cc >> So, lasagna gardening,
or deep mulch gardening, is an organic and sustainable, low
maintenance gardening technique. I don't have handout, for any of
you who came in, I do not have a handout for the workshop here on
paper, but you can go to: infiltratinglandscapes
.blogspot.com and download both lasagna
gardening handout and a number of other handouts.
They're all free. And I'm going to show that
website a couple more times. So, I do design and
installation, I offer that as a service, of edible landscaping.
I also do educational presentations, and I also have a
number of demonstration sites where I've worked with people to
help put in demonstration gardens.
I always do low maintenance sustainable gardening
techniques. For any of you that are
interested, October, at Olbrich Gardens, that's the O word, in
Madison on March 3rd, I'm doing a day-long workshop and I have
some other presentations going on around the state.
Those are listed on my blog. So, lasagna gardening is,
instead of tilling the soil, we're going to smother things
with a smother layer. I like to use cardboard or
newspaper. Then we're going to pile dead
plant material and livestock manure, some combination on top
of that, and plant directly into it.
In 2008, that was the first year I was at this site, I'm an hour
west of here by Spring Green/Lone Rock in the Wisconsin
River Valley on 160 feet deep sand.
So that's a sand garden. So, here are just a couple more
I want to show you. This is Highland School
District. They have really good soil.
Their lawn is really lush, and the lasagna garden looks the
same. Here's Seneca over south of La
Crosse near the Mississippi River.
And, again, this garden is on very heavy subsoil clay.
And, again, see the garden really healthy, very few weeds,
and really lush growth. So, again, here's my contact
information. I do not have a handout here for
you, but you can download it from the website.
So it's infiltratinglandscapes. blogspot.
com. So what we're going to cover
today: how to build the lasagna garden and maintain it, take you
through the growing season, and lasagna gardening pictures
because a picture is worth a thousand words, right?
So if you are a conventional bare soil gardener, this
technique is 180-degree mind shift.
Just relax in your chair, put on your seat belt because there's
going to be a lot of information here, but just look at the
pictures. These are not PhotoShopped.
These are my real photographs. So to me this idea is kind of
like Velcro or ratchet straps. It's simple, it's easy, it's
perfect, and it's kind of like, why didn't I think of this?
A question for you and if I've asked you this question before,
please don't answer it: when in nature does the soil get tilled
the way that we till it? Yes.
The only thing I can think of would possibly be pigs.
And when does nature leave the soil bare, other than desert?
Never. So when we try to have a tilled
bare soiled garden, right off the bat we're fighting nature.
In the early '70s and in the '60s, Ruth Stout wrote for
Organic Gardening magazine and also published a couple
different books. She's the first one to really
publicize having a mulch garden where you stop tilling.
If you have an existing garden with good soil, no perennial
weeds, no quack grass, no creeping Charlie, no turf grass
in the garden, I'm hearing chuckles, then you can just
mulch that soil with four to eight inches of deep mulch every
year and just plant through that into the soil.
But for anybody who has rocks or clay or sand or compacted soil
or quack grass or creeping Charlie or other weeds in the
garden, then keep listening. Plant-based mulches do a lot of
things for the garden. They conserve moisture.
They suppress weeds. They stabilize the soil
temperature. When we have a bare soil garden,
when you have a mulch garden, in the spring your soil is warming
up and it gets to 60-65 degrees and stays there through the
summer and then kind of cools off in the fall.
When you have a bare soil garden, the soil does this.
It starts warming up and then you start getting these peaks
and valleys every day. On those sunny days in July when
it's 90 degrees out, that soil temperature can be 110 degrees.
I'm sure we've all felt sand or soil that's too hot to walk on
or touch. Plants did not evolve with hot
soil. It stresses them.
That temperature goes down into their root zone.
That's why containers that are getting 95-100 degrees, peppers
and tomatoes, even though they like heat, they're from the
tropics, they don't like their roots hot because they evolved
with their roots in mulched soil.
And ultraviolet light kills the microbes and the worms in the
soil, and it also breaks down organic matter.
Those are two of the huge things we're trying to get in the soil
to give us healthy plants. So when we mulch the soil, it
protects the soil from ultraviolet light, and that
ultraviolet light kills the microbes and breaks down organic
matter. When the microbes are breaking
down plant-based mulches, they're actually breaking it
down and the nutrients that they make available feed our plants.
