How To Prevent Spring Weeds In Your Garden Before They Start
I don’t know about you, but my life is busy. I work, have a wife and family, have a home to take care of, church activities, and working to make sure that my family is prepared for a disaster situation. There are more things on my to-do list than I have time to even get to, so taking care of my garden is a tough additional item to fit in. So, when I hear about a technique to make one aspect of my gardening easier, I want to know what it is.
Fortunately, there is a technique to get rid of spring weeks in your garden before they even have a chance to invade. It’s the lazy gardeners dream (which means that it appeals to me). This gardening technique is called lasagna gardening, and Kristen Duever gives us the simple details of how to set up this type of garden:
Start with some simple brown corrugated cardboard or some newspaper (use three layers if you decide to go with newspaper) and lay them down right on top of the area that you’ve selected for your garden – right over the top of grass and weeds!
Keep this layer moist so that it provides a nice cover that earthworms will be attracted to; that will allow them shelter to loosen up the earth below.
Just like the kind of lasagna that you eat, a lasagna garden consists of multiple layers. In the case of a garden, the layers consist of alternating between brown and green compost. Brown compost can be made up of items such as cardboard, shredded newspaper and dead leaves. Green compost may be items such as fruit and vegetable scraps, trimmings from the garden, etc.
As a general rule, you should make your brown layers about double the thickness of your green layers. Doing this by sight is fine, though, – there is no need to break out the tape measure. Keep building your layers until they reach about two-feet tall. This may sound like a lot, but remember that this is going to shrink down considerably over the next few weeks.
Setting up a lasagna garden is that simple, and, then, you simply plant your garden like normal (though, if your brown layer is too stiff at the time that you plant, you may have to cut through it with a shovel).
This type of gardening helps to create its own mulch for fertilization purposes and helps to prevent weeks from growing at the same time. It’s a simple and really useful system.
So, whether you’re considering it for your garden at your home or your garden at your bug out location, lasagna gardening can be an easy way to get (and keep) your garden ready for growing food in.
