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Soil, Compost & Mulch

New lasagna garden and root crops

16 years ago

I'm curious to hear about people's experience with lasagna gardens and root crops like carrots. How is that working?

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Comments (4)

mommyandme
16 years ago
This past season, I grew several varieties of beets, but no carrots. The beets grew very large & very tender. Best beets I've ever grown. This coming spring, I will definitely be growing carrots, as well as more beets.
tclynx
16 years ago
Ok, My only real problem with growing carrots in the lasagna bed is that you need to give em a fine seedbed, keep it moist and covering over with most mulches doesn't really work well for such small delecate seedlings.

Here are my experiences with roots in lasagna beds so far.

My first season of gardening here I didn't have much time/materials to set up proper beds so I got produce boxes and simply dumped in compost I got free from our county. Sort of a cross between lasagna and container gardening. I did get carrots though and it is wonderful to pull carrots from soft compost in your own garden. I also planted sweet potatoes in some of those boxes (down here they are actually perennial ground covers as well as food) and the ones that grew in those compost boxes were quite easy to dig up, the ones that rooted outside the boxes on the native soil are much harder to dig up. I'm moving the vines into a mound/ridge of compost with wood chips covering it. Hopefully this will give the sweet potatoes more space to grow in soft easy to work material before rooting in the ground.

I've gotten turnips and radishes from those compost filled boxes too.

I have lots and lots of onions and garlic just kinda pushed into lasagna beds all over. I usually just make sure they have some nice texture compost right under them so they can root easily.
I now have some carrots growing in a layered lasagna bed. Probably the most important part of doing the carrots is keeping the surface of the soil moist till they get growing. I used some fine compost to make the top layer of this bed so I could plant seed. And cover with more fine compost. I have drip irrigation running right along next to that line of carrots. The seed tapes seem to work well for this sort of planting but as long as you can keep the surface of a fine seed bed gently moist, you can grow carrots in a lasagna bed. Keep in mind that really coarse materials in a bed where carrots are growing can cause some really strange shapes to your carrots.

I'm planning to plant potatoes on a bed of compost and build up layers over them.