So there was a book published in '98 called Lasagna Gardening,
and that's where I got the idea from.
She gets it really complicated. I've simplified it.
So the lasagna garden, it's a layered deep mulch garden of
dead plant matter and livestock manures.
So anywhere around the world there is dead plant material and
there are livestock manures. And livestock manures are not
required. Dead plant material, we need
that. And then you plant directly into
this mulch. You don't plant into the soil.
So I'm going to show you pictures.
But, basically, if this was a soil surface here, we're going
to, let me see the next slide, there.
So here's a really good picture. This is the Mineral Point garden
at their elementary school. They actually had wood mulch
along the fence. So here's some wood mulch that
has some dandelions and creeping Charlie in it.
We put down what's called the smother layer.
That's cardboard or newspaper and we're going to smother the
plants by taking away light, not taking away oxygen.
So we put down a smother layer, and that goes all the way across
here. Then at this garden, we had some
stray bales and some grass clippings.
Grass clippings are a nitrogen component, straw bales are a
carbon component, and we'll go over that more in a minute.
So we put down cardboard all the way across there, and then this
is just one of the best pictures I have to show the steps of
building it. So cardboard is a carbon
component so we put some nitrogen, some grass clippings
on top. Then there's some straw on top
of those and some more grass clippings.
And then there's more straw or hay on top.
And so there I think that picture shows you the steps.
And then eventually all the way across here it looks like this.
Like the left-hand side where it's the deep pack.
Does that make sense? Question quick.
[INAUDIBLE] >> Yep, I'll go
over that in a minute. Question about the hay and
straw. I'll talk about that in a
minute. So, here's just a sample
diagram. In the book, she talks about
many, many layers, and she also talks about using a lot of peat
moss. I speculate that she's married
to a peat moss baron. [LAUGHTER]
Because you would go broke using the amount of peat
moss that she uses or that she recommends.
I don't use any peat moss. There are some environmental
concerns about are we over-mining the peat bogs, and,
in my opinion, if we use things local, that's the most
sustainable. Every municipality is exporting
or burning leaves by the truckloads every fall, and in
Wisconsin we have lots of old hay and old straw about the
landscape. So those two things are really
abundant and those are dead plant material.
So here's, whoops, so here's the existing sod, and that could
have quack grass and creeping Charlie in it.
Then we put down cardboard or newspaper, and you overlap those
seams. So, I really, you saw some of
the gardens are fairly good size, so I like to use appliance
boxes, and by that I don't mean like a toaster oven or a toaster
or a blender box. I mean a stove or a refrigerator
box or chair and couch boxes from furniture stores or
appliance stores. They have very little ink.
The ink is only black. They just have some glue.
I don't use glossy boxes like would be from a toaster oven,
and I also don't use glossy from the newspaper.
So newspapers or cardboard would be the main thing.
You need to overlap those seams about four to eight inches.
Newspapers should be about 10 sheets thick every place.
Then you just start piling these things on top, and the reason
it's called lasagna gardening is because you're building it in
layers. So this one is just an sample
but we have the cardboard smothered in some old hay, maybe
some compost, more old hay, some soybean meal, which I'll talk
about more later, maybe some leaves, a little bit of soybean
meal on top, and a little bit of ashes.
For those of you who burn wood and add wood ashes to your
garden, here's a recommendation. One, don't burn pressure treated
wood or chemically treated wood. The normal annual application of
wood ashes should be about one-eighth of an inch.
So don't be dumping a five-gallon bucket of ashes
around your rhubarb plant. You're really stressing it.
They're very alkaline. A very low amount of wood ashes
per year. So here's just a little
accidental happening. On the, whoops, on the
right-hand side of the screen there you can see these squash
plants are higher off the ground and twice as big.
These are planted in my lasagna garden.
These are planted in the sand but heavily mulched.
Notice they were planted the same time.
Everything was the same. I started but notice just in
about a month of being in the ground, the ones on the
right-hand side are twice as big as the ones on the left.
I'll show you more of that in a little bit.
Here's a YMCA garden. And notice the lack of weeds.
This was put together, whoops, this was put together in the
spring, and because it's for preschool and early school kids
so they left a lot of space. But notice there's no weeds.
