City Organic Gardener

I've read about Lasagna gardening for years. I'm seeing even more about it lately with the growing interest in Sustainable Gardening. A lot of people are now turning their whole yards into vegetable gardens, so with this method they can get rid of all of the grass and weeds in one shot.
For me I like to prepare the soil in my gardens deeper right from the start so I never tried it. My method is also very labor intensive in the beginning. But then I started looking at some areas in the yard that I have plans for, but not anytime soon.
The area in the photo I had fully weeded a long time ago. I keep up with the new weeds and grass for awhile but then it just became one of those things were I saw it and thought 'I need to work on that tomorrow' and never did.
When I finally cleared it out again I put down 3 bags of steer manure on top. At 80 cents a bag that was cheap. This worked for awhile longer but once again it got out of hand. One of the problems was that the bermuda on the boarders of course took instantly to the manure, then using it as a junk area didn't help either.
First I decided to weed the edges of the area so that they wouldn't be peaking out of the sides. Next I cut down the tall weeds and grass and just left the cuttings there. Watered well. Next I spread 4 bags of steer manure. Watered well. Next I put down 2 layers of cardboard. Most people doing large areas would put down one layer of cardboard, water, overlap with another layer of cardboard and water again. For me since this was such a small area, while I was weeding the edges I was soaking the cardboard in buckets of water. Therefore I was able to lay down my two layers of cardboard that were well saturated with water.
Lastly I put about 5 cubic feet of bagged compost and watered that.
A lot of people who use this method on a larger scale are more practical and have a tree service dump a truck load of chipped tree trimmings at there place. In some places the city will deliver a truck load of leaves at your house. Some people have access to manure for free where if you shovel it into your truck it's yours. For large areas it's better to hit up appliance stores for the cardboard as the larger pieces take less time to put down. Newspaper works also.
The idea really is to get what ever you can locally and for free.
I forgot to take a picture when I was done, but here is one taken about two weeks later.

Labels: Lasagne Gardening