The most bestest thing you can use to build your Lasagna bed is those tree leaves that fall off the trees around your every year. They are free, abundant, and full of nutrients plants need to grow. Maybe, if tree leaves are not very readily available, hay could be used but that would be expensive if you have to buy it. Hay, since it is used as an animal food, is a relatively good nutrient source although not complete so other materials need to be added along with the hay. Straw would be a good, although fairly expensive, source of carbon, but since straw is the residue from harvesting grains there is very little of the nutrients in these plant stems because most all have been used for the seed heads, the grain. Since hay should be cut in the blossom stage, for the most nutrition, there should be very few "weed" seeds in hay, while straw not only will have some of the seeds left after threshing there is a good potential that "weeds" also have grown up and produced seeds, although I have seen very little of that when I did use straw. Since Oat straw is the most readily available around here all I have seen germinate and grow was some of the Oats, which would provide more of what I put down.

Hay and straw are both good in their own ways, if you can get them free. Through free cycle, I've connected with a local woman who gives me a mixture of straw, hay, wood shavings, urine & poop after cleaning up her collection of pet rabbits & guinea pigs. She fills trash bags that I give her. That is my only cost. She e-mails me after she's cleaned the cages & I co-ordinate the bag pick-up with other errands in her neighborhood, so I'm not burning any extra gas. I have also been fortunate enough to occasionally (not every year) find bales of hay and straw that have been tossed in the woods after the Halloween / Thanksgiving season. The dumping spot is close enough to my house that, we can flip the semi-rotten bales into my garden cart & wheel them home, one bale at a time. This past fall, I dragged 3 or 4 bales out of the woods. I also get huge quantities of grass clippings and chopped leaves from a local lawn service. The 2 keys to great lasagne are "a wide variety of ingredients" & "free".

Hi,
Thanks. That gives me some ideas. There are lots of horse places near here. the problem is that I drive a little sedan and so does my DH and I'm not sure anyone will deliver :)
Has anyone tried pet stores?
This is a last minute thing for me since I ordered my plants already and was just going to put down a bit of peat moss and manure and compost and mix it into my soil and hope for the best :)
My plants should be arriving in a week or two!

A feed & grain is the place to go, not a pet store. Maybe you can buy a few bales from one of the horse farms. I can fit 1 bale in the trunk of my 4-door mitsubisi mirage. It's a tight fit, but it can be done.

I live in surburbia, but I can find bales of straw at local garden centers. It probably cost more there than in a feed store, but feed stores don't happen in suburbia. And I can fit one bale of straw into the trunk of my little Honda Civic.

Karen