This was a strawberry patch that they were waiting for the
strawberries to finish and then they were going to dig some
plants out and move them to another spot and then smother
this because it's full of quack grass.
But Lindsey there is the one who is the garden coordinator.
They had a garden for three or four years and this past growing
season with this garden, I visited there July 18th, she
said one of the students who remembered the garden from the
year before, who was probably four years old and doesn't
understand the whole gardening thing, he said, Lindsey, when
are you going to mow the garden this year like you mow it every
other year? [LAUGHTER]
Because she would mow the weeds in the garden, and he
liked that part. So kids do say the darnedest
things. And they have some hay bales
here on the side. They were able to get extra when
they got hay bales for this so they have some there stored that
they'll use in the fall. But notice the lack of weeds.
So, lasagna garden is a slow compost pile.
Please don't glaze over now as we talk about carbon and
nitrogen. I'm going to simplify it.
Carbons are usually, these are four keys words.
Carbon materials are usually brown, they're usually dry,
they're usually burnable or things that you could start on
fire but you shouldn't, and the thing that I've added that a lot
of people don't talk about is they will not usually attract
animals to eat them. Nitrogen components are usually
green, they're usually wet, they usually are stinky or would get
stinky, and they will attract animals to eat them.
So here's my comparison, if you set your newspapers stacked
outside for recycling, no raccoons, possums, rabbits,
deer, or anybody cares that you set a pile of newspapers
outside. You put your compost bucket
outside on the deck to take to the garden the next day,
somebody comes and gets into it. Make sense?
So, some examples. Some ingredients for a lasagna
garden or a compost pile, and the first list, the brown, these
are carbon things. Cardboard, all paper products
come from trees. This is dead plant material.
Newspaper, leaves, grass clippings when they're dry,
weeds when they're dry, straw, sawdust, kids' homework or
papers, and peat moss, but peat moss is really expensive.
Things that are nitrogen components would be coffee
grounds, soybean meal, cotton seed meal, which is a southern
thing, kitchen scraps, grass clippings when they're wet.
You know how when you mow the lawn and you pile up grass
clippings, they'll stink for two or three days and then they'll
start drying out? What we're smelling, that stink,
is ammonia gas which is the nitrogen off-gassing from the
grass clippings. Dry grass clippings have low
nitrogen; wet green grass clippings are high in nitrogen.
Weeds would be the same thing. If you're in an urban area,
which I've talked to different schools that are, dog food or
alfalfa pellets or chicken feed are another nitrogen component
that people can buy. Animal manures, of course, and
it turns out that hay and compost are already pretty much
in that perfect carbon/nitrogen ratio.
Yes? >> [INAUDIBLE]
Manure, yes. >> Does it have to be a certain
age before you throw it on the pile or is fresh okay?
Okay, so the question is, I've mentioned animal manures
and do they need to be old aged or can they be fresh?
When we put the lasagna garden together, it's going to most
likely sit two to three weeks, so if you had some fresh manure,
you can put that in the bottom layers and spread it very thin,
and if you have aged manure, you don't have to spread it as thin
because when we smell manure sitting in a pile, what we smell
is also the nitrogen off-gassing.
So aged manure is much lower in nitrogen than fresh manure.
So you can use either in the lasagna garden, but fresh manure
put deep and spread it thin, So building a lasagna garden, there
are five simple steps. The smother layer, which is
cardboard or newspaper, the organic material layers, and
that's dead plant material and livestock manures.
Then we need to hydrate it. There's the primary digestion or
fermentation, and this is where the most readily available
nitrogen is eaten by the microbes.
You can get a fermentation smell and it may heat.
I'll talk about that more in a little bit.
It will last like two to five days, maybe a week.
And then we can plant into it. Fall is the best time to build
it because winter will do the rehydrating, and then there's no
decomposition smell because it happens at cool temperatures.
So, I've showed you this picture.
Here's the layers. So, question?
[INAUDIBLE] >> Put it
together? >> [INAUDIBLE]
So the question was, how late into the fall can you
put one together? My basic rule, the only time not
to put a lasagna garden in place is when the ground is frozen.
So into November/early December, or this year into January...
[LAUGHTER] Other than the last four weeks,
as long as the ground isn't frozen, and so now I'm
telling you about this when the ground is frozen so do not
install a lasagna garden until the ground has thawed.
