CLOSED: The Lasagna Garden Brigade # 2

we came from here:
http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/t/1030412/

** see note below

Hello all! Welcome to the Lasagna Bed Brigade!

A few of us on the Seed Trading Forum have gotten together and are attempting to build Lasagna Garden beds this fall. They can be used to grow anything from Annuals to Bulbs to veggies.. is all up to you, but its a simple till free, less weeding way to start a garden bed.

newbies feel free to garden along with us and we'll do our best to answer any questions you may have!

here is a simple list of things you will need to get started on your Lasagna bed. You can go as fast or slow as you wish. You can accomplish this all in one day and plant immediately, or you can build it over time and plant in Spring.. it's entirely up to you!

be sure to check out the links I have provided as all are good resources of information on Lasagna gardening!

List of items:

Cardboard or several layers of Sheet newspaper
Layers of 'Greens" (see list below)
Layers of 'Browns' (see list below)

GREENS

Grass clippings
Tea bags
Vegetable and fruit Scraps (No Onion)
Coffee grounds and Paper Filters
Old bedding annuals
manure from herbivores (no meat eaters poo in the lasagna bed)
Pond Algae
Pine needles (sprinkle lime on this layer)
Seaweed
Peat moss
Fresh leaves and fresh hedge trimmings

BROWNS

Finely crushed eggshells
Cereal Boxes - shredded
Composted manure
Corrugated cardboard packaging - shredded
Toilet tissue and paper towel roll tubes - shredded
Dried leaves and hedge clippings
Straw and hay
Ashes from wood, paper, lumpwood charcoal
Cotton threads
Cotton string
Dryer lint (from natural fibers only like cotton or wool)
Shredded Newsprint ( no shiny inserts)

What NOT To Put In Your Lasagna Bed

Meat or meat by-products ( cheese, eggs, etc)
Grease
Salty Cooked Food
Pet Waste
Citrus or citrus peels
Onion (this seems to be a matter of preference, use your own judgment)
Any grass or hedge clippings that have recently been treated with insecticides or fungicides (if using bed to grow veggies)


Once you have gathered some or all of your materials you can begin building your beds.

here is what to do:

Decide the location and area of your lasagna bed. Lay your cardboard or several layers of newspaper down in the shape and size you want your bed to be, yup, right on top of the grass!. be sure to overlap edges. This is your initial weed barrier.

Now, wet your cardboard or newspaper with water to hold it in place. if its breezy, place rocks at edges to keep it from blowing away.

Now start layering your 'greens' and 'browns' in thick 1-3 inch layers. Alternate your greens and browns until your bed is 12 - 18 inches high. Top off your bed with a nice 3 - 4 inch layer of Topsoil mixed with composted manure. be sure to wet your bed in between each layer. Dont saturate it, but it should be moist like a wet sponge.

You may choose to edge your garden bed, but i left mine as is and it is holding up nicely.

You can plant right away. as the materials break down, they feed your plants, this makes closer plantings possible as your plants wont be competing for nutrients. This close planting makes for less weeding as well.

if you chose to wait until spring, then keep your beds covered and moist. this aides in the breakdown of the materials and by Spring, you will have a nice rich planting bed to start with!


here are a few links to help you get started!

Websites:

How To Build A Lasagna Garden - About.com
http://organicgardening.about.com/od/startinganorganicgarden...

Lasagna Gardening 101
http://ourgardengang.tripod.com/lasagna_gardening.htm

An Introduction To Lasagna Gardening - thriftyfun.com
http://www.thriftyfun.com/tf582744.tip.html

Videos:

Lasagna Gardening; Part 1 - Youtube.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpfB6lkbSwc

Sheet Mulch Garden (lasagna gardening) - Youtube.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfYmazZ2L_Q

Happy Gardening!


*** once a the thread is closed, please refrain from continuing to post in it, just carry your convo over to the new thread.. This ensures that our fellow gardeners with dial up will not miss posts due to long threads and wait times. :)

This message was edited Sep 6, 2009 4:04 PM

ya like my pic?? hahaha

This is a repost since the thread moved...

