Lasagna Gardening

"I'm on Oprah's website," my husband grumbled to me across the room. I was puzzled, because he despises Oprah. When I asked him why, he replied that he was looking up about "lasagna gardening," to which I so eloquently replied, "Huh?"

He went on to explain to me that it was the type of gardening we were going to do. This year we made a pathetic attempt at starting a potted garden along with what we could grow in our two aero gardens. The tomato plants died...twice. The sunflower grew to be six feet tall, bloomed and proceed to die two days later. The basil plant almost died, was revived, and somehow is still sprouting leaves, even though most of the plant has turned to more of woody substance than an herb. The strawberries took forever to sprout, they're going on strong, but are still tiny and not likely to fruit this year, or even the next. The huckleberry are growing strong and continue to flower and fruit, despite something continually eating all the leaves. (We thinks it's one of the dogs, since we don't think the deer would venture that far up the patio.) We planted the eggplant and something grew. We're not sure if it was the eggplant or a weed. Now something else is growing. Again not sure whether eggplant or weed. But they're both doing great, so we're keeping them both alive for now. In our aero gardens we grew tea and cherry tomatoes. They both grew really well, but got overgrown from lack of regular maintenance and pruning by us.

My husband was really disappointed with the outcome from this year, so he got permission from our amazing landlords to start an in ground garden and he's been planning for months. A few weeks ago, he started digging the hole. We've been vermicomposting along with keeping an outside compost pile and he wanted to mix it in with the soil we'd been using to help growth. Upon the first day of digging, we discovered that the dirt was in fact pure clay soil. Making it very hard to have a successful garden without either spending lots of money or using lots of chemicals.
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Now the phrase "lasagna gardening" probably conjures up thoughts of trying to grow wheat to make pasta, tomatoes, herbs, and some how growing ricotta cheese from a plant...at least it does for me. However, it is a method of gardening in which various types of organic matter are layered on top of each other like a lasagna. Like the lasagna layers seen below (not from our garden).




We layered alternating layers of brown organic matter, green organic matter, manure, and clay soil. Because of how lucky we are and because we'd been keeping a regular compost, all of this was free. (Thanks to our very generous landlords who let us use all their shovels, etc. so we didn't have to buy any.)

Brown organic matter is things like fall leaves, pine needles and shredded paper. We used old decomposing wood shavings from what we believe to have been a tree that fell down in the woods and one of the neighbors decided to have shredded.

Green organic matter is things like fresh grass clippings and leaves, garden trimmings and vegetable scraps. Here we utilized our compost.

We were lucky enough to get the manure for free from a horse farm down the road us. And the soil was what we dug out of the hole when we started.


Lastly we added a bunch of vermipods, which we had left over from when we started vermicomposting (more on that some other time). Vermipods are little balls of clay that contain eggs for 5 different species of earthworms. Each species does it's own job in helping make the garden healthier & better. Some eat the compost, some help aerate the soil, some live in the manure, and so on! Above you'll see the vermipods, worm seeds & worms!



Now mind you, we won't be planting anything in this garden until the spring. That's because the layers need time to decompose and turn into what they call black gold. This is the term they use to call compost once all the matter has been broken down. As the name implies, it is black gold to the garden, leaving all sorts of nutrients for the plants to soak into their roots.

So from Oprah, to Italian classic dinners, to gardening and lastly to black gold for us in the Spring. All that hard work resulted in black gold for free for us! Needless to say, my husband and I are looking forward to next fall when we harvest the plants that grew as the result of all the hard work we put it these last few weeks!

See below for a picture of our nearly completed lasagna garden. We still have two layers left to go. Then we're gonna surround the garden with flagstones and Kevin's going to plant white clover over the finished garden to help protect it until we can plant in the Spring.