All of this dead plant material is basically cellulose
insulation. You don't want to build a garden
on top of an ice cube that is insulated.
So if this sounds overwhelming or weird or maybe I'd like to
try it but maybe this guy's crazy, just try it.
Trust me. Just try a little bit.
Just 16 square feet. Maybe a four by four plot.
Do the smother layer. Just try a four by four plot in
your garden and see what happens.
It's easy enough this fall to spread it around and be done
with it and go, yep, that guy was crazy.
[LAUGHTER] So do the smother layer.
It's really this simple. Do the smother layer, 18-24
inches deep of carbon and nitrogen layers, and rehydrate
it. Transplants you put just into a
hole, you just dig a hole in the mulch like you were digging a
hole in the ground, stick them in the mulch and push it back
around. Put a little water on and
they're planted. For seeds we have to make a
little trench like you were making a trench in the soil.
So you make a trench in the mulch, put a little soil or
potting mix or seed-starting mix in that hole or in that trench,
put your seeds in there and then they'll come up through that.
I'm going to go through that a little bit more with pictures.
And so right now a lot of people, I don't know if I'm kind
of rocking your brains because this is a totally different
mindset of gardening, but just try it and we're going to go
through more pictures, but this is how simple it is.
And how simple it is, I said four by four, this a four-foot
by four-foot garden. This was at a preschool or a
pre-K school. So these were little kids.
We used two straw bales and some blood meal.
And they didn't have a hose at school, and this is how easy
this is. They followed my directions.
They had great success. They just used cups or milk
cartons or bottles, and when they went out to recess, they
all had fun to go water the garden for two to three weeks.
So if preschoolers can do it, we all can do this.
So a small hay bale garden, so I just used little square hay
bales to make this garden. This is probably the most simple
lasagna garden possible. Question.
[INAUDIBLE] >> I don't and I'm going
to come, question was do I worry about weed seeds in
the hay or straw and I don't. I'm going to ask, can we just,
if there's clarifying questions you can ask those, but I'm going
to cover almost all these things so let's hold questions til the
end unless you're really confused.
So little square hay bales. In case you don't know what they
are, these are little square hay bales.
[LAUGHTER] So if you look closely
at this picture, you can see the hay bales.
I did not even cut the twine. They are set right there.
This was a friend who had never gardened in his life.
He's in his mid-60s, a neighbor. I put some loose hay in the
center because it was wider than the hay bales.
But see the hay bales are still intact, and I'm there to plant
that day. This is May 25th, and look at
the vegetation around there. There's day lilies, there's
periwinkle, these things that are not that easy to kill.
And what we did, I don't even think we did cardboard here, and
there's, of course, wonderful quack grass here.
No weeds here. So May 25th, the garden is being
planted. There's July 7th.
July 27th. This is a German man who is very
German. [LAUGHTER]
And he said to me, I keep talking to my friends about
my garden and they say you're going to have to weed, you're
going to have to weed.
He said, I have had five weeds, is that bad?
[LAUGHTER] I said, no, you're doing
very well. So, this is the lasagna garden
simplified. There's the sod layer, the
smother layer or the existing vegetation, and just old hay on
top. I have learned one thing since I
put these slides together, and when I get to decomp, I'll tell
you what that is. The decomp smell.
So here's my garden. Spring Green, Lone Rock,
Wisconsin River Valley, 160 feet deep pier in fertile sand.
So there was my backyard when we bought the property.
This is June 2nd. If this was decent soil or clay,
there'd be some grass growing. The people before us either had
a UFO land in the backyard... [LAUGHTER]
Or an above ground pool. I think they had an above ground
pool. So this has been all the month
of April, all the month of May when cool season grasses are
really, really happy, and nothing's growing there.
So I laid down cardboard over the existing, or the lack of
existing, vegetation. Those are mostly refrigerator
and stove boxes. Little square bales.
There's a thunderstorm coming so I got them so the cardboard
didn't blow away. If you're using newspaper, don't
use glossy but take a dishpan or a five-gallon bucket or some
container, get it wet first because then it won't blow.
All you have to do is put it in something, run water on it, let
it sit for 10 minutes or so. You can still lift it out,
unfold it, and lay it down just fine but then it doesn't blow
away. Spread the hay.
June 7th I'm still putting it but it's getting deeper.
