Wisconsin Public Television University Place Garden Expo 2012  Roger Reynolds Deep Mulch Gardening  February 11, 2012 UP685   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 forming 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] Right. 

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, 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 saying 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]