Start your own nutrient-dense sprouts any time of year to provide yourself and your family with a high volume of nutritious greens even in small spaces. This video pairs with Nicky Schauder's upcoming book, Permaculture Gardening for Everyone.

Design your garden from the ground up with these tips from Nicky Schauder. She lays out the steps for scouting the perfect garden position, including considerations for water and topography.

You don't need special equipment to start your own seedlings at home. Learn how to start seeds in small spaces and when to tell when those seeds are ready to transplant into your garden outside.

Put a garden down over grass or weeds with the lasagna method of soil building. This simple method uses recycled materials and compost to build beds that provide adequate nutrition to plants at low cost to you. This video was produced as a complement to Permaculture Gardening for Everyone by Dave's wife, Nicky Schauder. TRANSCRIPT _____________________ DAVE SCHAUDER: [00:00:00] Today we're gonna be doing a garden in-ground installation. By in-ground, I mean that you don't need any wood in order to make the edging as you would in a raised bed. So we're gonna be practicing something called lasagna gardening, where we put different layers on the, i- in the preparation of the bed so that we can suppress the weeds that are underneath it, and immediately start being able to plant in the garden. [00:00:28] So what you're gonna need is, first of all, you may need to work the soil if there are rocks, so you might need a broad fork or a pitchfork in order to work the soil and remove the rocks first. If you have very rocky soil, then I recommend doing that before you install your garden, because once you've planted your plants, you don't want to then disrupt them by digging out the rocks afterwards. [00:00:55] You're also gonna need some cardboard. This is our weed suppressant layer. [00:01:00] What I recommend, all the packages that you get delivered to you, you can just break those boxes apart. Just make sure that you remove the plastic tape from the edges of the cardboard before you use it. Ideally, you need some compost or kitchen scraps. [00:01:16] This just gives an extra boost to your garden, so that's gonna be the second layer that we apply. The third layer would be just regular soil, so it could be as simple as topsoil. It could be mushroom compost or leaf compost. So you're gonna be putting that as your third layer above the layer w- with your kitchen scraps or your garden compost. [00:01:42] Finally, you need some kind of mulch layer, just to prevent the soil from eroding or drying out too much. You can either use straw from a, like a straw bale or you could use something like shredded leaves, just to give it a kind of a coating on top [00:02:00] of your lasagna garden to make sure that you retain all the moisture and keep weed seeds out of that. [00:02:07] So I'm gonna demonstrate now. We have an area here. You can see it's quite weedy. The advantage of doing the lasagna gardening is that the cardboard will suppress the weeds, but it'll gradually break down over time, so it'll break down af- over about three months' time, and all those weeds ideally will turn into fertilizer for your new plants. [00:02:32] So now I'm gonna demonstrate with you how to build a lasagna garden. So first take your cardboard, place it over the area that you wanna install your garden. [00:02:50] Ideally slightly overlap the pieces of cardboard so that the weeds don't have a little access to poke their way through[00:03:00] [00:03:04] So now that you've laid out all your cardboard, put the second layer. This is your, either your kitchen scraps, or if you do have some compost, your compost can be your second layer [00:03:21] Once you've done your second layer of compost or kitchen scraps, then the third layer is topsoil or leaf compost, but it's a finer soil. So just dump that right on top of your compost, making your third layer, and try to smooth it out evenly across the garden bed. [00:03:55] Just like a regular lasagna, if you have a lot of soil and a [00:04:00] lot of compost, you can make your lasagna bed as many layers as you want, alternating the compost layer and the soil layer. Finally, you need to put a topping on your lasagna bed. So here I have some straw [00:04:22] And you wanna sprinkle this over, just thick enough that you can plant directly into the bed without the straw suppressing the transplant. Finally, once you've covered your entire bed with straw if you have any pieces of wood on your bed, on your property, what you can do is make edging using those logs for a rustic look. And there you have it. [00:04:57] That's how you would use the lasagna [00:05:00] method for installing an in-ground bed for your garden.  

Transplant your seedlings with minimal losses with these simple tips. Learn when and how to move your seedlings out into the garden and how to give them the best chance to thrive.

How do you know when plants are ready to pick? Can you harvest more than once from the same plant? Get some tips on how to determine when and how to harvest different types of plants from your home garden for optimal yield and potential subsequent harvests.