I've got a sprinkler on it watering it.
Here's how soybean meal, so if you have mostly leaves or mostly
straw, you'll need to add some nitrogen to it.
So I mentioned soybean meal, which you can get at a farm
co-op store where farmers would buy animal feed in bulk or
seeds. Not at Farm and Fleet or Fleet
Farm. Or, like I said, dog food or
alfalfa pellets or chicken feed. Those are all easily acquired
things. And I'm going to quantity.
So this is how I spread it. My recommendation is roughly one
gallon per 100 square feet. So if you know who Jackson
Pollock is, you just take an ice cream bucket or a five-gallon
bucket and a little yogurt container or some deli plastic
container and you go out there and you just throw it here and
there. There is no rhyme or reason.
This is just I threw it here and there.
My motto is less work, more food and flowers.
So this isn't rocket science. So the hydration process.
Dry plant material is slow to rehydrate.
It is better to water the garden one hour a day for six days than
water it six hours in one day. If you water it six hours in one
day, 95% of that water is just going to run through.
When you water it, you can put a tarp or a plastic sheet over it,
and then you can water it like every other day because that's
stopping the wind and evaporation.
When it gets moist, it may heat up to 120 degrees for two to
five days and you may get a fermentation or decomposition
smell. It's vegetation decomp, not
flesh decomp. But the human nose doesn't
distinguish that much, particularly in an urban
setting. So what you can do if you're
using mostly hay, now in an urban setting you probably
wouldn't be using mostly hay, but go to my website
infiltratinglandscapes. blogspot.com
and pull down the composting handout.
That talks more about carbon and nitrogen, gives you a good list
of different things. So if you're having,
which hay is just a little bit high in nitrogen,
that's why when we get it really wet it smells.
So what you can do if you have all hay is mix 25% either leaves
or straw in with it. So do a couple layers with hay
and some leaves, hay and some straw.
And then it's like a compost pile.
Then it will be neutral nitrogen, and it won't smell.
I'm confused. So in the spring, if you built
in the fall, all the layers, would use water in the spring?
Okay, sorry, yes. So the question was, when do you
do the watering? If you're putting it together
and you want to plant within two to four weeks, you do the
watering. If you put it together in the
fall, you can water it a couple times, maybe that will keep the
deer out if things get moldy, but you can water it a couple
times in the fall just so it doesn't blow away if we get a
40-60 mile an hour wind, but you don't have to water it that much
in the fall. Winter will take care of it.
In March when things are thawed out, check it and see if it's
wet. It needs to be wet through and
through before you plant, but it does not have to be broken down,
just wet. So if you put it together in the
spring, when things thaw out now and you want to plant this year,
you'll need to take two to three weeks of watering, and that's
when you do this intensive watering.
That's when things are warmer we can get a warmer day, and that's
when you may get this decomp smell.
So if you got all hay, just add some carbon in there.
[INAUDIBLE] >> Okay.
Okay. So the question was about a lot
of different rodents and different things getting in the
garden, moles. Moles tunnel under this and it
doesn't cause a problem. There's maybe a little bit of an
increase rodent thing, but not that much.
No different than other mulch. And the thing is you won't get a
rodent population explosion because there's not a food
source. So whatever problem you have
now, this really shouldn't change it, and I can't address
how to fix your problem. Once it cools down, then you can
plant into it. Here's just and example of
getting water on it and putting a tarp over.
So the planting instructions, planting transplants.
I know it's unbelievable but, so if this is the soil surface we
stacked it up this deep, in two to three weeks of watering or
from fall to spring, it's going to compress more than 50%.
As long as it is wet through and through, you can plant into it.
So all you do to plant into it is you just, now here's, I no
longer plant in rows because I don't need a tiller so I don't
have to do rows to accommodate a tiller.
So here's me just, this is a mix planting of flowers and edible
plants. So you notice I just have them
planted here and there. I just dig a hole in the mulch,
not down to the soil, stick them in, push the much back around,
pour a little bit of water on, and they're probably not even
going to wilt and you probably won't even have to water them
the next day. That's planting transplants.
It's really that simple. Why don't weed seeds grow?
Seeds need two things to germinate at exactly the same
time. There's a lot of things, but
they need these two things at the exact same time.
They need moisture from good soil to seed contact.
