Lasagna Gardening

Enlarge Image Image Gallery ILLUSTRATIONS BY ELAYNE SEARS

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If someone told me years ago that he or she had found a way to do an end run around the sweat equity of traditional gardening, a way around digging, weeding, and rototilling, a way to produce more regardless of time constraints, physical limitations, or power-tool ineptness... well, I would have checked that person for a head injury. Yet such a system is actually possible, though I never would have believed it if I hadn't stumbled upon the basics myself.

Lasagna gardening was borne of my own frustrations. After my husband retired from the U.S. Navy, we began our next period of work as innkeepers. When the demands on my time became so great that I could no longer do all that was required to keep both the business and the garden going, the garden suffered. I'd plant in the spring, then see the garden go unattended. I needed a way to do it all.

Just when I was about to give up, it happened: a bountiful harvest with no work. I'd planted, late again because of a late spring. And again, when the seasonal demands of the business began claiming all of my time, my plantings were forgotten. In midsummer, I made a much belated foray into the garden. I had to hack through a jungle of weeds to find the vegetable plants—but what a payoff! I discovered basketfuls of ripe tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, peppers, and egg plant. True, there were also basketfuls of rotted, overgrown, and unusable vegetables (the product of neglect), but the abundance was truly amazing.

To gain some measure of control that year, I simply stomped the weeds flat in between rows and put down cardboard boxes to walk on. The harvest continued, with carrots, onions, garlic, and potatoes persisting among the weeds. Stout stems of collard greens pushed the plants up to tower above the mess, despite the native morning glory that tried to hold back growth. Lower-growing Swiss chard also persevered, though I had to cut out the shriveled leaves and pull a few weeds to get to the good growth.

Flower seeds, planted in a border around the garden in the spring, came up and bloomed. As I poked about that messy old garden, I found patches of basil, parsley, sage, and thyme that had done battle with weeds and grass and won. I was suddenly very excited about the possibilities.

And the timing couldn't have been better. The inn had caught on, making my time in the garden more limited. And, as much as I hated to admit it, I was getting older and losing some strength. I was by then living and working alone, so there was no one to run the tiller. I bought a smaller model but couldn't cope with cleaning the carburetor and mixing gas and oil.

Inspired by my no-work harvest, late that fall I began my first attempt to make and maintain a garden without digging or tilling. Using no power tools and little more than what was at hand, I layered for the first time. A neighbor's son had promised to bring me a load of horse manure in a spreader in exchange for pizza and sodas for himself and his friends. This seemed like a fair exchange to me. I removed all the cardboard from the paths and gave him access to back the spreader right up to the garden. He spread about four to six inches of fresh manure on the entire plot. I waded in and covered it with a layer of peat moss.

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