I'm doing the lasagna thing for the first time this year. It'll be flowers, not veggies. I hope it works, because I'm trying to kill off a weedy mess. I called a locallly owned appliance store for the cardboard. They told me that a particular two days of the week are the best times to come by. I've gone by twice and filled my station wagon with washer & dryer boxes both times. I used the first batch to cover a large area that I wanted to mulch. It used to be an area with ugly grass/weeds between two of my flower beds that was hard to mow. It looks much better now, and my pumpkin & watermelon plants are enjoying crawling up into the area. No crabgrass has shown its nasty self so far. Early this spring, I did a similar thing with newspaper around my veggie beds, because I was tired of all the weeds growing into them. It's been fantastic all season - almost no weeding. The cardboard was a lot faster than the newspaper - it took practically no time to get it positioned. I'm lucky in that a local horse owner leaves bagged horse manure free for the taking. But I've heard most barns will let you help them clean up in exchange for manure. (Gee.) And at my local dump, I can get virtually unlimited grass clippings & leaves. I've heard calls to locally-owned landscapers will yield grass & leaves in the appropriate seasons. Sure, I'd love to know that they weren't treated with anything, but I figure in the end the benefit outweighs the risk. If you connect with landscapers, you have even more control. A locally-owned coffee shop (getting the theme yet?) will collect coffee grounds for me if I just leave them buckets. I bought a couple at Lowe's for a couple bucks since I felt bad leaving kitty litter buckets (the ones I had handy) at a food establishment. Starbucks has a program for this, too - you can go into any Starbucks and pick up used coffee grounds. You don't get a lot of volume that way, but if you're driving by - heck, it's free. Apply cardboard, then compostables. In my case, let it all overwinter and plant next spring. Sure sounds easier than the double-digging I did for my veggie beds! Especially when you consider all the granite rocks we had to haul out here in New Hampshire. When I lived in the SF Bay Area, they used to use goats to control weeds along some roadways. People had herds & portable fences they rented out. I thought that was pretty cool.

Kimmsr, I agree that we should all try to minimize our use of nonrenewable resources in the garden. Perhaps a better approach for me would be to make sure that the llama pellets are well moistened and then to cover them completely with something like grass clippings to retain the moisture. I too have had good success using cardboard to kill off lawn for new garden beds. I used to strip all the sod off but I finally learned that that was way too much work and that the organic material from the decomposing turf will add to the soil quality of the new bed. I do have a number of pieces of scrap glass around so I may try using those instead of clear plastic to increase soil temperature and retain moisture. You know, I think what would really help me most is to have an easy method for crushing llama pellets into a powder. Any suggestions for that?

Thank you for your comments. I'm gardening for the butterflies and hummingbirds so my main intent is to keep some nectar and host plants, both annual and perennial, alive, so I can get a jump on spring. I don't care that they bloom through the winter, but want to encourage them to begin growing in early spring before they would if planted outside in my beds. A rest period or slow down in growth through the winter is fine. I'll be using a heater, a fan and wire shelving, so as to permit the best air circulation for the tiny space. One long side will have a southern exposure, the door end will face east and the northern end will have a privacy fence behind it, which I hope will help block winter winds. I'm very new to a greenhouse experience so my expectations may be totally off. Mary Here is a link that might be useful: this is the little greenhouse I've ordered

I use 4' wide strips of woven, black polypropylene weed barrier in my garden, and it actually works, more often than not, as insulation, keeping the soil cooler and a more even temperature and moisture. There are small air pockets, a few layers of organic mulch and compost from the growing beds under the plastic, giving a pretty good heat transfer barrier. An interesting phenomenon is to be out there transplanting stuff, and the black plastic is almost too hot to touch so I need to sit on a bench, and the planting soil is cold. I routinely grow cool weather crops like spinach, peas, fava beans, and so on with the weed barrier right up to the stems. It certainly would be worth a try, but I'd keep the layer of newspaper down to the bare minimum, like one sheet, to stop weeds and allow the best transfer of heat energy. Otherwise, the paper would act like insulation and actually might keep the soil cooler. I proved to myself this past summer the difference on soil temperature and growth rate of both tomato and eggplant. Soil in a 10 gal container heated up considerably faster and the plants grew at least 2x as fast, yielding at least 2x as much as the garden plants. Now, if I can figure a way to heat the soil in an entire bed.....