So if this is a seed, this is my seed, it needs lots of fine
particles around it so that it can absorb enough moisture to
trigger it to germinate. The other thing we don't always
think about, how many people would plant carrots underneath
your rhubarb plant? No.
Because they're not going to grow because they don't get
light. Seeds need a little bit of light
to trigger germination. That tells them, so if I'm a
seed down here, if there's already something above me
making shade, it's not a good year to grow.
I might as well sit dormant and hope next year there's nothing
growing above me. So this is their little internal
dialog that I heard. [LAUGHTER]
So they need a little bit of light.
So what happens in this deep mulch, and now that it's 8-12
inches deep, there's two really critical things.
One, the smother layer the first year, and two that the top layer
be somewhat coarse. Don't put compost up there, and
don't put really fine particle stuff up there because what
happens is this is 8-10 inches deep with a coarse layer on top.
So the straw and old hay is kind of coarse like spaghetti, like
dry spaghetti. So there's no good soil to seed
contact for weed seeds to germinate.
They don't get enough soil to seed contact.
And they're getting light. But the seeds that are down here
below this, they have enough soil to seed contact that things
are really compressed but they don't get light.
And that's why that garden that I've shown pictures of, and
you're going to see more, it's 30 by 50, 1,500 square foot
garden, I used some of the weediest hay I could get because
it was really inexpensive. It was full of thistle seed,
burdock, and dock. That growing season I had less
than five minutes of weeding the entire growing season.
Not per week, not per month, the entire growing season less than
five minutes weeding because this principle works if you use
it. So now how do we plant seeds?
So how we plant seeds is once this mulch is compressed, the
top two to four inches will always be dry, but below there
it's going to be wet. So you dig a trench, you dig a
trench across here to make a place to plant.
So I dug down here. Then you put some soil.
Some of your native soil, some potting soil, some seed starting
mix, any fine, some compost, some fine particle materials
that will give you good soil to seed contact.
You put about an inch down deep, two to three inches wide, put
your seeds on it, and then cover them up and then let them
germinate up out of that. And once they germinate in that
seed in that soil-like mix, their root is going out into the
mulch. They'll be just fine.
So you just need a little trench.
So that's planting seeds. One more picture.
Planting potatoes, even easier. So you got your mulch down.
Is it a clarifying question? >> [INAUDIBLE]
What? >> [INAUDIBLE]
Yes, you have to dig down to where the mulch
is moist. So yes.
Sometimes one piece of hay or some parts of the leaves will be
weird and they won't rehydrate. They have some fungus growing on
them that prevents rehydration. What I do is if I want to plant
in a spot where it's dry, I just go to my path where I'm going to
walk and I take some wet stuff and I just flip-flop it.
So if it's dry where I want to plant, I just get some wet stuff
some place else and flip-flop it or I just move over a foot.
So planting potatoes. You've got mulch, you got your
mulch on the soil surface here, I just, because if you've been
listening to me at all on Larry Meiller or on other things you
know mulch is my garden religion.
So I'm always happy to put more mulch down.
So to plant potatoes, you just put them on top of this dry
mulch, put another four inches of mulch on top of them, they're
planted. If you want to hill your
potatoes, when they get to be four to six inches tall, just
put some mulch between them just leaving a little bit of stick
out. Do that two or three times and
that's like killing them. So I live in the Wisconsin River
Valley on 160-foot deep sand. I want to show you some gardens
for comparison. I'm not making fun of these
people, but I want you to see the difference of what this
gardening technique does on this sand versus what other people
are doing. So these are some local sand
gardens in the Lone Rock/Spring Green area.
That's their tomato crop. Actually, beans did pretty well.
This guy, look at the fencing here.
They go to a lot of work to have this garden, and that's all the
tomatoes they get. Every year it looks like that.
There's another one. This is a summer squash.
Any of you that ever planted summer squash, that doesn't look
like a summer squash, does it? They got one fruit.
This is a very harsh growing environment.
It's called the Wisconsin desert.
This is the best garden in the area.
They actually water it twice a day, and we're looking to the
south-southwest. So that tree shades it
mid-morning, and now it's 6:00 at night and it's shaded to the
west. So people plant their gardens in
partial shade just to be able to get them to grow.
And they water it once or twice a day.
