Guest Post: Lasagna Gardening

I am thrilled to have the opportunity to introduce you to one of my dearest friends Lauren.  She writes about her life, projects and trying new things on her blog  Fancy Nonsense – http://www.fancynonsense.com/.  She has graciously agreed to guest post for me about her experience with lasagna gardening.  Enjoy!

It’s a privilege to be posting here at Little Homesteaders! This family keeps me motivated and moving towards a more quiet life in the middle of our big city. It’s like country-urban living.

I love the start of a new gardening season.  That’s probably just because I love to start things.  I hesitated this year because I needed dirt for my huge raised bed, and dirt here in the city is expensive. I couldn’t justify spending $150 on dirt when I wasn’t going to get that back from the garden. At a play date, my neighbor told me about this idea called Lasagna Gardening or No-Dig Gardening. To be honest she had me at lasagna. I’m like Garfield and could eat the whole pan. But more than that I love the idea that like making lasagna, each one is made slightly different and measurements are not super important. I’m a big-ish person, a dash of this, a pinch of that.

Here is the basic idea:

By layering dry compost such as hay, straw, manure, bone meal, blood meal, you are creating an environment that will breakdown as the season goes on and create a rich nutrient environment as your plants grow. As the materials breakdown, the plants benefit from direct access and the controlled environment that potentially has less disease and pests than the straight unamended ground. Check out the wiki link and the learning and yearning blog for more information. That’s where I started.

This is what we did.

1.  Drove the minivan to pick up hay and straw at the nearest feed store.

2. Recycled some of my amazon boxes to keep the weeds from popping up immediately.

3. Put a layer of hay down and sprinkled with blood and bone meal.

4. Put a layer of straw down and sprinkled with blood and bone meal.

5. Put down a few inches of dirt/compost

And that is what we have so far! It will be fun adding plants as the season goes on. Here we have 300 growing days a year!