Lasagna Gardening

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There's no such thing as work-free gardening, but the lasagna method is close. Once you train yourself to think layering, and learn to stockpile your ingredients, you will work less each year.

Following are some of my favorite vegetables, along with tips on how I grow them the lasagna way:

ASPARAGUS

Many gardeners shy away from this tasty crop, mainly because it's difficult to grow through traditional means. Not so with lasagna gardening. I still remember the first year I planned my asparagus patch. Turned out to be one of my best vegetable trials yet. For fun, I grew a tray of plants from seed, started indoors in February. In early spring, I added the small seedlings to the assembly of roots—one, two, and three years old—that I had accumulated to plant together.

Using a mattock blade, I scraped a shallow opening in a newly made lasagna bed, an inch or two deep. I combined the roots and seedlings in the opening and covered them with a sifting of soil and peat moss. Once the roots were planted, I covered the top of the row with a mixture of manure and peat moss.

As the roots sprouted and grew, I added sifted compost and grass clippings. In the fall, I added more manure and a thick layer of chipped leaves for winter mulch.

During the first spring, I watched the asparagus emerge and grow. I invited inn guests into the garden to help me cut and eat the first tender stalks. Then I mulched, mulched, then mulched some more.

The second spring, I cut so much asparagus we had some to freeze. It was all so easy: plant, mulch, harvest, and enjoy.

Site and soil. A heavy feeder, asparagus needs well-drained soil and at least six hours of sun. The fall before planting, build a lasagna garden on the site you've chosen for your asparagus, using a base of newspaper topped with 18 to 24 inches of layered organic material. By spring, the lasagna bed will have composted to ideal soil conditions for asparagus.

Planting and harvest. The time is right when the soil is thawed and crumbles in your hand. Plant in rows two feet apart in two shallow trenches, with a rise in between. This lets the crowns sit on top of the rise, with the roots in the trenches. Plants should be 18 inches apart and covered with two to three inches of soil and compost mixture.

As the plants grow during the summer, continue covering with the compost enriched mixture until crowns are four inches deep.

In the fall, cover the entire bed with a blanket of eight to ten inches of chopped leaves or other organic mulch. Each spring, feed the bed compost enriched with manure. In colder regions, pull the mulch back on half the bed to get an extra early harvest, saving half the bed for later harvesting. Once the harvest is over, the remaining shoots expand into ferny top growth. When the ferns turn bronze, cut them back.

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