So here's my garden. Now you're looking through my
deer fence/chicken wire fence. It's not laid down on the
garden. So remember, I didn't start
putting the garden together until June 2nd.
So this is late. This is a late garden.
This is July 21st. Notice the lack of weeds.
There's August 5th. Remember, this is a line of peas
that were planted mid-July for a fall harvest.
Remember them. There's my summer squash.
[LAUGHTER] And they were planted late.
There's a sunflower. It's getting on eight-foot tall
there. Isn't tipping over.
I love it when the garden is taking over the weeds.
[LAUGHTER] Those are those peas
September 9th. They started, the peas by
package were supposed to get four to six feet tall.
We started harvesting peas at knee-high.
They eventually got over eight feet tall and were still
producing peas until hard frost stopped the pea production.
There's that sunflower. That's about nine-foot tall, and
it didn't tip over.
This becomes that. And that's in one growing
season. So this is a picture, here's,
obviously, where I walk. Notice there's no blight on the
tomatoes. There's how much in compressed
in a growing season. In the path, there's that
tomato. I had to tie it up because the
head got heavy. Just showing this is what old
hay looks like as it mulches. It turns that kind of
gray-brown. There's those peas getting
taller. See all the blossoms on them?
So this isn't just growth. So the squash, this is my
accidental experiment. I showed you, I talked about
this picture. So just showing a little bit how
this squash in the lasagna garden are twice as big as the
other squash. Look at it.
Here there vines have pretty much reached these guys, and
these guys are just starting to shoot out vines.
Nutrients are more available, moisture is even, then it was
kind of a free-for-all. [LAUGHTER]
So there, this is in one growing season.
So the advantages. Soil type.
Sand, clay, rocky, compacted, or good soil, it doesn't matter.
You grow above the soil. You could do this on asphalt or
concrete. No tilling, no digging, no
weeding, less watering. Kills perennial weeds.
Soil microbes are protected and fed.
There's less soil-born disease. Soil-based tomato blight can be,
basically, gone. It recycles your garden and yard
waste. You're never muddy.
You have cleaner plants, cleaner food, cleaner boots, and if
you're at school, you have cleaner students.
[LAUGHTER] So look at these two pictures.
Those two gardens have one characteristic that one is at
one end of the spectrum and one is at the other.
Can anyone guess? They look fairly similar, don't
they? Here's the answer.
This garden is on 160-foot deep pure sand.
This garden is on subsoil clay that was full of shale.
There's the two ends of the spectrum of soil types, and the
gardens look the same. So more advantages.
The main garden work is done in spring or fall when it's cooler.
There's less sitting, kneeling, and bending.
You use your larger body muscles.
To me, it's neat looking and orderly.
There's almost no weeding, almost no summer maintenance,
very little watering, and very little cost.
I'm on this sand where people water once to twice every day.
I water once a week to once a month.
So I've cut watering in my area, what I do, to one-seventh to
one-thirtieth, and I have a bigger, more productive,
healthier garden. So you have productive, healthy,
giant plants. When to install.
Fall is ideal. There's lots of leaves and
winter takes care of most of the rehydration and there's no heat
cycle. Any time works if you can get
the materials. Just remember, the hydration and
heat cycle takes two to four weeks and you can get that
fermentation smell, but I told you now you mix some carbon in
if you're using mostly hay. The end of the season in fall,
how do you do clean up? So what started out, so this is
our soil surface, what started out 18 to 24 inches deep, in two
to three weeks is now a foot deep or less, by the end of the
season will only be two to four inches deep.
It just keeps breaking down. It's feeding your soil, it's
feeding worms, and it's decomposing.
So, we don't end up with a garden in three years that's six
feet high and we have to have a ladder to get into it.
[LAUGHTER] So, what ends up happening
is from the soil surface in the fall you know
everything down, dead tomatoes, squash, whatever, all those pea
vines, whatever, knock them down after the last killing frost of
whatever you had in there, and then you just, from the soil
surface, bring it back up to be 18 to 24 inches deep.
So you already got two to four inches, you just go on top of
that. You're also burying all of this
year's disease problems that will never come to the surface
again. No smother layer is needed again
unless creeping Charlie or quack grass or some perennial weed has
gotten in there. Other gardens, annual flowers
work just the same. In the book Lasagna Garden, she
talks about doing perennial flowers.
