No till, No dig, Lasagna Gardening

I like the sounds of this method but have a few questions.

The materials I have available are:
Newspaper (as much as I could ever use)
Grass clippings (the neighbors-he has dumped them on my property cause he didn't want them on his, nice hugh?)
Leaves (as much as I could ever use)
Coffee grounds (not buckets full but say 3 or 4 large coffee cans full with more to come)
Some chipped up tree branches from a storm, some had leaves on them but for the most part its not green
Some FRESH horse manure
Hay
Straw

Questions:

1) In what order do I layer this
2) What do I need to add to make this start breaking down, don't you need green stuff to get it cooking
3) What food scraps can be added that wont attract mice rats etc.]

I would prefer not to use chemicals.

I need all the help and suggestions I can get.

Lisa Moore

Lasagna Gardening in Small Spaces author Patricia Lanza states on page16:
Use entire sections of Wet newpaper . One or two sheets aren't enough-you need layers thick enough to block light to the grass and weeds underneath. It will take months for thick layers of paper to decompose, and during that time, the plants underneath the paper will die....
Cover the newspaper with a layer of straw, spoiled hay, peatmoss, or compost. Next, spread a layer of a different organic material, such as chopped leaves, composted manure, or composted kitchen waste. Keep on alternating materials until you have a bed of the desired Height.
lisa, when I have food scraps I just make sure I cover it up enough to detract insects or animals. I place peatmoss between each layer. i believe Patricia mentions this in her other book on Lasagna Gardening. There is also a web site showing a diagram.
This is the only way I garden.
Linda

In effect, all you are doing is sheet composting and mulching as gardeners and farmers have been doing for ages. If you have enough material to make a subtantial depth of organic matter, newspaper is unnecessary unless the weeds are vigorous enough to push their way through. (The goal is to create a physical barrier to weaken them, light reaching them should not be possible except with the thinnest of layers of mulch.)

The order in which you add your layers is unimportant. You could just as effectively turn the ingredients together into a homogeneous mix. Your microbes do not care one whit if it's layered, mixed or laid out like a marble cake. Adding organic matter in distinct layers is only necessary to justify the gimmicky name" Lasagna Gardening."

Obviously, I'm not a fan of this method of gardening. At best, it merely borrows heavily from traditional gardening techniques and at worst, it's premise has a major flaw which is that it completely ignores your garden's most precious resource, your soil. What this book does is to encourage planting in a shallow compost pile, a method that offers few of the benefits that soil offers.

Much of the stuff you've listed are "greens" in the sense defined by composters, if not in color. It refers to the nitrogen levels of the material, usually high in green-colored material but often as high or higher in other, darker materials such as manure, coffee grounds and hay, though there is often a debate about the hay.

I've trench-composted in my raised beds without success in that critters would immediately dig up the kitchen waste that I buried. Losing some compostables is not a big deal but it became annoying to have to continually repair the damage to the beds. Everything goes into bins now. Anyway, in the case of "Lasagna Gardening," digging deeply enough into the beds to put kitchen scraps out of reach every day seems to defeat the purpose of a method that bills itself as requiring "no digging."

Wayne

Thanks for the input Linda.

So what keeps the grass clippings from sprouting or the hay/straw?

Lisa

I tried this method on a couple beds this year. I had good results but I can tell you it's a lot of work. The author of the book seemed to think it was an easy method of gardening but it was not! There is no 'easy' method of gardening I guess. Gardening is work but most of us enjoy it. But I did find it to be effective for me and had a great flower bed in the area I did it in. I was not all that precise about what I put in which layer . The newspaper went on the bottom and I alternated the other layers with peat moss. Other than that, I used what I had. I did not bury the 'kitchen waste' layer very deep and had no problems with any digging, but the only thing that gets into the area that had kitchen waste is bunnies.

Gwendalou

Thanks for the input.

I really dont care what it's called, the goal I'm shooting for is a good, loose, airy, soft, rich, black manageable dirt that my plants will thrive in and it wont break my back to dig in.

I will try this layering in a bed and see how I like it come next spring.