Choosing the No-Dig Method

Bill and I seem to live in a constant state of anticipated dislocation, suspended over each successive plot of earth like a house on stilts, never digging a foundation. We have moved three times in the 11 years we’ve been together. This is not a healthy state for two committed gardeners.

Our gardens have always been designed to bring us the most benefit in the shortest possible time. The two previous gardens were reclaimed from lawn using traditional methods—spading the sod under for the first, and building raised beds of trucked-in topsoil for the second.

 









We left both gardens behind, as we will, eventually, leave this latest one. Someday we hope to find a place to put down deeper roots. But not yet.

Our current home is a rental. Space for a garden was at the top of our wish list as we looked at this house last April. It certainly had potential. The entire quarter-acre back yard is treeless and south facing:  an expanse of healthy-looking, dandelion-free lawn despite years of owner indifference. That spoke of good soil. Our future landlords seemed enthusiastic about our plan for a vegetable garden, offering to lend us fencing against the local marauders we would presumably come to know and loathe.

We didn’t move until June, too late for major garden construction even if dragging our life from one house to another hadn’t left us disoriented and pooped. In any event, the gardening tools were barricaded behind stacks of unpacked boxes in the garage.

The summer days limped along. Although we had only been gardening for a few years, we were surprised at how terribly we missed it. We were, quite literally, bereft.

Bill, the champion researcher and indefatigable gardener that he is, refused to give up. There would be garden, but there would be no digging. He’d read about the no-dig method of creating a garden years before, in  Mother Earth News. He'd bought Ruth Stout's bible, The Ruth Stout No-Work Garden Book, and, most surprising, was able to unearth it (sorry) from its box!

This seemed to be just the ticket for us 60-year-olds. We could avoid the backbreaking labor of starting from scratch, spading up and turning the sod, amending the soil, and then planting a full garden, all of which would have to be done on weekends in the late spring when the weather can be so uncooperative here in Zone 5 Western New York. This plan also gives us the opportunity to get our hands dirty now and drag ourselves out of our garden-deprived doldrums.

No-dig, or lasagna or sheet mulch gardening calls for smothering the sod with newspaper or cardboard and covering that with layers of compostable materials. In our case, we’ll be doing this right now, in the fall, so that the layers can decompose over the winter. Voila, soil. Or at least a planting medium.

Let there be garden. We hope.

As we were assembling the ingredients for our lasagna garden, we encountered several people who were very curious about it and asked us to let them know how it all turned out. One or two had never heard of no-till gardening, as I had not before Bill introduced me to it. A blog seemed like an easy way to post the pictures I took and to document our progress.

Stay tuned for the creation…

Reading Up

The very first thing we did was to read up on this new (to us) method of garden design. Bill found us several books which seemed to agree on the process of building a no-dig garden. He had also bought, years ago, one of the bibles of organic gardening—Ruth Stout’s Gardening Without Work : For the Aging, the Busy and the Indolent. He’d come across it through a subscription to The Mother Earth News.

I’ve also listed them in the “Sources” page but here they are:

Gaia’s Garden,  A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, Toby Hemenway

Chelsea Green Publishing Company, White River Junction, Vermont

2000,2009

Lasagna Gardening, Patricia Lanza

Rodale

1998

Weedless Gardening, Lee Reich

Workman Publishing, New York

2001

The Ruth Stout No-Work Garden Book, Ruth Stout

Rodale Press, 1971 Edition

The most comprehensive is the first—Toby Hemenway outlines the theory of permaculture in exquisite detail, and his “how to” of the sheet-mulch or “lasagna” style was enormously helpful in determining the quantities of materials and the proportions of each to include. The rest of the book might be a gardener’s bible for us in the future—when and if we ever land in a more permanent situation where we can plan out our gardens and see them come to maturity.

Patricia Lanza has been lasagna gardening for many years and takes a slightly more casual approach to the construction of the actual bed. Her experience in no-till gardens was invaluable and her methods were close enough to those in Gaia’s Garden to supplement our meager knowledge.

