You could till once more, but it is probably not necessary. You're right that you probably won't need to till ever again if you do a lasagna garden and renew it yearly with mulch.

Usually the newspapers are the first layer hold additional moisture and to keep the weeds from the soil below from growing up through your new soil, so you might be better off with putting the newspaper layer first. If you cut through the newspaper you break your continuous barrier against weeds. When I've planted in fresh lasagna gardens in the past I usually add some of the native soil to the hole and otherwise plant directly into the "lasagna". The roots will find their way to the soil.

It is preferable that the manure be composted before use. That said, composted manure is an excellent layer to use in a lasagna garden. If you have some of your own compost, or other organic matter (coffee grounds, leaves, grass clippings, etc) the more layers of different things the better the nutrient diversity.

The first year of a lasagna garden you want to keep it extra moist to help it break down and to keep the ingredients (in which your plants roots grow) moist throughout. In subsequent years the area will hold significantly more water and require less watering.

Lasagna works better with wide planting beds, so make your beds about 4 feet across and use permanent (for the season at least) paths in between. Make sure the paths are wider than you think you need, every year I make mine too close together and by the end of the season I can't easily walk between the beds. If you have the room you could make the paths at least 4 feet wide or more. The paths could be used to grow green manures for addition to the beds.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Kyle

I have, and many others have also, made a planting bed by laying newspaper over grass and covering that newspaper with a mulch to hold it in place and hide it and have had very good gardens in those places after doing that. No tilling was done and was not necessary.
Will the same thing work in your planting bed? Sure. This is what Pat Lanza describes in the book she work about "Lasagna Gardening" and what you will read about doing at this Lasagna Gardening 101 web site.

Here is a link that might be useful: Lasagna Gardening 101

lasagne/raised bed gardens no tilling ever, me i would just do as you are thinking to do, check our site for more ideas and pic's.

len

Here is a link that might be useful: len's garden page

I deal with the high 90s and low 100s virtually every summer with red clay soil, but with more humidity and rain than you all get out West. Having stated that, I think you will probably do best if you do till in some additonal organic matter like manure, poultry litter, compost, shredded leaves or even pine bark. The soil will have more tilth, the oragnic matter will release nitrogen and help the soil drain much better. From then on I would just layer the stuff on and let the pill bugs and worms do all the work for you. I would also recommend using a natural fertilizer like Milorganite or Cock-a-doodle-doo. Your garden will really get a jumpstart and it can be maintained from then on.

Hi everyone, thanks for the advice! I think I'll just till some admendments into the soil as the virginian stated and then do newspaper and mulch. My husband really wants to improve the soil that's there and so this fall I'll just layer on like a regular lasagna garden and go from there. Thanks everyone!

Just one more question! How well will a soaker hose or drip irrigation water through several layers of newspaper? Will it just puddle? I want to make sure it gets to the plants roots! Thanks....

You are most welcome and good luck with the garden as it sounds like you are on the right track. If you shreded the newspaper a bit and watered it in well to begin with, it will start to break down so I don't think it will be a problem with the drip hose. The key will be to keep the watering regular so the newspaper doesn't dry out. Eventually the newspaper will be pock marked with small critter holes in it too, so water should pass. I've never had a problem using it in my garden.

Newspaper, covered with a good mulch, in contact with soil will not dry out and if you start with dry paper it will absorb moisture from the soil and get wet. The only reason to use newspaper is to block access to sunlight by unwanted plant growth which will kill that plant growth. An added benefit is the newspaper will provide some organic matter to your soil, eventually.

I feel nothing but scorn for Pat Lanza who stole Ruth's Stout's (and others) deep mulch gardening techniques, renamed it "lasagna" gardening, and never gave so much of a nod to Stout.

That said : ^> ...

