Lasagna garden magic

Mitzi Carter sent in these 2 photos. They each show a zucchini plant, and they were planted in the ground at exactly the same time. The one on top was planted in their lasagna garden, the one below into the regular garden bed. Quite a difference!

Building Lasagna Gardens at Marygrove

On Tuesday, April 28th, a group of us met with a group of volunteers from Marygrove College in Detroit to help them build the frame for their first lasagna garden. A lasagna garden is a raised bed garden full of layers of organic matter that grow huge vegetables with little watering or weeding (for more details see our Lasagna gardening page). Marygrove is currently clearing out dead ash trees, so there was an abundant supply of wood. The wood was cut to fit a 4 X 6 garden. We stacked the logs on top of each other and put stakes in the ground to hold the logs in place. We'll return in a couple of weeks to fill the garden and help plant the plants. Martha is jumping over the finished garden, below.

For a video showing the pounding of the final stake (and to hear Delphine's fine singing voice), see below...

Lasagna Season Extension

Spring is finally arrived, and gardeners all around Michigan are waiting for the soil to warm and dry up, so they can start planting. But look: raised beds (aka Lasagna Gardens) warm quickly and while they keep moisture, they won't be soggy. So, with the help of a little plastic tunnel, I already started my cool season veggies...

This neat raised bed is waiting for some seedlings. It is nice enough to be in the front of the house, ... but it has been my compost pile during the winter. Lasagna Gardening wonders!

--[[User:Erica|erica]] 09:53, 14 Apr 2008 (EDT)

Another lasagna garden

Another lasagna garden in Troy... I'm preparing it now to let it cook during the winter.
You can see the whole sequence on the lasagna gardening page.

Lasagna Gardening, Part III

We thought it might be interesting for you all to see the end result of our lasagna gardening work this year. I'm calling this Part III because we have talked previously about building lasagna gardens, then the planting and growing process, but we have not as yet arrived at the best part -- making delicious food from the harvest. The picture above shows Maureen, Tom and Molly cutting up butternut squash to make soup. We had so much this year we had to make a double recipe. We now have soup for both their household and ours, and it should last until NEXT summer's harvest, looking at the huge amounts we have frozen. If you'd like the recipe, you'll find it on the recipes page.

Eating locally

Our lasagna gardening project is producing food in abundance! This past Sunday, Tom and Peggy trooped out to the garden to harvest tomatoes. We had to whack our way in, mainly because the 2 squash plants have decided to take over. You can see from the picture that some of the broccoli has gone to flower, but we have been able to harvest quite a bit of it first. The broccoli made a delicious cream of broccoli soup, and with the tomatoes we were able to make a fantastic spaghetti sauce. Yum.

Raising Gardens with Fallen Trees

This past Saturday, the Brennans and the Bradleys went to work building the frames for lasagna gardening. After trooping through the woods next to the Brennans' home to gather the fallen ash wood, they laid out the logs, cut them to the length they wanted (3 for each side - 12 in all), stacked them on top of each other, drilled down into all 3 layers, and then put bamboo stakes into the holes to hold them together.