The ground floor of the garden

The Lasagna Garden book says you can just lay down wet newspaper or cardboard right over your existing lawn to start the beds. What this does: Putting newspaper or cardboard over the lawn will kill it & force it to decompose, eventually forming a beautiful layer of compost for your plants to grow into. Since the newspaper or cardboard will also decompose, you get dual benefits without all the cost & labor of renting a rototiller & tilling the soil for the new garden. This new, dark & moist area is also perfect for earthworms, which are great garden helpers! I thought, "Sweet!" all those benefits with so little work!... except that I only had 2 newspapers in the house & no idea where to get more for free. So, my daughter & I were off to Walmart to see how many boxes we could get from the employees stocking the shelves. I felt like a hobo, but the boxes were free & they were going to help me create my new garden, so I got over it. We collected quite a few boxes, rather quickly actually!

By this time, I had already decided to lay out the garden in a 4' wide strip, almost the length of our house, and have it 3' out from the house for drainage & ease of working the garden. It ended up being about 4' by 22.5'. I had no idea how much "bedding material" (compost, cow manure, peat moss, etc.) we would need, so off we went, on what turned out to be the first of four trips to Lowe's, to buy the materials.

I should also mention that we had already planted our green beans & installed trellises along the fence for them to grow on. Here's a photo of that area. The funny thing, about the green bean plants, is that all the skinny, scraggly plants on the right two-thirds of the area were started as seedlings in the house and then transplanted outside. The nice, full plants on the left were just the "extra" seeds I planted instead of throwing them away. (I had already soaked them & they were starting to germinate, so they couldn't be kept if they weren't planted.) I guess I should have started all of them outside! Both my kids enjoyed planting these green beans & are having fun watching them grow!

How our garden came to be...

April, 2008:

It all started when my son, who is in Kindergarten, brought home a Styrofoam cup full of dirt.... well, dirt & a pumpkin seed. Excited, he asked me to help him water it and find a place for it to grow. Over the next week, we watered the dirt and kept the cup in the window sill, hopeful to see something green emerge. Eventually, the dirt was pushed up and a small green stem emerged. The seedling continued to grow. First, the seedling leaves appeared and then the first true leaf.

During this time, my son also brought home a sad looking plant in yet another cup. This one was a Lima bean plant. To make a long story short, the lime bean plant was already on it's way out and died within a few days, but the pumpkin plant looked promising until an unusually warm day about a week later. The plant still had it's one true leaf and it was growing rather large. It looked like it might start growing another leaf, but the heat of the day proved too much. I guess plants weren't meant to be grown in Styrofoam cups! By that evening, the plant was wilted and basically dead. It was gone by the next day and I had a very upset 6 year old boy on my hands! With tears streaming down his little face, he asked me why his plant had to die. I felt so bad for my little guy!

Over the next few days, I thought about how distraught my son was. I thought about gardening as a kid, growing strawberries, zucchini, and tomatoes with my parents, and how much fun it was. I thought about the unrealized garden plans I had for my own backyard for the last 10 years, the seeds I had purchased over the last few years that hadn't been planted, and I thought about how much fun it would be to have a REAL garden for my kids to enjoy.

*Moment of truth*

That was it... we were going to have a garden!!! Now, where should we put it? What should we grow? How big should we make it? How will I dig up the sod? EEK!! Now, I was a little overwhelmed, but figured we could do this if we planted seeds inside to start growing in order to give me time to make the bigger decisions. So, we got a bought of dirt, some peat pots, and a few seed packets. I also gathered the seeds I knew were around the house, garage, etc, and started planting. Before long, I had two window sills full of little pots of dirt, two excited kids, and crossed fingers in hope that we wouldn't kill any more plants! But, I kept finding seed packets I had purchased over the last few years. Since we were starting a garden, it made sense to plant a little of everything we had.

OK, that was a dumb idea! Now we're out of pots, window sill, room, and we still have several different seeds we haven't planted yet. By traditional gardening standards, we probably had enough to plant our back yard, and a couple of our neighbors. We needed a better way! I had heard of square foot gardening, knew there was a book about it, and knew it meant you could plant more plants in less space, but I didn't know much more than that. So, I was off to the Internet to see what I could find..... Apparently, the information is pretty closely guarded, so I headed to Amazon.com to see if I could get enough information from the pages I could read for free to start the garden outside.

I got that 4' x 4' blocks were good garden sizes, so I picked the garden spot and started digging up the sod. Mind you, it was about 90+ degrees outside, and we have Bermuda grass, so work was slow. I dug up a 1' x 2' plot and I was done! I thought I was going to die; I had no idea removing sod was so difficult!! After a nice, cool shower, I went back to Amazon.com. I decided I needed to purchase the book and see what I was really in for! Amazon suggested another book for me, called "Lasagna Gardening" by Patricia Lanza. The cover was interesting, so I clicked on the book and started reading the "teaser" pages. Within a page or two, I was hooked! This was my answer!! This book showed how to start a garden without digging up the sod!!! Instead, you build UP from the sod. It is a non-traditional way to garden like square foot gardening. So, I bought both books to see what information they held. After I received both books and read the key chapters of each, I decided to form the garden beds via the Lasagna way and plant the square foot way. The square foot garden book has much more detailed information about planting while the lasagna method of building the garden beds gave me an easy way to get the garden started, which is great and very timely because I had many seedlings growing too big for their pots!
In the next post, I will explain how we built the beds and show photos of the work in progress.