Lee Rich’s book will perhaps be more useful to us in the spring—if this actually works! He is more concerned with the maintenance of a weed-free garden and I’m sure we’ll be needing that.

So, armed with our book-learning, it was on to the next step.

Saving Up

The amount of material needed for a lasagna garden can seem daunting, though most of the requirements are relatively flexible. You need a combination of nitrogen and carbon in such proportion that the decomposition happens, but it doesn’t burn itself out in the process. Toby Hemenway has a long list of things to use, but the most important thing about the ingredients is that they be available and inexpensive. We used straw, for instance, for the major carbon, because leaf compost wasn’t readily available (the lot is nearly treeless) and we’re literally surrounded with sources for straw. Because we were placing the layers on mowed lawn, not bare soil, we counted the grass we’re killing as a nitrogen element.

I’ve listed them in the order they were placed on top of the sod. More details about quantities will be included in the appropriate posts.

Bone meal (for phosphorus)

Alfalfa pellets (for nitrogen)

Cardboard and newspaper (for carbon) – having just bought several large items for our new home, we had plenty of the former, as well as the scores of empty boxes Bill dragged home from the office. Several friends helped us out by saving their newspapers for us – thanks Sally & Dave!

Composted chicken manure – that you will see later – came from Nature Berry Farm, where we get our wonderful free-range chickens and eggs. Right around the corner. And free! And filled with worms!

Straw – this we got from a local farm

We also hedged our bets with a Plan B -- a few bags of humus -- to be dumped on the beds in the spring if our experiment somehow fails us. We’ll have a garden one way or another!

Location, Location, Location

The first decision we faced was where to put our garden in this vast expanse of lawn—this vast expanse of south-facing lawn, to be exact. Oh, that all decisions should have so many favorable options! It wasn’t really too difficult, however, as we had already decided the herbs would go into a strip along the foundation from the back door, under the windows of the wonderful 50’s style breezeway and on to the far edge of the garage. Having the herbs separate from the vegetables will give us that much more space for greedy vegetables, and if the decomposition in our lasagna works as well as we hope, that soil will be a mite too rich for growing strong-flavored herbs.

Bill decided that running the vegetable beds perpendicular to the house at the edge of the garage would make a quite nice L-shaped garden. It would be close to the kitchen, and within view from kitchen and breezeway windows.

Layout

October 17, 2010

Bill decided on four 4’ X 16’ beds, laid out parallel to the house in a rectangle out from the back wall of the garage. So, a week before the Big Day, he roped the garden off.

 

The Big Day, Saturday, October 23, 2010

We set the alarm for 6:30 (!) for our 8:00 appointment with Farmer Lee to pick up the bales of straw. The only other thing that would get us up that early on a Saturday is a trip to the Public Market. So we must be really committed to this project!

We had assembled the following supplies:

2 bags of alfalfa pellets

12 bags of humus

1 bag of bone meal

Mountains of cardboard – some of it from packaging of our new bed and mattress (!) and some Bill dragged home from work.

Ditto newspaper

8 bales of straw – two per bed. We made three car trips for them, wishing all the time for a pickup truck to haul things like this. Pieces of that straw will undoubtedly remain in our cars until the day they go to the junkyard.

That left one more ingredient – composted chicken manure from Nature Berry Farm, which we planned to get later in the day when the farm was open to the public.

It turned into a gorgeous, warm fall day with little wind (thanks to Mother Nature) so we set about assembling the layers of our lasagna.

Marking Out the Beds

The first thing I want to say here is that it appears in the following photographs that Bill is doing all the work and I’m just lollygagging around being the documentarian. Not true! He just didn’t want to take any pictures of me. He did do virtually all of the heavy lifting, though—and those bags of chicken doo-doo were really heavy!

We were fortunate that it had rained two nights before and the ground underneath was still quite wet. That saved one half-hour watering stint.

