Lasagna bed with new plants?

15 years ago

Ok, I just moved to a house with a yard (previously lived in an apartment) a couple months ago and was all excited to start a garden. I plotted out where I wanted beds and bought a ton of plants, mostly perennials and a few shrubs, a week ago when the nursery was having a 20% off sale. The plan was to rent a tiller and have my husband till in a bunch of compost bought from the city into the soil. Well, we got the tiller and it did next to nothing. Even with lots of work, it only tilled the top few inches of our clay soil. And this is after we had a good rain few days before! So, I'm now trying to figure out what to do with all my plants. I don't want to kill them!

Could I do lasagna beds now? All I have to work with is city compost and some grass clippings. I have some cardboard boxes that I could use too. Do I need peat moss? Everyone seems to say I should use it, but it's expensive. I need whatever I do to be fairly inexpensive as I'm near the limit on my garden budget.

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Comments (5)

girlndocs
15 years ago
I just laid out a new lasagna bed last week and I've been installing new plants in it as I buy them.

The real secret is to make sure it gets a GOOD soaking first so your shovel can punch through the cardboard. Insert plant, backfill with good soil or compost if you need to, water in.

If I were you and had such a shallow depth of good soil, I would also pay extra attention to making sure the layer of organic matter was good and thick.

Kristin
girlndocs
15 years ago
Sorry, I missed your question about what kind of OM to use.

Congratulations! you are about to become the new crazy neighbor on your block! When you go to introduce yourself to your new neighbors, ask for their lawn clippings. And leaves in the fall.

Alfalfa hay contains substances that make it extra helpful for plants as it rots and around here it runs about $15 for a huge bale. Straw is cheaper but not as good. You don't need peat moss (if you can get lots of it for cheap or free you can use it though).

Coffee grounds from Starbucks are free. Tree services in your area might be able to dump a truckload of chips in your yard (use this for just the top layer). Stables might have horse poo for the taking. Grocery stores or farmer's markets and fruit stands might have rotten stuff. Of course you won't waste your own perfectly good kitchen waste; into the new bed it goes. Use up the city compost too and if it was cheap and looks like good stuff, get more.

Kristin
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This is exactly what I am considering. I've loved the lasagna method for vegetable gardens and now I plan to use it for a new perennial bed. I have both of Patricia Lanza's books. In her first, she said she planted bulbs by pulling the layers aside until she felt the newspaper layer. She put in the bulbs and put the layers back in place. For perennials, she spread the roots as best she could then weighted them with some sod (grass side down) that had been removed from the edge to make a mowing srip. She developed her method while living in the NY Catskills so that should have been a good test of her method. I think the bulbs will end up at the proper depth after the top material condenses. My veggie beds that were 18-24" high in fall were a lot lower in spring and now are pretty much even with the existing lawn. My biggest concern would be using unshredded leaves that could smother the bulbs which happened to me the year I didn't get my garden raked off early enough and it was loaded with leaves from our oak trees. This is a good time of year to get new beds started. Spring is busy enough.
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led_zep_rules
15 years ago
It wasn't clear if your 'city compost' was free or not, but if you have that available in large quantity, make a lasagna bed. You do NOT need peat moss for anything. I have 8 raised beds, there isn't peat moss in any of them. Put the cardboard down, put a frame around it if you so desire and can scavenge some materials. I have mostly used free old lumber, and freecycled concrete bricks, and 2 plastic children's pools with holes cut low on the sides.

My lasagna beds are always deep enough that I haven't need to get through the cardboard with a shovel for any reason. The plant will put roots through the cardboard if and when it needs to after it grows for a while and the cardboard has softened up. Pile the city compost and grass clippings plus produce scraps and eggs shells from your kitchen. I sometimes have put a layer of wood chips over the cardboard, since I can get those free, I always put in horse manure, too. Whatever free organic material you can find is what you should use. Plant your plants in little pockets of plain soil or finished compost. Your plants will love you for it! Things grow GREAT in lasagna gardens. All my ingredients are always free.

Marcia
Vic Billings, MT
15 years ago
Annica, I feel your pain!! We just moved here and I brought what plants I could with me from my nice sandy yard in Michigan. This is what I'm planning to do and I am hoping if someone can tell me if I'm on the right track, I just learned about the lasagna method.

I started digging holes to put some plants in (NOT easy!)
The only thing I have to mix with it right now is some sand to loosen the clay. I too am on a very tight, well ok, nonexsistant garden budget. I was then going to use all those moving boxes and put them on the ground around the plants in the area I want to be my garden, I used a weed wacker and cut the weeds down as close to the ground as I could, left the clippings and was going to just put the cardboard on top. I found some free river rock to use for now to hold it down, and have started a compost pile out back and am hoping to start layering it on the cardboard through the summer but it gets very windy here and I'm afraid it might all blow away!
We do have quite a bit of dried horse manuer that blows over from next door so I was going to rake that up and add it also. It's been there since last year (or longer) so it is all dried and clumped, I'm guessing I will have to break it up?

Am I doing this right?

Vic
dottyinduncan
15 years ago
Another source of browns, is shredded paper. I too have clay soil and last year I put down a row of cardboard in my veggie garden. On top of this went a couple of bags of shredded office paper (confetti type). Then a layer of grass clippings and finally a thin layer of finished compost. It was a very thin lasagna! This was on June 12th. I planted corn into the compost and we were eating the corn late August. It wasn't according to specs, but I thought, "What have I got to lose"? and it turned out just fine. I love gardening. Really, it's very forgiving and this forum has so many suggestions. Good luck!

Lasagna bed with new plants?

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girlndocs

girlndocs

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