WOW - That IS a Large Slope

Always remember - I AM NO EXPERT

So I left you off with my discovery of the term and idea of Lasagna Beds.

Now I had a plan. I had a map of my yard with an outline of the house and where the trees were and how much area they would cover. All I had to do was find the perfect spot.

At first I thought I had it. With our lot on a slope I was steering away from the obvious spots. The only other flattish area was perfect, except WE would not really be able to see the garden. That is one of the major things you would like out of a garden. The ability to actually SEE it.

So my only choice was to put the 14x8 foot garden in the other perfect spot. Dead center (left to right) of the yard 2/3rds of the way down THE SLOPE.

DJ saw me pacing back and forth, muttering and drawing and hemming and hawing and walking up the slope and down the slope and scratching my head and then I just started staring.

I spent a few days with this little problem always in the back of my mind, always there but never really showing itself, just tumbling around like socks in a dryer, waiting from some moment of spontaneous inspiration.

Then, it came. I WILL BUILD A WALL!!

Well - when it comes to some major terra forming of my backyard I'd like to have some help (also known as a scapegoat) so I called my buddy Elwood who has been virtual gardening for years. He also has this streak of perfectness which might come in handy.

Neither one of us have ever done anything like this before which makes DJ a little apprehensive, but I tell her that there is little chance for death from cave ins or anything and WHAT CAN POSSIBLY GO WRONG!!

I have the area already strung out and we go look for some field stone from Madison Brick and Block. After deciding on some Copper Mountain 8" Wall stone ($14 per 100 pounds) we put a bunch in the car and make some trips back and forth with 30 pound blocks of stone.

Laying then down in a curved pattern we start to dig a little to make sure they are level and it's all going smooth . . . until we see that the left side of the down hill is higher then the right side of the downhill. Hmmmm . . .start over, we must account for up/down AND left/right!

I have a string level and much to my surprise the 8 foot width slopes down a good 18 inchs. WOW - WHO KNEW it sloped that much. This means I' have to dig out the top and put that dirt on the bottom to make the garden somewhat level.

BRILLIANT!

We keep adding and taking away dirt to level the bottom, most important layer. I'm not too concerned with the next two layers, it's not like we are holding back a wall, just a garden. Well, I guess we will see.

donn from the Garden Web suggested we use some landscape fabric behind the wall to stop erosion. This sounds like a great idea, not that I will do it but it SOUNDS like a great idea! The train is rolling now and we can not change. (As I stress, learn from our mistakes)

We worked a few hour's and when we were finished this is what it looked like.

Not very exciting but it was a start! In fact looking at it today as I write this I say to myself - "THAT'S IT?" But we were pretty proud at the time and a few Guinness were hoisted for our efforts!

A few days later I purchased seven more stones (another 240 pounds) and plopped them on the wall to get an idea on height and did more dirt work. I had a pile of grass clippings that was starting to attract flies and smell and I HAD to do something with it before DJ realized it was my doing and not the "countryside" air.

So I started to really lasagna-ize the garden. First I put down newspaper.

Then I put some Peat Moss on top of the paper - not much - just about 1/2 and inch. Peat Moss is actually becoming a little more scarce, it is thing that happens before it becomes coal you know. It's not a renewable resource, at least in OUR life time.

Then a layer of grass.

And last - top soil. I don't have access to top soil (weird to say that isn't it - I can't find dirt). So I have 40 pound bags of it. This section took two 40lb bags. I figure it takes ten bags per level.

And then I put about twn pounds of Star Bucks coffee grounds on top. Say what you want about Star Bucks. They, 1. have the highest caffeine of all coffee and, 2. give away all of their used grounds for gardens!

So now I have 1/4 of my first layer (or what I call one layer, mulch/dirt = 1 layer).

Over the next week we added more stone and more layers so now 4/5th of the future garden is covered. I ran out of mulch, no grass clippings and so forth, thus, the project came to a screeching halt.

One thing no one mentioned is that while Lasagna Beds make better gardens, they also cost $$. Dirt that is already in the ground is pretty cheap. But adding top soil above the ground costs money. Not much but it does add up a little. Along with The Wall costing a little. One thousand pounds worth (that is pounds in weight for you Europeans not Pounds Sterling)

So here is where we are at the moment, well, before the layer was put in but after most of the wall has been put in place.

The plan is to used thicker stone on the right side to account for the slope left to right of the yard.

My next blogs will be when we get the entire wall up and I can start filling in the bed in earnest. Plus I'll go into the HUGE process of WHAT TO PLANT.