So we got to work on cutting and flattening out the cardboards. As recommended, we also removed any tape, labels (plastic) or staples.

 

We were not planning to waste our soil-building materials on the pathways between the beds, so we put down the cardboards to see how much we would need.

We’ll take care of the sod in the paths later in the spring.

Soil Amendments

Bill moved the cardboard aside and we got our soil amendments ready. As we hadn’t tested the soil, we just used some all-purpose, natural ingredients.

First was bone meal (for potassium).

2, 3-cup scoops per bed = 6 cups

24 cups total for the garden

Next came alfalfa pellets (for nitrogen) which would help lure the worms up from the existing soil to eat the cardboard!

4, 3-cup scoops per bed = 12 cups

48 cups total for the garden

Then something we would be doing all day.

WATER, WATER    

AND WATER SOME MORE...

Cardboard

Let the smothering of sod begin. We put the cardboard back down onto the beds and, again,

WATER...
    

  ...WATER ...    

           ... AND WATER!

Finally, there they were in all their sodden glory!

 

A break for lunch and then it's on to the chicken farm...

Chicken Man!

We’re very fortunate to have an organic farm practically within spitting distance. Jim and Sandy Pecora of Nature Berry Farm sell chicks for raising (a distant dream for us), and chickens, ducks and turkeys for meat and eggs. They were kind enough to offer us some of their amazing composted chicken manure. 

FREE!!

All we had to do was shovel it ourselves. Jim supplied some feed bags...

 and we joined the flock at the buffet table...er...compost pile...

Though we had an invitation from The Boss, the ladies (and gents) were hardly stepping up to welcome us.

I suspect they're not accustomed to having guests for dinner. More used to being dinner (sorry, couldn't resist). They squabbled around like cranky toddlers, but as we turned over a whole new layer of wormy life for them to gobble up, I guess we paid our way!

Bill ignored their antics (and mine) and got to work...

A trip to the farm is always a hoot for me. For some reason, I get the biggest kick out of the chickens! But I was actually right there with him, holding the bag while he shoveled the chikety doo-doo.

An added bonus was every scoopful was a squirming mass of red wriggler WORMS! Gardener's little helpers! Sorry I didn't get a good shot of them...

...I was having too much fun taking chicken portraits.

Two trips got us 8 full (and extraordinarily heavy) feed bags full of...well, you know...

We may make another trip back to the pile when we're ready to set up our worm bin composter. But that's another story...

Spreading the News

We spread some newspaper over the cardboard, watered it down, (did you think otherwise?) and began to lay down the richest nitrogen layer of the pile.

 

There’s a joke here about news and chicken sh---t…oh, never mind…

All done!

Of course, we then watered like crazy.

We were getting pretty pooped by now (the puns never stop, do they?), but we still had one more layer—the topper.

Straw--Mozzarella It Ain't

The sun was heading toward its daily reward as Bill began to cover over the beds with straw. At last we were tackling the final layer. Two standard bales for each bed.

As our energy flagged, Bill kept saying, “This will be the easiest part.” For once, a bit of innocent optimism proved true.

 Multiply by four...

Before we could hit the much-needed showers, there was one more chore – you guessed it –

WATER

Wetting this thick pile of straw all the way through became the most daunting chore of the day. When it appeared that the moon would be lighting our way before we finished, we dragged out our fairly useless sprinkler and let it waste a few gallons over it in a misty cloud. This was obviously going to require a soaking Noah would recognize.

And then I went inside and consulted the weather man. Wonder of wonders—there was a huge blob of green on the radar! Rain, beautiful rain, was headed straight for us! A big shout-out to Mother Nature!

So we let nature take her course, cleaned up our mess before the deluge, and headed for our own (hot) showers. 

And, so, there it was -- our proto-garden -- fading into the gloaming...

One day of very hard work -- though nothing like it would have been had we tried to dig into the soil. And so to bed!

Before and After

It's up to the worms and Mother Nature now.

 Before

and After

Before 

and After