Lasagna Gardening

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In the spring I had more weeds (smart weed, pig weed, dumb weed) than ever before, but they were easy to stomp down. I covered the garden paths with cardboard, then set about hand-pulling weeds from the garden spaces, easily keeping them clear just long enough to plant. Once the plants were in, I mulched with compost and peat moss. As the plants grew, I mulched with grass clippings and more peat moss. My garden spaces were smaller with wider paths, and I planted closer. I expected that as the plants grew they would crowd out the weeds. To plant seeds, I created a weed-free planting space with a mixture of peat moss, sand, and sifted compost laid on top of the rather untidy garden base.

The business—a country inn and restaurant—was year-round, but from July 4th to Labor Day I danced as fast as I could to keep up with the heavy seasonal trade. By midsummer, I found myself once again ignoring the garden. Yet, once again, the garden produced more than I expected, though it was still weedy and messy.

There was something missing. I knew I could control the weed growth with plastic or landscape material, but it wasn't what I wanted. I needed a ground cover that would suppress weeds, deteriorate, be easy to come by, and cost nothing. As I lugged tied bundles to the curb for recycling, I found my answer: newspaper.

ALL THE NEWS THAT'S FIT TO LAYER

That fall, I covered the entire garden: the paths with new cardboard and bark chips and the garden spaces with two or three sheets of wet newspaper and peat moss, layered with grass clippings and chipped leaves. It was looking good. In fact, it was beautiful-neat and beautiful!

In the spring, I pulled the weedless layers of dark, rich soil aside, right down to the newspaper, and planted.

I took time to add compost, peat moss, and grass clippings as mulch to the plants. It was some year—a great harvest, few weeds, and no work to speak of. That's when I began to think about a garden built on top of the sod, requiring none of the traditional preparation: no lifting the sod, no digging or tilling, just neat layers of organic ingredients left to decompose over the winter.

Once I found the spot—a level, grassy parking lot near a water source—I drew a sketch of a garden of herbs and flowers in a formal Williamsburg design. It was all about measuring: two-foot garden spaces and three-foot paths, all leading to a circle at the center with space for a sundial and thyme garden. While waiting for my daughter, Melissa, and surveyor son-in-law, Bill, to stake out the lines, I stockpiled the ingredients: newspapers, flattened cardboard boxes, wood chips, compost, grass clippings, leaves, rotted barn litter, old hay, horse manure, sand (left over from a building project), and bags of soil amendments bought on sale at the garden center.

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