When Haleigh Doyle of Eternal Returns brought up the idea of lasagna gardening I had no idea what she was talking about. She was helping me pull weeds in my epically weedy garden. No matter what I have done the wild wants to take over my garden. I am not willing to use chemicals so I either needed to become a full time weed puller or find a new gardening method.
Lasagna gardening to the rescue! This untraditional gardening method is earth friendly, natural and puts recyclable material to great use.
- Collect enough cardboard to break down and cover your entire garden. Gather rocks, bricks or other heavy material.
- Stomp down weeds flat. My weeds we incredibly thick and deep so I pulled them prior to putting down cardboard.
- If you have compost put it down first and then cover with cardboard.
- Put down rocks, bricks or other heavy material on top of the cardboard. You can wet the area to moisten the cardboard, but once it dries again a good windy day could disturb your cardboard layer.
- If you still have a harvest growing simply place the cardboard all around your crop without covering the growing plants.
- Some lasagna gardening directions include another layer of compost and cardboard or newspaper, but with the size of my massive garden I decided to go with one layer. I’ve already peeked underneath the first layer and found rich soil filled with an abundance of earthworms.
- When it is time to plant simply dig a hole through the cardboard down into the nutrient rich soil below. There is no need to till the garden before you plant.
- After you plant you can allow the plants to grow over the cardboard or if the appearance of the cardboard is unappealing to you add mulch.
- Enjoy a relatively weed free garden!
- Water as usual, but keep in mind that a lasagna garden has better water retention because of the compost forming under the layers.
After the weeds won the battle last summer I am looking forward to this new venture in gardening. By now my garden would normally have weeds covering every inch of it again, so I can already see that it is working.
I love this, I am going to try this next year. Thanks for blogging about this.
You bet!
We do this every year! Works wonders and it is a perfect way for me to get rid of any cardboard I may have stacking up!
Yes! We had a huge stack of cardboard and used every single one of them. I love to re-use.
This is such a brilliant concept! Now, if we could only make Nonna’s lasagna grow in the garden, too 😉
Right!? When I first heard the term I thought of eating lasagna.
Thank you for sharing, I will have to try this.
It has already made gardening easier for me.
It works! I had an herb/tomato bed that was thistle ridden. You could barely keep up. One year we put down cardboard to cover the entire bed. Now the soil is in great condition and the weeds don’t have much of a chance to get established.
Wow – if it works with thistles it will definitely work with weeds.
Hi, i read your blog from tim to time and i own a similar one and i was just wondering if you get a lot of spam feedback?
If so how do you protect against it, any plugin or anything you
can suggest? I get so much lately it’s driving me mad sso any assistance is very
much appreciated.
I just use the standard akismet that comes with WordPress. And when any get through I mark them as spam. I don’t have too many come through.