Newbie here. I want to try a lasagna garden on top of my clay/sand soil. I have about an acre and am starting to amend some of the soil, bit by bit.

Has anyone tried using pine cones for a layer? I'm in a pine forest, so lots of needles and cones available. I understand that the needles need lime to offset the acidity...but what about the cones? ...are they acidic too? They are sharp little buggers...do you think it is necessary to break them up? I don't have a shredder.

Love it!!!! This native already posted while you were posting and we left some behind. I'll go get em. :)

LOL... i thought perhaps my posts werent visible.. was about to panic that something was wrong with my PC! ROTFL

Hi Bluffles,

The cones take at least a year to break down. I'd use the needles but not the cones. Only because I want my bed to break down quicker and I don't want to get stuck when I plant into it. :)

well, seray.. could she perhaps use the cones as a mulch once the bed is as high/layered as she wants it? would that work?

Sorry seray...i'm here now.

Ouch!!!!! I used to use them at the base of my pots. They never broke down and they stuck the holy moley out of me. I'd stick with the needles and leave the cones to the squirrels. LOL

lol.. guess not. I am surrounded by sand pines, but oddly enough, either they done have many cones, or they just fall of somewhere int he woods and not in my yard...

Hey Lollyjean That's the equivalent of us all talking at once. LOL

Pretty spot for a garden Bluffles. Looks like you'll have plenty of brown with the needles. What will you use for green?

I just scored a 50 gallon bin of grass clippings from my next door neighbor...on wheels!

Are the pine needles green or brown?
I am a huge coffee addict...so I have lots of coffee grounds (and a Starbucks in town). I'm planning on the following:

My Green list:
Coffee Grounds
Pine needles ?
Grass clippings
Horse poo from my friend
fresh Leaves

My Brown list:
Egg Shells
dried leaves


Hmmmm...by brown list is sadly lacking

Well...here is another area that needs some help. Serious erosion issue...makes lasagna-ing impossible. I thought about some ice plant...but I hear they don't root very deep. but the soil is cr*p and Texas heat means I need something very heat resistant.

Here's another good link comparing green and brown materials for your lasagna bed or compost pile . . .

http://goorganicgardening.com/compost/green-versus-brown-compost-materials

locakelly
Have you got your computer with you on the plane..

Bluffles

Dried pine needles would be brown. Shredded paper brown. Dried leaves brown. Cardboard shredded up would be brown. Kinda hard to shred though. I used top soil as a brown layer in one of my beds and old potting soil in another. Broken bags of soil are cheap at Ace and the box stores.

Thinking on your sloped area. Bound to be something wonderful for that area. Mamajack might know. She's a Texas girl. I'll see if I can hunt her for you. :)

Gotcha! thanks...that solves my brown problem then. Yay...I got an acre of dead pine needles. Just have to be sure and get some lime.

The prize of the day for the best lasagna score goes to Lollyjean for that 50 gallon bin of grass clippings! Nice work!!!!

After my DH wheeled it over to our yard, a guy from down the street came over and practically accused us of stealing the bin. We've lived here 2 1/2 years, he has never as much as said hello and this is the first thing he says to us??? People are strange.

We'll get the Sorceress of the Brugmansia tribe to put a curse on him for you. :) Something like 'may his scraggly grass grow up to his ... ' You get the picture. LOL

LOL, thanks. I thought about taking some of my poison ivy over to his house and spreading it around.

Bluffles while we're waiting on mamajack have you ever considered ornamental grass for the area. I found a link that might be helpful

http://www.naturalgardeneraustin.com/nursery/grasses/index.html

bluffles you ought to come on over to the texas forum. somebody on there could help you. that soil looks sandy to me. are you new to texas or just new to daves?

Yep...I will post something on the texas forum...good idea.

mama...I am new to Daves and new to gardening and fairly new to Texas. I'm a Cali transplant for about 9 years. I just bought this semi-rural property about 2 years ago. The soil is clay...and yes, sand too. The weeds absolutely love it!

lots of really pretty stuff will too. come on over and introduce yourself.