At the moment I'm thinking of making a combination Butterfly Garden with normal Sun plants! The process of design is interesting and I have some pretty nice ideas of how to do it in a logical, non-hap hazard way!

Until then.

remember - comments are ALWAYS appreciated.

Cheers
Rod

What is a Lasagna Bed

The basic concept of a Lasagna Bed (also called a raised bed for the uninformed) is that it is a layering system for creating the best dirt you can imagine -- there is no digging (more on THAT one), no tilling, and no weeding.

What you want to do is make layers of organic materials. In a perfect world this layers will sit and stew for a while and in spring they will have blended into the perfect growing medium with zero weeds!

It's certainly not a new concept. I was looking at a Perennial book I got from our library (a very good source of garden books that people forget about) and I came across this technique. I looked at the date of the book and it was 1992.

Obviously someone got the idea of naming this technique "Lasagna Beds" wrote a book and became an instant millionaire, as all authors always do (look at JK Rowling for instance).

So after figuring out the shape of your garden you should lay newspaper on the ground and get it good and wet. I used sections of a paper, perhaps 10 pages thick but I don’t think it really matters as long as you cover every square inch and over lap the papers.

This will create a dark place and without photosynthesize nutrients all plants will die! Thus - no weeds! Well - almost. Some plants take this deprivation as a challenge, like quack grass. I'll let you know how this works. I have heard that quack loves the challenge and sooner or later it'll pop through. At that point I'll take some Round Up and KILL IT. Sorry but I have been in battle with Quack and I give it no sympathy. I want it DEAD.

Donn from the Garden Web forum says it best.

" Cover the grass with cardboard (moving boxes are great, as long as you take the tape off), and soak it down thoroughly. Then start piling organic matter on it; almost anything you can lay your hands on, from lawn clippings to fall leaves (shredded, if possible), from used coffee grounds to composted horse manure. Keep layering it on, preferably alternating between greens and browns (nitrogen and carbon). Pile it at least 18" high, and make the top layer a good carbon based mulch of some sort."

Many Lasagna bed gardeners do the above and then "cook" the bed for a while giving the layers of mulch time to breakdown. This is my goal and that is why I'm starting this process in fall. This reduces the height of the beds and produces high-quality workable soil more quickly.

Cooking the beds is optional though, one nice thing about lasagna beds is that you can layer your bed and plant your garden all in the same day.

Note - start collecting newspapers NOW - it takes a lot more then you would think.

So far I have newspaper/a little peat moss, grass clippings and then top soil. Today I picked up 10 pounds of Starbucks used coffee grounds and will dump that on my bed.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

That is basically what a Lasagna Bed is.

I'll start this journey next time with
WOW! This is Quite a Slope! The Story Begins.
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Going back a little to the last blog about getting started in gardening. I was looking at some photos of when we were building the house (well, WE were not building it, we were watching OTHERS build it) and I came across a photo I took from our deck just after they have put in the top soil.

We had had a large storm, a gully buster if you will with another one on the horizon. Here is the photo. Look at where the "river runs threw it" area. If you look at the Aug 27th blog you will see that this is the exact spot where I put in garden #1.
The question is - how can I fix this water drainage problem. A Lasagna bed would have worked but that fix is in the future.

I also have two bonus photos I took this morning. The first is a close up of some Autumn Joy Sedium showing the tiny little flowers. I'm not real familiar with this plant so I'm not sure what to expect. As always clicking on the photo will enlarge it.

The other one is from a Carefree (is it really) Rose bush we planted. This one is cool. If you left click on the photo and then right click to set as background it should fill the screen! If you want!

A Quickie Back Story

always remember - I AM NO EXPERT

A Quickie Back Story - BEFORE I learned about Lasagna Beds

I have always loved growing things but never took it seriously. I even created a little lawn grass of sod in my office but I have never had a garden. Just never had a good place for one.

When we moved into my very first house it already had "gardens". Long, straight strips of daylilies one after another in a long line outlining our back yard. We also had a tiny bit of baked dirt in the front, not soil but dirt. My wife and I planted a few things there but it all got baked . . . . . except for some lavender that flourished!!

Well, we moved and I was presented with a blank canvas. A yard with absolutely nothing on it. Oh sure the builder had landscapers put in top soil (dead dirt) and planted seed for grass and after a month I had 50% grass and 50% quack grass.