I think a deep soft lasagna bed is a wonderful thing for root crops since it makes digging/pulling them much easier. Only challenge being where grown from small seeds, one needs a fine seedbed that can be kept moist till the seedlings are well up.
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You may have some of the tree roots in that bed, depending on how close the trees are, but plants growing in soil put out lots of roots that search for moisture and nutrients the soil has. The only way to know for sure is to take a spade and cut all around the edges of the planting bed to se just where those roots came from. Many years ago I thought that pulling up the plants that once grew in a garden bed, hauling that to the compost pile, composting that material, and then hauling the finished compost back to the garden plot was too much work, so today I leave the plant material that grew in that planting bed there and cover it with finished compost and the soil bacteria digest that material right there putting the nutrients the plants took from that soil right back into that soil along with what is in the compost. Some people, that still hang onto the clean garden bed concept, cut off the top growth because someone told them they had to remove all the plant material or they would get plant diseases but they leave the plants roots in those beds (mostly because they cannot see the roots) so if there will be any plant disease the roots will have them. I have found over the years that leaving all the plant growth in a planting bed, and getting the soil of that planting bed into a good, healthy condition will do more to prevent any plant disease then anything else you can do.
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Thanks for the reply. I tried corn last fall and again this spring. The fall trial was a disaster... I only got one small ear from a three sisters garden. The spring crop has been better, but still not up to my hopes. I blame poor site selection and insufficient soil amendments. At one time, Zellwood, Florida (near me) was a sweet corn mecca. Farmers grew their crop on muck from Lake Apopka and had spectacular results. Farming has since been driven out of the area in an effort to clean up the polluted lake. The last corn harvest from the muck farms was in 1998. Although I've known about this history for years, it only recently dawned on me that I live on a natural spring-fed lake that has experienced land-spreading in recent years, and there's plenty of muck for the taking right at the edge of my backyard! So, I decided that I'd give it another go, this time trying to do everything right. Full sun, fantastic soil, drip irrigation, and protection from critters (I've had a heckuva time keeping squirrels and birds away from the seedlings, losing an entire start more than once). After I plant (this time starting in containers in case the lasagna soil is too "fluffy" for direct seeding), I'll build a "roof" over the cage made of a thinner garden fence material to keep the critters out. I also plan to enclose the bottom with boards so squirrels can't dig under the fence. This will also solve the grass problem, allowing for a weedwacker. Sorry for being so long-winded, but I'm really on a rather obsessive quest to conquer home garden corn production! I've never done a lasagna garden before, though, so I don't know if I've built it up enough.
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Here's a shot of my corn from Spring. I did everything "wrong"... straight line instead of planted in a block, shady site, last-minute soil amendments, overhead watering... and yet they are still producing very nice ears (even though they're on the small side). Square-foot gardeners put one plant per each square foot. So, you could have 25 plants in a 5x5 area, probably much more than my family needs. Traditionally (depending on variety) you might space 8 inches apart in row, with 2-3 feet between rows, and a minimum of four rows in a block. I would not be able to fit four rows in this area using that spacing. My hope is that the extra-fertile soil of the lasagna garden (I also plan to incorporate plenty of 10-10-10 at planting and sidedressing periodically) will allow for success using the Square-Foot gardening spacing. This post was edited by TheTradition on Tue, Jun 4, 13 at 19:11
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Just so you know . . . uncomposted manure will have weed seeds in it and will need something on top of it unless you are buying it in bags, which I think will have been sterilized (though I'm not sure since my manure comes directly from the farm down the road.) Peat moss isn't great in large quantities as it tends to shed water once dry. I usually just put the paper on the bottom and then also put another layer on the top, right under the woodchips that I use for mulch because my manure has tons of weed seeds. My lasagna beds really don't have lots of layers; they are: -thick paper or cardboard if things are already growing - well-aged manure - thick paper or cardboard - woodchip mulch It is best to do what you are doing - one area at a time. Be sure that you put stuff deeply enough on the wet newspaper so that the newspaper doesn't blow away when it dries. (I often do my lasagna beds on a drizzly day so that the newspaper stays wet as I work.) Also, if you are doing this in a vegetable garden area, be sure that the newspaper is printed with soy-based ink since old fashioned printers used ink with heavy metals. (Just call the newspaper and ask.) Otherwise I use heavy cardboard without printing or with only black ink which doesn't have the heavy metal content. Grocery stores are a good source of boxes and brown grocery bags are a pretty good paper layer as well. For me the biggest challenge is finding good layering material. I don't know what your sources of organic matter are, but you might be able to get grass clippings from neighbors that don't use lawn chemicals or have dogs and leaves in the fall (chop them up by running them over with the lawnmower), pick up inexpensive compost from a city composting program, or get woodchips for your topmost layer from a tree service or power line trimming crew (I just stop and ask the crew if they will dump their load in my yard instead of at the yard waste part of the transfer station when they are working nearby.) Some folks have a nearby restaurant or coffee bar save coffee grounds for them. Good luck with your project. I'm sure that you and your neighbors will enjoy the outcome.
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dottyinduncan
16 years ago
I made a row lasagna garden in early July -- just trying to get rid of some compost "stuff", shredded paper, wood chips, grass clippings and I had some finished compost which I put on the top. It looked so good I seeded a row of carrots and parsnips, figuring that I was only going to lose a couple of dollars worth of seeds. Well, they germinated very quickly and grew well. In our climate things grow quite late into the fall and we now have small carrots and parsnips fresh from the garden. Only problem we have had is that one night raccoons dug in the parsnip row and uprooted quite a few. They are still growing now and I will just pull them as I need them.
led_zep_rules
16 years ago
I have grown potatoes in lasagna beds, that worked well. A lot easier to dig out than in regular soil. Also had a fabulous garlic crop this year, not sure if that counts as a root crop. I don't grow carrots anymore so can't report on those.

Marcia

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