'may his scraggly grass grow up to his ... '

LJ - that's for your neighbor;~)

Tubby - I'm not on a plane but wish I was - lol.

Oh man, I wouldn't want to be that neighbor. I'm not good with poison ivy.
What Loca ,said- to him. Yea.

I've been "lurking" on this thread for a while & think I'm close enough to lasagna that I can join in! :)

Bluffles, you could probably run over the pine cones with a lawnmower to break them into mulch. As they are, they don't do much good for the soil. Also, if you don't have lime (easy enough to get for the most part), ashes can help offset acidity too.

If you need browns, check with your local dollar store, grocery store, liquor store or other store for empty boxes. They have to pay to have them hauled off, and are often times happy to let them go.

Also, my niece has a paper-route and gives me her old newspapers. Check with your post office or local paper to see about recycling through composting.

My lasagna bed is more of a "pseudo" lasagna bed. I have large areas that I'm making into gardens, but don't have enough plants to fill it yet. So, I'm laying down last year's leaves (we have dozens of huge oaks here, shedding beautiful leaves) on top of the ground, including some that have decomposed after being in a pile for about 5 years. I'm also sprinkling in some ash from the bonfires we have had this year, and from my brother's large wood-stove. When I get it, I add to this rotted manure or other organic matter. I let it sit on top of the existing soil in about a 3"-6" thickness in order to help retain moisture and smother the weeds.

Then, when I'm ready to plant, I flip the sod over about 2x the diameter of the rootball, and break up any roots (we took down some maples that had huge networks of fine hair-like roots) with my shovel. We have sand here, so it's pretty easy to chop up. I add some organic material like rotten manure or compost to the hole, stick the plant in, and cover with whatever is around (soil, sod turned upside-down, remaining leaves). Then, I get the cardboard boxes from the local dollar store and lay them all around the plant, overlapping, but keeping at least 6" from the crown of the plant. This, I cover with the free mulch that I get from our neighbor who has piles of it from his tree-trimming business.

I usually compost my kitchen scraps, and spread them around to areas that I'm working on as it's available. But this year, I'm doing more planting than I have "greens" for, so I'm using a combination of techniques.

This is to tell you that there are many ways to skin the proverbial cat. There's not one right way to prepare your garden, and this method is providing me with beautiful, full, healthy gardens with a minimum of effort, and very rich soil within a year or two.

and if that curse dont work... there is always 'Lucy'

loca - you have dmail

Good thinking about the lawnmower for mulching the pine cones. Wouldn't have thought about that one. I got lots of old rotting leaves and woods dirt to put on mine as soon as the poison ivy and stuff that break me out ,die back for fall. Not going to plant mine till spring so will have time for getting it ready by then. Just gonna keep adding more layers until then, off and on. I got vegies growing in mine from the cantelopes and peppers and tomatoes scraps I put in. There was seeds in there. Man, I wasn't intending it to be a vegi garden.

What's "Lucy"?

Yeah...I thought about the lawn mover, too. But then I remembered how my husband just sharpened the blade all nice....and it would probably make him pretty sad if I purposely ran over the pine cones and dulled that blade again.

Lucy is what cue sends after everybody that isn't a good girls. LOL Mean and ferocious.

This message was edited Sep 6, 2009 10:29 PM

We don't want to meet up with Lucy in the dark. No way.

LOL. Sounds perfect.

Lucy can be very very not nice if you @&!$ her off . . .

Got the d-mail cue - sorry I'm not so on the ball tonight !! ;~)

Excited to have an extra day off tomorrow. I hope it's not too hot cuz I plan to be working outside to finish digging the compost into my veggie beds.

Are you going some where KT2? Look at all this information. I cant talk anymore there is just too much reading to do. I noticed Ashes from your fires going onto lasagna beds...Be careful I think I read somewhere they arent good for your Irises.
Right Mit?