We planted some trees, an Autumn Blaze Maple, two clumps of Heritage River Birch and the first of two Don Wyman Crabapple Trees. And we had some guy from McKay Nursery design a plan for a few spots of the yard but, frankly, I was under whelmed. Everything was so . . . . formal.

This tweaked my brain wondering what was missing, why was I under whelmed. Some primal part of me was whispering, plant it and it will grow (with apologies to Field of Dreams).

Plant? Plant what?? Tomato's? Rutabaga? I'm not real big on veggies. It must mean flowers! So I opened my eyes and started looking at what others have done with flowers and I saw there were some things I REALLY liked and some things I did not like at all. The deciding factor was that I loved gardens that looked lush and almost overgrown. And the beauty of this is that if they are overgrown with flowers, there is no place for weeds to take over!! Have I found the magic solution?

So I went NUTS!!

My very first garden, a test garden if you will, was around my mail box. I dug out around the box and started planting like there was no tomorrow! I used Blue Wonder Catmint, East Friesland salivia, Autumn Joy sedium and Karl Foerster feather reed grass. All look pretty feeble at the moment as it is fall and I did not dead head when they were blooming.

I have heard that all REALLY nice gardens that you see are 3 years or older. Like wine, a garden needs to age.

I then dumped in a big bag of cocoa bean chips and waited. BINGO, everything took off and I would walk out to the little garden beaming like a proud papa. I would pick the tiny weeds even before they would taste sweet sunshine.

After a couple months of my plantes NOT dieing I started my next project.

This would be a larger project and more expensive (who new gardens cost so much!!). I wanted a triangle near the southern border of my lot. We were in the middle of a drought and since this faces south with 100% sunshine I picked all drought tolerant plants.

After shoveling and roto-tilling (which is much different then roto-rootering) the 72 sq feet and with the plants in my garage and with our first rain in 3 weeks on it's way, I started planting. Lavender, Coreopsis, Rue, Purple Palace heuchera, some other type of heuchera, daylilies, more catmint and then again, lots of cocoa chips leaves things.

I was the Jackson Pollock of gardening, random splashes of plants, no REAL design going into it. OH, I had a vague idea but it all changed when I put my first plant into the soil.

I then ringed the garden with rocks that I had found all over the new yard (not seen in this photo).

Then, it rained. And then it rained some more. This was good I thought, flowers like rain. It was perfect for a couple weeks and the garden looked fine and I was happy.

Meanwhile, the south of the US was being called the ring of fire with heat. We in southern Wisconsin were on the very edge, the dividing line between two powerful, warlike armies of air masses.

We were about to become the front line.

In August we average about 3 inches of rain, and from the time I planted my garden to two weeks later we had gotten a little more the 3 inches of rain. and THEN war broke out.

Sunday the 19th 3 inches
Monday the 20th 3 inches
Tuesday the 21st 0.7 inches
Wednesday the 22nd 0.8 inches
Thursday the 23rd 1.6 inches
Friday he 24th 0.7 inches

Six days and 9.8 inches of rain PLUS the 3 inches in the previous two weeks.

I would step on my yard and sink an inch in muck!

The words "well drained" does not enter in any conversation when speaking our our land.

The garden came through "ok" for the most part. The catmint is showing stress because it is on the uphill side and was taking the proverbial bullet of rain as it gushed down our hill. I hope it comes back and figure I'll wait until spring to see if it made it.

Here are some photos of the aftermath - the Heuchera is looking bleak and the catmint, while looking bad has some new green on it. Oddly a different variety of Heuchera (Purple Palace I believe) is doing better, (or is it the other way around). As you can tell THIS catmint looks a little more stressed then the above photo of the mailbox catmint.

The rest of the garden faired OK as you can see the Lavender, Coreopsis are doing fine.



Note to self - write down what is actually IN the garden, don't commit to memory!

The rest seem OK and the mail box garden is fine.

I SHOULD have deadheaded the catmint but that was a new concept to me. Next year! I did shear the coreopsis and it is now reblooming.

SO - with two gardens running I was thinking of spring. I had my yard layout in front of me and there was a spot just begging for a garden. Full sun between the trees.

Lasagna Beds.

Hmmmmm - what could I do NOW that would help me next year. The dirt in my yard is clay-like and not the best for growing. I asked the Garden forum for ideas and was told by no less then 14 people START A LASAGNA BED!

This was yet another new concept. So being an obsessive sort of guy I looked into it.

The short answer is, it's a raised bed with the best dirt you could ever dream of!

And that is where I will stop for now.

Next blog I dive into a Lasagna Bed!