This link within GW should be helpful, since it follows from inception to actual use. Also, you can find inexpensive copies of Patricia Lanza's book, Lasagna Gardening, on eBay. She also has a book for small space lasagna gardens. I am building my first bed now and have been reading everything I can find. Google lasagna gardening and you'll be surprised at how much you find. Good luck. Laurie

Here is a link that might be useful: Lasagna Gardening

Thanks, Laurie! The recipe in there really helps a lot! I showed it to my DH, and we are going to try it for our veggie garden for next year, as well as giving it a try for the next flower bed. I'm looking for a copy of the book, but if you find more sources, please let me know.

Thanks again, Emmie

Good luck Emmie - this method has worked so well for me in recent years. When you put the newspaper layers down, wet them well with the hose so they don't fly away, and it helps them start decomposing. After that, anything goes - whatever organic materials you have on hand, dump them on there! It certainly won't be completely decomposed in the fall but you can definitely dig holes in it and plant in there, and next spring, you'll have a beautiful garden bed teeming with worms.
Ellen

How many noodles does it take to make a lasagna garden? :D Just had to say that...

Cardboard will work instead of papers also.
Check out any furniture, electronic, appliance stores dumpsters for more cardboard than you can ever use. I used more than 60 appliance boxes in my last lasagna garden!! Make sure to take off any tape or it will be there forever.

Lee

Heathen: Every time I mention "lasagna garden", people say "How clever! A garden full of tomatoes, basil, oregano..." I have taken to looking at them and saying seriously "Yes, but can I grow mozarella in shrub form, or does it need a trellis?" (Noone seems to know...)

Thanks Ellen and Lee. I'm definately doing this in the fall, and letting it sit 'til veggies go in next spring. I'm also going to do it in the spots for the next perennials and roses. My DH is very happy to hear he will not have to till!

Has anyone used permeable black plastic mulch as their mulch layer on top? I use it now, and I love it for weed suppression and such. I might cover the beds with it, at least for the winter.

Thanks again,
Emmie

hi Emmie - in my opinion the newspaper or cardboard is more beneficial because the worms love it, it adds essential "browns" to the mixture (which speeds its decomposition) and you never have to clean it up/remove it later. The plastic mulch looks awful after a few years and you may be picking it out of your soil for years to come (that's my opinion, I have never used black mulch)....

Thanks, Ellen. I've used a product for the past few years from Gardener's Supply, it's permeable to water and is removed after the end of the season. I might still use it on the veggies, and then remove it in the fall. I agree, though, the permanent black mulch can look unattractive, especially over time. I won't use that under my more permanent plantings.

Maybe I should just use a layer of bark mulch.

Emmie

My first 25x8' bed is nearly complete. I had this brilliant idea (not!) on how to improve my recipe. Boy, did I mess up. Living in midcoast Maine, lobster was our meal of choice for 4th of July. While ordering lobster, I asked for, and received, two 5 gallon buckets of crab shells from our seafood supplier and dumped them on top of the 8" partially composted manure I had just layered. The next ingredient was grass clippings. After my husband commented on the unusual aroma coming from that area this morning, I went out to check and broke into a sweat. Flies everywhere, I was in fear the neighbors would call the EPA on me. I started looking around for something to layer on top of the "greens" and added a dusting of peat and an 8" layer of hay. It seems to have controlled the smell and the flies. The plan was to let this bed cook until next spring but I am considering putting black plastic sheeting on top of the bed to get the bed warmed up and composting quickly, but am concerned about the earthworms. Will they be killed as the pile warms up?

Emmie, I bought Lasagna Gardening by Patricia Lanza on eBay for about $8 including shipping. Good luck. Laurie

No, the worms will be o.k. They wiil move out of the lasagna bed until the temperature comes back down to a comfortable level for them.

Lee

Thanks, Lee. I needed reassurance. Laurie

laurielilac, put a good layer of leaves on that bed if you have them. I use a large amount of crabshells in my compost. As long as they are covered good they break down in a couple of weeks. I can usually turn my pile after 3 weeks and there is no smell.

If you can cover them up to get rid of the smell they are great for the soil!

Carey

Thanks, Carey. I'm headed for our woods today. Having recently moved to the country from the city, I had a cleanup crew come in May and take two truck loads of, what I then considered debris, off. Then I found GW and "enlightenment." Never thought I'd get excited over manure and worms!

I've just read the lasagna garden book. I have two questions - is peat moss environmentally sound? and is this really just planting in a compost heap?

Here's a experiment I did with lasagna style gardening recently.