I haven't done it, and it doesn't make sense to me.
I want perennial crowns in the ground, not above the ground.
A myth: the soil will never warm up in the spring.
It's a raised bed, and mulch is an insulation.
My soil in my garden right now underneath the lasagna garden
never froze. I went out a week ago and I
stuck a post in the ground over a foot deep because it went
through the mulch into the ground.
It never froze. This is cellulose insulation.
So the ground doesn't get as cold.
I've had potatoes sprout from last year that I missed digging,
so obviously they didn't freeze. If you want it to warm up in the
spring, the lasagna garden, or if you're wanting to install one
this spring and you want that ground to thaw out faster, put
some clear plastic over it, or if you want to lasagna garden
warmer early in the spring, you could put clear plastic over the
lasagna garden. >> [INAUDIBLE]
No. It needs to be clear, not black.
Black blocks the sunlight. You want clear so it actually
strikes it and warms it. A myth: tall plants will fall
over. Nine to seven foot sunflower
didn't fall over, and you're going to see some seven to
eleven foot corn. This matrix is dense.
The roots spread a long way in the rich, loose medium.
Concerns or warnings. It takes a lot of material.
One truckload is basically the footprint of that truck bed
because a truck bed is 16 to 18 inches deep.
So a truck bed isn't going to do a big garden, isn't going to do
a third of this room. In the warm months you can get
the decomposition smell that might last two to five days.
In winter there's no smell. Don't install it touching
rottable foundation sills of buildings.
There are fire concerns. You decide.
You can have it a minimum of 18 inches from a building, but
actually, I've done some research since and from some
scientific testing actually wood mulch is more likely to start on
fire than hay or old straw. So here are some pictures of
gardens.
This is in Lone Rock. We have about five minutes.
I'm going kind of quickly. So while I go through those, is
there a question? Okay, a whole bunch.
Wait. Tracy, here you are with the
microphone. So I'm just going to slowly flip
through. These squash vines got 35 to 40
feet long. There's that corn.
I'm five-foot, nine. That's going on nine feet.
And that's August 9th, so it's go another month-plus to grow.
Gourd went up the tree. [LAUGHTER]
This is that Seneca garden. This is the way to trellis big
tomatoes. Put posts in and tie a branch to
it, and then run twine. Okay, question.
Wherever you...
My question is, can you use dried pine needles?
Okay, great question, dried pine needles.
So this garden turned into a jungle but there's no weeds.
This one, I'm going to come to that, this garden I wanted to
show you. This is a school garden out at
the school forest. This is fallow hayfield.
This is quack grass and other stuff.
All the difference here is they put down cardboard.
So it's pretty darn effective. So pine needles, pine needles I
would use as the top layer of the top mulch.
You could put a few in but if you put them as top, they look
nice, they're coarse, it will stop weed germination, and then
you can have it, then in the fall you'll cover them up so
that since they're slow to break down then they end up at the
bottom for next year. I want to go through a few more
pictures. I want to talk about how do you
manage big tomatoes. I will take more questions.
I have to get my computer out of here, and then I'll be outside
to take more questions because we're not going to get to all
those, but I'll be outside to take those.
So, big tomato cages. This is dead from frost, not
from blight, but this is a woven wire or field fence.
So I get the kind that's about four-foot tall, 40 inches, cut a
seven- to eight-foot length, stand it on end, make it into a
column, tie it to one T post, and then that holds it up.
Or I've started working with a friend that does welding, and
this is kind of a fun sculpture that's a bottle tree that is a
tomato cage. There's another one.
Here's a big garden. There's a couple more.
There. Okay, another question.
Can you grow blueberries? >> Blueberries are a perennial
shrub so I would still want them in the ground.
There's my handouts again. So you could, if you are going
to do blueberries and you want a clean, weed free area, do a
lasagna garden for one year with annuals and then start planting
blueberries into there, and you'll have a weed free area.
One more question. >> What about using urine as a
nitrogen source? >> Oh, you're just trying to get
me into all kinds of trouble, aren't you?
[LAUGHTER] The question is, what about
using urine as a nitrogen source?
There is a book called Liquid Gold: The Lure and Legend of
Using Urine. It is a perfectly acceptable
nitrogen source. It is at your discretion.
[LAUGHTER] Okay, thank you.
[APPLAUSE]