids, people in wheelchairs, people with small spaces and terrible soil conditions. Come along with me while I show you just how easy and fun Lasagna Gardening can be. Might make you want to run out and make one of your own.
Amazon Price: $12.21 (as of 08/07/2008)
In late fall of 2002 I built a 5 foot by 25 foot border bed for perennial flowers the lasagna way after reading Patricia Lanza's book. It sounded almost too good to be true - no digging, no tilling, no weeding? What was the catch, I asked myself. When I was done I planted perennials taken from four inch pots, watered them in, and left them for the winter rains to take care of (we can do that in So. Cal, hee hee). They settled in nicely and grew steadily, but it was cool weather so the roots were doing most of the growth at that time. A few months later as top growth appeared I was encouraged to build more lasagna beds in my vegetable garden - two 5 by 5 raised beds to go with my other two traditionally tilled raised beds (those were a lot of work, double digging, sifting rocks, mixing compost, etc. I wish now that I had known about the lasagna method a few years ago!). After about two hour's work I was done layering my new vegetable beds and watered them down to compost a little. In late May, I transplanted sweet peppers and basil starts to one lasagna bed and planted cantaloupes and flowers in the other.
Those two lasagna beds outperformed the traditional beds in every way. That summer I harvested more sweet peppers than ever before. It was my first try growing cantaloupes, so I have no previous crops to compare, but they did well and I harvested quite a few delicious, sun-sweetened cantaloupes from that bed. Meanwhile the flowers seemed to love the soil in my perennial bed, and they grew to huge proportions, filling in the space nicely by season's end. As promised, there was little watering and even less weeding. As a bonus, I never fertilized because the soil was already so rich in composting organic matter. Best of all, no soil-borne diseases! This was an organic gardener's paradise.
Lasagna Gardening:
Amazon Price: (as of 08/07/2008)
I found Patricia Lanza's book to be extremely practical and down-to-earth. Even if you don't use her "lasagna" method to create your garden, you can still benefit from her advice about maximizing any small space you have to work with. The basic idea is if you don't have room to grow out, then grow up! And she's not just talking about flowers. She shows how easy it is to grow satisfying crops of just about any vegetable or fruit in tiny plots of land and containers. And she shows how to do it without spending any money. This book is peppered with ideas about how to use things we might consider to be trash as decorative containers, plant supports, and garden tools.



Last year I used regular round tomato cages. They worked, but you couldn't fit too many tomatoes in such a small space. This year my mom got me these great tomato towers. I have 5 plants on the towers, and I also got an upside down tomato planter, which is a whole other lens.
Tomato cages make tending to tomatoes in a lasagna garden much easier. I think I am going to really like the towers. I'll keep you up to date as the summer goes on.
Fetching RSS feed... please stand byI love to hear about everyone's gardens. Please tell me about your garden, are you lasagna gardening? Please feel free to share pictures too!
Ok Jackie -- you've got me convinced, I'm gonna give this lasagna thingy a try -- great info!
Appreciate you,
Andrea
Posted June 06, 2008
| Adam_Fletcher
Great Lense! Posted July 21, 2007 |