Lasagna garden

I've decided to plant a garden. I've lived in this apartment almost nine months, I'm not sure why it's taken me so long. My neighbor said the soil in our small patch of yard was shit but then I remembered it doesn't matter. Last year, I helped a friend of mine create a lasagna garden in her backyard. The idea is simple: You put layers of wet newspaper on top of any ground surface - grass, weeds, rocks, it doesn't matter - and layer peat moss and any organic material you can find like compost, manure, clippings, etc. Then you plant your garden! My mom always says that vegetables are the easiest plants to grow. People always complaining that they kill plants in their house don't have to worry. As long as you have light and water, veggies will grow. Fruits too!


The best thing about this method, other than the obvious ease of it, is that you leave the soil undisturbed. That means earthworms and other bugs that till the soil will find their way into your garden and keep it growing. I remember reading an article about a guy who turns lawns into food gardens. In the article, his company was rototilling this front yard and broke their machine on the grass roots and rocks. It was totally silly, renting that expensive machine and going through all that work, and killing all the sweet little earthworms! All you have to do is layer on top. The lack of light kills grass roots and anything else much easier than any chemicals or forceful extraction, the newspaper eventually gets eaten by worms and dissolves into the earth.

I've been mulling over this idea for some time. I can't see the garden from my apartment so it's easy to forget that there is a patch of land down there. Then yesterday, walking around, I saw that someone in San Francisco was growing vegetables in pots on the sidewalk! It really is that easy and I have no excuses. Here's how to do it.


Without getting into this too much, I believe that water and food are going to become serious battle grounds as people start to realize that mass production of food has driven it into very unhealthy directions. Big agribusiness is not likely to give up huge profits to make our food healthier and treat the earth better but we DO have control over our food - we can all plant vegetables. Power to the people!