Here is a link that might be useful: Experiment

laurielilac, did the leaves take care of the smell or did you have to cover your bed?

Hope everything worked out.

carey

emmie9999,

Here is a link inside gardenweb to my lasagna bed, starting at the beginning. I add pictures about once a month to show the development of the plants. It is a tropical garden including bananas, cannas, elephant ears, etc. in zone 5.

Lee

Here is a link that might be useful: lasagna bed

You don't need peat moss. Shredded leaves are better and cheaper (free).

If worried about the smell of crab shells, etc- pile them up and run through a hot compost cycle. Add the 1/2 finished compost as a layer. As long as the bed doesn't get hot, there's no reason not to plant in it before it's finished.

I have a ton of fireplace ash from burned paper and books (Don't ask) - Can I use these as a layer since books come from trees or would there still be too much chemical in the ash?

Chrislyn - any time you use ashes, only just a sprinkling. Don't know about the chemicals, or how this would compare to wood ashes.

Hi,

If anyone has advice or suggestions on this it'd be appreciated. New to this lasagna gardening though seen alot of the comments/posts and briefed through the book. We didn't have time to do the entire garden bed yet and also didn't have enough of the mulch materials but I had to plant some bareroot roses in the ground so we dug up our bermuda/zoyzia? sod and I laid newspaper with just 3 things; peat, composted manure, peat and soil conditioner and so on until it reached the bottom of bud union which was probably about 9-10 inches high but I read that 12-24 inches is recommended for a lasagna garden. So there's what looks like 5 giant ant mounds covered with pine straw in our lawn. We plan to eventually mulch the entire bed. My questions are:

I planted the roses/roots on top on newspaper, will it go thru the paper or should I have dug holes in the paper for the roots? And as I planted individual plants the effect was more like a rounded mound instead of a flat lasagna style and is that okay?

In her book she doesn't mention digging up grass but I heard Bermuda was tough and would still go thru. We placed some black weed control fabric for a Thuja bed previously and the grass still came up...Arrghh! Does anyone have experience with this grass in a lasagna garden and the results?

Is "Soil Conditioner" an acceptable mulch? Should I add more levels of mulch to make it the recommended 12-24 inches? And if this mulch eventually breaks down will I need to constantly add more mulch to keep the level at the bud union of the rose or will the rose sink with it? Should I just replant the roses deeper when it fully breaks down??

I know I have many questions but any help is appreciated. Thank you.

Hi, I have no idea what soil conditioner is, so no advice there. Makes it soft and manageable? :-) I don't buy anything to make soil, I compost a lot and scavenge other people's bagged leaves, get free horse manure, free wood chips, free old produce, etc. and just make layers over cardboard when I need to build a new lasagna bed. I have never put peat moss in a lasagna bed. It is completely unnecessary.

It really helps to plan ahead to make lasagna gardens, since leaves are a great component in them, but mostly only available in quantity in the fall. Find out who in your area has animals, and get some free manure, the older the better. Ask at the store for the bag of corn husks when the corn is on sale. Get coffee grounds from Starbucks, etc. Be creative.

For a lasagna garden, basically put down a layer of cardboard (I have abandoned newspaper for this purpose, cardboard is so much easier to work with and thicker.) Then build layers of various organic materials such as leaves, grass clippings, coffee grounds, finished or unfinished compost, wood shavings, manure, what have you. You can sprinkle on a handful of wood ashes but not much. If you have some spare soil, sprinkle that on the top.

I am confused about the mound part, are you saying the soil between your rose bushes is a lot lower than where they are planted? Generally one builds a big area up as a lasagna bed and it is all the same level. If you just mound stuff up in various spots I imagine some of it will come tumbling down again. I never made lasagna beds 24 inches tall, just 8 to 15 inches, and seems to work fine.

With roses you will have to topdress with compost and other organic material every year as the layers decomposte and get shorter. Wood chips decompose slower than other items so I like to put that as a bottom layer in my lasagna beds over the cardboard. I like to put horse manure on top of that to help the wood chips rot. Manure also goes well next to leaves. If you are planting big plants into it of course the manure should be aged a bit. Again, I stockpile that and let it sit in large containers and use it the following year.

Marcia

Thank you, Marcia, for all the good advice and tips. I'm going to check Starbucks next week for coffee grounds.

Request info on Lasagna gardening. How do you stop the decomposing compost from getting to hot and "burning" all your plants? Got a truck load of compost and used it as mulch one year and it just about killed everything by burning it. You could see the steam rising as it decomposed. Don't want to go through all the effort and money to lose everything. Any suggestions?