i will periodically compost shredded paper... phone books... cardboard, etc if i need some dry brown materials... but as others note.. soy inks aren't completely "eco-friendly" to 100%. A very small portion of the inks and the coatings are composed of non-eco friendly based materials. So if you want to be a 100% organic stickler... you should recycle it if you have the ability vs route to your garden. The benefits i would think still outweigh the sliver of negatives... as many things in life are. I opt to recycle as much as possible since many of the printed items (not counting newsprint and phonebooks type media) you receive have an aqueous coating on them... which isn't like the high gloss stuff... but non-the-less isn't good for the ground.

Jessica, Just to confirm one more time that you aren't crazy, I saw a thread where an instant layered bed had been made and then immediately planted in. It is definitely do-able and I am actually making another one this year. I did one last year but I didn't need it right away so I covered it in black plastic, held that down with big rocks and let it sit and cook until this spring when I filled it with perennials.(store bought I admit very guiltily because we thought we were moving and I did not sow perennials :-( Anyway, it is doing great now and all I did was lay down cardboard in the shape I wanted the bed, directly on top of the grass. Then wet it down and started layering it with compost we had not been turning. I didn't really even layer it all that much except that we dug to the very bottom of the compost where the decomposed black "gold" was and put that on the very top. Instant beds are very much a possibility so give it try! Good luck!

This year is the first time I've tried a lasagna bed and I think it's a fantastic idea, wish I had done it decades ago. I used cardboard boxes cut open and made sure the edges overlapped well and there were no holes. They can be covered with more cardboard pieces or many layers of newspaper. Then DH cleaned out the barn and piled the old straw, sawdust, shavings, and of course the sheep manure on top to a depth of a couple of feet. Over 3 months it decomposed to about a foot thick. He's just added more which hopefully will rot down by next spring. We've also used old coffee grounds we get from the coffee shop in town and grass clippings from the lawn. One thing I did was to water the lawn well first, then soak the cardboard, and water each layer. Occasionally over the summer I watered it when there was no rain. I've had to weed it but didn't want to cover it - heard on the soil forum that's a no-no. I'm planning to use cardboard between the plants next spring tho cause I think it's a weed crop waiting to happen. In the past when I wanted to turn lawn into flower beds DH had to dig out all the grass and that's much more labor intensive than this lasagna thing. There is a lot of good info on the soil forum here at GW: http://forums2.gardenweb.com/forums/soil/ Here is a link that might be useful: lasagna gardening

Or you could get a second or third opinion if you have any reason to doubt what he recommends. Many landscapers just recommend what they've heard. Many in the nursery/landscape business commonly give bad advice. Most of the workers have little to no horticultural education and spend very little to no time researching techniques or information. I read posts on Gardenweb every time I log on about how some "professional" told the poster something that turned out not to be correct. The tree forum is a good example. I can't even count the times I have read where the nursery recommended leaving the protective cover, and even the metal basket in some cases, in the hole when planting balled and burlapped trees. Even landscape installers commonly do this. Then the homeowner is stuck with a stunted or dead trees a few years later. My experience has been that the best information is information obtained from multiple sources. Extension service publications are also usually extremely helpful. Another valuable source is college textbooks (used ones work just fine, but newer editions are likely to have more up-to-date info). I have found a few really smart people in the nursery business, but they are unfortunately the exceptions. If one source is wrong, you can usually determine that with a few second opinions. So far as drainage issues go, the next time you are at the library, check out a book on horticultural soil science. I would bet that after you have read it, you'll know way more about the subject than 9 out of 10 nursery "professionals".