I've used newspaper a lot and I'm always surprised to hear people doing these two things to it:

A.) putting the newspaper layer on the bottom of their layers to prevent weed seeds in the soil from germinating. Then they cover the newspaper with materials that weeds LOVE!! and easily root in. Manure, sometimes people even recommend putting soil on the newspaper (!). The newspaper works best on the top of the layers where it's an impenetrable weed barrier. Then I put something fairly inert on top---certainly not manure or soil---to weigh it down. I use something wonderful that you probably don't have access to: seaweed covered with something pretty---chipped leaves or hay.

B.) the other thing that kind of defeats the beauty of using newspaper is to shred it. If you shred your newspaper, any weed with an ounce of brains, arrives at the fluffball of shredded newspaper, elbows it aside, and heads towards the light. If you use layers of paper, the weed hits its head on the newspaper ceiling and that's the end of that.

Although---I garden in Maine, so my experience with newspaper may be different than yours, but because of my newspaper mulch, I almost never water. If your experience is the same as mine, you're going to find that the paper stays moist almost all of the season. And when you water, it works like blotter paper, soaking up the water before it can run off.

I secretly like rototilling, which I bet really is bad for the soil---like 'they' say. I'm not able to till here, so I've been either using deep mulch methods or forking in my amendments for the last 12 years at this site. Like the others, I like amending my soils with as much organic matter as I can get my hands on (which is never enough) before covering it with my upper mulch.

I'm with Annpat (there's a surprise) :) in having a secret wish to dig. However, I notice the heavy clay soil here simply doesn't get better with digging, aside from the slight (but noticeable) benefits of an occasional double-digging.

The tallest, most bushy, and most productive plants I've grown have been in the areas where I did the most intensive lasagna gardening. Some of those areas had tillage prior to laying down the lasagna layers. But for immediate soil improvement, I'd take 2-4' of lasagna layering over intense tillage of any kind -- including tillage which includes substantial amounts of compost and other organic materials.

All the best,
-Patrick

to irrigate my mulch garden, I use TurboTape.
Specifically T-Tape model 715.
Most farmers use T-tape underground, I use it right on top of the mulch. Because I use it on top, I use the one with the thickest tubing walls so that it is stiffer and won't kink with the water going on and off. When the water goes on and off the tubing tends to "walk" and stretch a little and you will need the stiffest one.
Since this is a commercial product sold to farmers, you may want to share a role with a friend, but my farm irrigation store sells it so cheap that a great big role of 3,000 feet is actually cheaper that retail store soaker hose for my size garden.
You can make your own pipe to feed the tubes with a few fittings that connect the tubing to pipe, and some common PVC from the store.
I use mulch beds, about 40 inches wide, which is a little wider than most people would use. (I have long arms that can reach that distance, reaching from both sides.) 2 tapes down a 36 in wide bed would do nicely.

I live in CA, and have very hard packed clay soil. When I begin my lasagna gardens, I put a LOT of newspaper down, soak it, and build the garden on top. Very few weeds (other than bermuda grass) and tons of worms. I recently had just built another garden, and a month later we had to dig/push the layers aside to get to some plumbing. The paper layer was still obvious, but was LOADED with worms. Worms in the majority of my yard are scarce, but they always seem to appears in the gardens. For me, the moisture in the soil covered by the paper (and other things) seems to attract the worms to the "surface". I don't till prior to building my beds, and after a year or two, the soil is dark, soft and crumbly way down below the original ground level. The worms do my tilling for me, and saves me a ton of effort. All I do is add mulch and keep feeding the beds (a la Ruth Stout). Don't need to turn, dig or whatnot. Just plant!

Kathy

Thanks guys for the responses... I went ahead and let my husband till our garden. He tilled in horse manure that wasn't well aged in my opinion, but he went without me and forked it into the garden for me, so I'm not going to complain! I have dried leaves from last fall that I'll work in around the plants when I get them in the ground, and then most likely I will put some newspaper down around the plants, then lay down the soaker hoses that my husband picked up for me and then the straw. I've already made my beds, which I can just reach to the middle of from the paths I've made and the paths are not quite two feet. I'll probably regret it later, but oh well. I already planted some mesculen, which I'll just push straw around a little as they come up to keep them cooler. I'm hopeful for a better crop this year!