Yes, I bought the book. Not worth buying. There's a forum on Garden Web---Soil, compost and mulch---where you can learn a lot more about sheet composting than you can from Lanza's fluffy book. Lanza irritates the heck out of me---copying Ruth Stout's gardening methods and never so much as a wink in her direction.

This is the exact procedure that I do and have been doing. I do not know about cold areas of the country, but here in the Buffalo area it works great for me. The reason I started doing it was that I wanted to plant these critters in a basically basic soil situation, sweet, yes, but not good as we know. I wanted drainage. I wanted a high organic matter content, in fact, here is what kicked me into the beehive. From my reading and looking at research the comments were that the ideal growing substrate was LEAF MOLD. Last winter I used alternating layers of shredded office paper and coffee grounds. This year I have compost, leaves, light layer of manure, leaves, pine needles and then a top dressing of coffee grounds. I got it about a foot to 18" tall. To plant I cleared an area for each plant. Into that area I placed a soil mixture, tuned to acidic loves of rhodies. I am using small shrubs so this area might be a foot to two feet in diameter. Into that soil mix goes the plant. Now I have a huge bed with, if you will, rhodo pimples here and there, along with some arborvitae. The soil mix is as high as the lasagna. But the lasagna will decompose and shrink? Oh baby I hope so, cause that means it is going the way of the dodo bird. I will simply keep layering things on top. Can you say replenishing organic matter? During the spring this will be rough bark or other mulch. In the fall, there we go again with layers of leaves, etc. Mangia mangia!

When we had our recent thaw, I went outside and shoveled some of the snow aside, put down cardboard and newspapers in places I wanted to start a lasagna bed, then shoveled the snow back on top of them to keep them from blowing away. I figure it will give me a head start by keeping the ground moist and the melting snow moisting the paper and cardboard. Then, in the spring, I'll order some manure to put on it. I am also saving compost from kitchen scraps to dump on the bed whenever I can. I have a plastic garbage bag inside one of those TidyCat buckets and when it gets too full (or too smelly), I'll just tie up the bag and put it outside, or dump the pile on the bed. I am told that you can start a lasagna bed anytime and even start one in the spring and plant in it right away. It may not be that pretty then, but the soil/compost still breaks down and creates good soil even while the plants are growing. Cut a hole where you want the plant, maybe put some potting soil in the hole, then pluck the plant in the hole.

hellerlake wrote ... "The arborist's chips I have gotten always came full of shredded leaves and/or needles which begin to break down immediately. There's plenty of nitrogen/organics. As for mulched beds that have not loosened up, what were they mulched with? Bark? Bark is naturally imbued with a waxy substance to protect the tree from moisture. It's suberized. It never really breaks down, and incorporates into the soil because of the suberization. Eventually, it breaks down into waxy, little fibers that form a crust on top of the soil. " An arborist friend once had a 25' tall birch tree-spade moved to his front yard. To start, the hole was half where the lawn was, and half in shrub bed that was never rototilled - same soil to start - but had a barkdust layer maintained for at least 10 years. The half circle in the lawn when dug, was pretty much unchanged. But old bark had decomposed enough to improve the bed soil. Down to 12" depth it was darkened some, and crumbled. It was handy to have seen the side-by-side comparison where the soil history was known, to see the change on the bark side, versus the lawn compacted by mower tires and bag weight side. Sometimes I've applied both. The last home in south Oregon, I put down about 8 truck loads of the chipped tree branches first, then laid barkdust on top for a more groomed look. 20 years ago, when we got about 30 big truckloads at my mother's 2nd acre in Beaverton, the wood chips with plenty of branch wood broke down pretty quick, which was nice. Thought it may be worth adding ... One golf course superintendent I worked under at Columbia Edgewater Country club in Portland, some year back, used to add fine barkdust to the sand for some of the new greens. It was because they decomposed - but decomposed slowly. The new greens were about 3% to 5% bark and the rest sand. His education was in agronomy. From what I've seen since then, the method makes sense.