Lasagna bed, so far

Here is what I started with. This used to be part of the horse pasture.

Newspaper was spread out about 12 layers thick and covered with straw mixed with sheep droppings and alfalfa hay. When I ran out of newspaper I used cardboard.

After all the straw was spread about 6 inches deep I watered it good. The white stripes are shade patches where the snow hasn't melted.

wow mary, you've been keeping yourself quite busy there! Looks great!

I'm very impressed Mary. keep up the good work. I'm sure you'll be rewarded greatly.

SNOW??!! (Said with a mixture of horror and awe!)

LimeyLisa Kay

Good luck MaryE. I'm waiting for the leaves to fall for my last layer in my lasagna garden. We lost some of our trees in hurricane Claudette so I'll probably have to rake my neighbors' leaves! (We don't have many trees in our area, unless we plant them.) Anyway, I've been reading that the leaves can be shredded by runing over them with the lawnmower or putting them in a large garbage can and using the edger (the string kind) into the can and shredding them. Anyone have experience doing this!

I have shredded them with the lawn mower. I layed a sheet of plywood on the ground and dumped bags of leaves on that, then ran the mower over it and caught the shredded leaves in the grass bag and dumped them where I wanted them. I used plywood since there was no grass where I was working in the corner of my vegie garden and didn't want to be picking up dirt.

Update and more pictures. Here is what it looks like today.

The plants are small but they will grow. See what a difference a few months makes!!

Mary Mary
quite contrary
How does your garden grow....................now?

We would love to see new pics.

Yes, pictures, please.

It may be too late, has it frosted up there yet?

Here are two photos from about 3 months ago. Some of the new plants started to get stressed from full sun and small root systems, so after these were taken I noticed that I had some very nice winter squash volunteers that were doing better than the ones I had planted in my vegie garden. So I decided to shade the stressed plants with squash leaves and now have barely got room to walk in some places! I'll get more pictures taken to post here, so stay tuned. After frost I will update again if I don't forget. Anyhow, I will watch the thread so you can remind me.

Here is one from the lower end.

Here are a few photos that I took this afternoon. Sorry for the shadows the fence rails make. This shows how extensive my squash plants are, they even crept through the fence and there are squash out there in the pasture.

This message was edited Oct 7, 2004 3:53 PM

This is the lower end, same area as one of the photos above. There's nothing like a burned stump to show off gailardia! Behind the yellow and orange combination are two kinds of pinks (kind of a carnation relative), and Autum Joy Sedum sticking it's head up through the squash leaves.

This message was edited Oct 7, 2004 3:59 PM

I have to view these as full size pictures after I post them so that is why my posts show up as edited, poor eyesight on the small things.

Healthy squash plants. See the squash on the log, I discovered that one today! The grayish plant in the back is wormwood and grows in the old part of the flower bed. The fence used to be next to it.

Upper end of the lasagna bed. Coreopsis Sunrise is the yellow, burgundy Gailardia is the red, the pink and white are nicotiana which are annuals that I hope will reseed. There are some small shrubs, liatris and another sedum, not Autum Joy but similiar, and of course the squash which made it out through the fence and produced 2 fruits out there that are too big to get back through the rails.

Looking back over the fence from the new to the old. Cleanup is in progress in the background.

The last one shows a rosebush near the birdbath, the burgundy galilardia next to the fence, and other things you saw from a different angle in earlier pictures. Hope you enjoyed it. I will try to post some more of it when the squash are removed, I'm leaving those until the frost gets them because the squash on those vines need a little more time to ripen.

Now that's my kind of garden. Flowers along with the edibles. Thanks Mary, that gives me an idea of what to do with a certain space I have. I LOVE that fence. It looks like it really took some hard work.
Sherri

MaryE, your lasagna bed garden is looking great. Your earlier work sure paid off. Hope you don't get hard frost too soon. Donna

Cherishlife, some people plant chard that is called Rainbow in with the vegies, it comes in bright colors and adds dashes of color on the stalks along with those big wrinkly leaves. I also have some parsley growing in flower beds which is very interesting when it goes to seed, and if you let it do that you will have a lifetime supply. The bees love those seed heads and the wind scatters the seeds around to come up in strange places. Radishes going to flower and seed are pretty, and so are beets but those take 2 years to make flower heads, same with carrots. Strawberry plants running here and there are cute too and could provide you with a tasty little snack now and then while you weed. Have fun!

Bumping this back to the top because somebody was asking.

Oh Mary,
You have a beautiful view.Jody

Here's the upper end of the lasagna bed under a few inches of snow.

Just think what's going on under there... LOL.

A view from the lower end.

Lots of bioactivity happnin' under that snow. Last year when the barn cleanings were still kind of new (they had been in one big pile since March and April) there was enough activity under the snow to keep it thawed out all winter. I buried the contents of my compost bucket in there and that is how I got the squash which by the way gave me 45 nice big butternuts, more than any 3 plants I have ever planted in my vegie garden. And I still have a nice parsley plant out there, still usable, they take a lot of frost. I'd say this project was definitely a success!

Cool! I hope to have enough of a sunny place next year to plan one for myself, for veggies. My amount of sun/shade in this new place will remain a mystery until all the trees leaf out next year.

More interest in Lasagna gardening, so I'm bumping this up again for blau.

Whats it look like now, Mary?

I'd like to see it too. I love lasagna gardening, makes me feel good to "create" wonderful soil from discards.

Here are a couple of recent pictures. I took this first one mostly for the sky because the clouds were so interesting. A thunderstorm was coming.

Gosh, that phot makes it look as if you live at the edge of a flat world!

This one looks from the back porch into the lower corner. The hollyhocks will be moved outside the fence next year so I can use the inside for dahlias. After putting down the newspaper/cardboard layer and the straw/manure layer I made some pathways with chipped mulch from a tree trimmer. When I dig a hole to plant something the top few inches are nice and crumbly and sort of a redish brown color. Under that I find a bit of paper sometimes and then the soil under it is hard clay. Eventually it will soften up I hope. When I started planting about 6 months after I started layering, I used potting soil in the holes the first spring since the straw layer hadn't broken down as well as it has now. In a warmer climate (winter) it would have been faster to decay. edited to correct spelling.

This message was edited Jul 30, 2005 12:52 PM

Just looked at the before photo again. What an incredible difference.

Mary,

My gosh! What an accomplishment! You're an inspiration. I'm new here and have a question. Is a "lasagna garden" one that is started with the layers you did, or has that and layers of plants, or what? Thanks so much for the neat thread. I really enjoyed the progression.

Leslie