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!