Lasagna Garden

Lasagna garden in Powell River, BC

We started collecting seaweed about a month ago for this big project, after getting permission from the landlady to transform the front lawn into a garden. It’s ironic that this area receives the most sunlight, whbile the actual garden in back suffers from the neighbour’s stupid cedar trees all in a row, shading almost everything especially during the winter months.

Then, as the weather was quite sunny and warm-ish, we plotted out the 2 garden beds, so that they left a good-sized pathway between, and created a more organic structure than the rows I hate so much… it’s a keyhole pattern. This was done on paper, and then redone with sticks set into the ground, and string between them: here’s some video of the ‘walk-through’ and some of the images you see below: http://www.rabideye.com/lasagne.html

A trench bordering the decided-upon shape that is 4 feet wide from all sides (2 ft access in both directions) was made: pretty easy with the right tool — a flat spade thingy was used to press down into the soil creating a 4 inch “rail”, that was then just popped/pulled out of the ground –you see those bits above in the middle. Those grassy strips were taken out of the proposed garden and put under black plastic so that the grass will die, and the nice spongy root material can be used as compost.

The trench allowed me to (with the help of a box-cutter to score the cardboard) fold the cardboard into the sides like you see above– this is to create a barrier that (hopefully) the rest of the lawn will not jump. We’ll see…

Then the straw was added, covered by the maybe 30 gallons of seaweed (much of it actually looks like strips of lasagna!) and on top of that, I emptied out the compost pile that has been stewing since Spring (the bottom half, anyhow), and added lots of water.

Next steps include getting some sheep manure and some topsoil.

The idea is that the worms in the grass and the many compost worms will form a union to transform the soon-to-be-suffocated grass/moss and cardboard, seaweed, straw and compost into a nice rich loamy soil that we can plant right into. This, with really almost no digging (except for the trench that took maybe 20 minutes).