Wiktory, Garden

[akirlu]

I have been wanting to get our yard under human control for a while now. With a long, cool, wet spring, the lawn has gone mad with euphoria and little opportunity to check it. I've also been wanting to plant some vegetables and flowers and berries and such, but every time I get up a head of steam I am defeated by the prospect of digging in the alluvial rock suspension that is our soil. All too many nursery plants have died in their containers, waiting for me to make a hole.

But a little squib in the current issue of This Old House gave me a new shot of hope. It was a piece about a woman in Portland who had converted her lawn into a market garden without getting rid of the sod, by using "lasagna" gardening. Could it be that I could plant things without having to excavate the rocks first? Maybe so. Last Sunday I found a copy of Weedless Gardening at Elliot Bay Books, and have been mining it all week for techniques. It really is supposed to be no-dig gardening.

So I cadged some newspapers off freecycle, and today I did battle with the grass in the small plot next to our deck. Cut it, flattened it, fertilized it, laid out newspaper on top of the sod, wet it, piled lawn clippings and pulled weeds and trimmings on top of that, and then finally three cubic yards of steer manure on top of that. After that I wet it all down good, got some bark to mulch the paths between the beds, and poked a bunch of vegetable starts into the beds. Poked in some seeds, too. By golly, it looks kinda like a garden. Like, on purpose and stuff.

All in all it took me about 6 hours this afternoon, so not "no work", but way less work than clearing the same space would have taken if I had cut the sod and tilled the earth to get a garden. Now we get to wait and see how my garden grows.