Lasagna Gardening: The Easy Way to Create Raised Garden Beds

Once upon a time an innovative book on raised garden beds changed my life. Lasagna Gardening by Patricia Lanza promised that I could grow a bountiful crop of vegetables, flowers and herbs with no laborious digging or tilling, and no time-consuming weeding. Many years and many raised garden beds later, I'm happy to report that she wasn't fibbing. Thanks to lasagna gardening, I can enjoy my favorite hobby sans the backbreaking labor.

Raised garden beds are infinitely easier on the body than traditional garden plots. Add the concept of lasagna gardening, and the vegetables practically grow themselves. Much like a cook layers pasta, sauce and cheese to make lasagna, gardeners can layer an assortment of organic materials one atop the other to create raised garden beds. The difference is that with lasagna gardening, the ingredient list is a lot more flexible, yet the "recipe" always turns out great!

So what ingredients can you use for lasagna gardening? Newspapers (black and white, non glossy sections), chopped leaves, grass clippings, kitchen scraps, compost, hay, animal manure, sawdust, coffee grounds, straw, wood ashes and sphagnum peat moss are all great layers for lasagna gardening. Many of these are readily available, and even better, they're free.

You'll probably still need to buy some ingredients for your lasagna garden, such as the peat moss. I frequently use the peat moss after each layer of the other mulch ingredients in my raised garden beds. You might also want to buy bonemeal (which promotes good root growth) and bloodmeal (a high nitrogen material that's good to use if you don't have any grass clippings or manure).

In the spring, you can build raised garden beds and plant your seedlings on the top layer immediately. Alternately, you can cover your lasagna garden with black plastic and let it "cook" for about six weeks (or over the winter) to reduce the height of the beds and get wonderfully rich, crumbly soil. Cooking the raised garden beds requires a bit more planning to achieve the right balance of ingredients that promote heating, similar to creating a compost heap. Essentially, you want to have about four times as much brown materials (high carbon) as green (high nitrogen) in your lasagna garden.

One of the most amazing aspects of lasagna gardening is that you can make raised garden beds right on top of hard-packed soil or grass, with no digging and no tilling! This is because lasagna gardening encourages earthworms by providing all the conditions they need to thrive: darkness, moisture, and an abundance of organic materials to feed on. The industrious earthworms then do all of the hard work of loosening the soil and transforming even the most compacted ground into raised garden beds with loose, humus-rich soil that plants love.

What I appreciate most about lasagna gardening is that there's really no wrong way to go about it. Over the years I have built many raised garden beds this way. Since I use whatever organic materials I have available at the time, no two are exactly alike yet they all turn out fine in the end. Some of my raised garden beds break down quicker than others, but it really doesn't matter. Once you see how easy and enjoyable lasagna gardening is, I'm certain you will want to use this method again and again.