Making the Raised Beds Lasagna Gardening Style Part One: What and Why?

Spring has sprung, and our family has been busy little bees preparing our garden. In the past, while living at our in-laws house we have had more traditional garden beds; the type you need to til and plant in tidy rows. But in reading Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture by Toby Hemenway, Lasagna Gardening by Patricia Lanza and from our own first hand experience at a permaculture blitz, we decided that we were going to try making raised beds at our home instead. Not only that, but rather than just fill the beds with soil, we were going to attempt to try lasagna gardening, or sheet mulching instead. Now you may be wondering what some or all of those terms are, and why we are doing things this way, so before I go on to tell you how, I am going to tell you what and why.

What are raised beds?

Raised beds are a form of gardening where soil is raised from the surrounding soil. The soil is usually enclosed by a frame such as wood, rocks, or concrete blocks. Plants are able to be planted closer together and the beds are made narrow enough so it's unnecessary to have rows within the beds; creating more space for plants.

Why make raised beds?

1. Raised beds are space savers because less space needs to be devoted to paths
2. You don't have to remake them each spring
3. You don't have to walk on the planting bed which means the soil isn't compacted (compacted soil makes it difficult for roots to penetrate)
4. You don't have to bend down as far to work in the garden
5. Raised beds create well designed, active planting areas
7. Easier to plant in guilds: groups of plants that work in harmony with one another
8. Raised beds extend the planting season because the soil warms up faster
9. Generally result in higher yields than conventional gardens
10. Simpler and tidier place to do lasagna gardening/sheet mulching

What is lasagna gardening? 

"Lasagna gardening is a nontraditional, organic, layering method you can use to create better soil while keeping your gardens neat and attractive. (The name comes from the layers you'll be making to create your beds) Based on a commonsense approach and ready available natural ingredients, lasagna gardening is an easy, time-saving way to install and maintain any kind of garden without removing sod, digging or tilling). Close planting and generous mulching greatly reduce the time needed for watering and weeding" (Lanza pg. 2).

Essentially, lasagna gardening is stacking layers of mulch on top of the soil which will slowly decompose into a rich and healthy soil that plants will thrive in.





Why do lasagna gardening?

1. No tilling involved
2. It's a method of eradicating weeds without herbicides or having to weed
3. Helps to conserve water
4. Keeps soil cool in hot weather
5. The mulch agreeably rots down into rich compost; essentially you are composting in place
6. The soil organisms that are essential for ferrying nutrients to plant roots, aren't disturbed. Plants thrive in this rich, intact ecosystem.
7. Sheet mulching is forgiving (you don't have to be exact with your methods to be successful)
8. Can be done anywhere. That includes on rooftops and on pavement.
9. Sheet mulching is a fast and easy way to boost organic matter and soil life to prodigious levels; your garden will support a diversity of plants, beneficial insects and wildlife
10. It saves work, energy, time and money

(Hemenway pgs. 81-82, 85-87, 90) and (Lanza pg. 2)

So, what's wrong with tilling (conventional gardening)?

Finally, you may be wondering, what's wrong with tilling anyways? That's how most farmers do things isn't it? Well, Toby Hemenway describes the problems with tilling so beautifully in his book Gaia's Garden, that I am just going to directly quote his wonderful explanation.

The invention of the plow ranks as one of the great steps forward for humanity. Farmers know that plowing releases locked-up soil fertility. Plowing also keeps down weeds and thoroughly mingles surface litter with the soil. We do all this too, when we drag our power-tiller out of the garage and push the snorting beast through the garden beds in a cloud of blue smoke.

What's really happening during tilling? By churning the soil, we're flushing it with fresh air. All that oxygen invigorates the soil life, which zooms into action, breaking down organic matter and plucking minerals from humus and rock particles. Tilling also break up the soil, greatly increasing its surface area by creating many small clumps out of big ones. Soil microbes then colonize these fresh surfaces, extracting more nutrients and exploding in population.

This is great for the first season. The blast of nutrients fuels stunning plant growth, and the harvest is bountiful. But the life in tilled soil releases far more nutrients than the plants can use. Unused fertility leaches away in rains. The next year's tilling burns up more organic matter, again releasing a surfeit of fertility that is washed away. After a few seasons, the soil is depleted. The humus is gone, the mineral ores are played out, and the artificially stimulated soil life is impoverished. Now the gardener must renew the soil with bales of organic matter, fertilizer, and plenty of work.

Thus, tilling releases far more nutrients than plants can use. Also, the constant mechanical battering destroys the soil structure, especially when perpetrated on too-wet soil (and we're all impatient to get those seeds in, so this happens often). Frequent tilling smashes loamy soil crumbs to powder and compacts clayey clods into hardpan. And one tilling session consumes far more calories of energy than are in a year's worth of garden-grown food. That's not a sustainable arrangement.

Better to let humus fluff your soil naturally and to use mulches to smother weeds and renew nutrients. Instead of unleashing fertility at a breakneck, mechanical pace, we can allow plant roots to do the job. Questing roots will split nuggets of earth in their own time, opening the soil to microbial colonization, loosening nutrients at just the right rate. Once again, nature makes a better partner than a slave (Hemenway pgs. 81-82).

Conclusions

As you can imagine, conventional gardening has lead to lots of problems, especially with large scale farms. Thousands of acres of land have been leached of nutrients and pumped with chemical fertilizers to grow fantastic monocultures to feed the masses. Conventional gardening in our own gardens can be just as harmful to the precious ecosystem that cradles your home. With lasagna gardening, you have to do hardly any work while the benefits are substantial. And if you feel overwhelmed by the idea of trying something completely different than what you are used to, don't! This was my first year doing it and I found it to be both easy and extremely satisfying. Plus I already think our garden looks amazing; even without any plants growing in it yet. So please stay tuned because in my next post I will explain how we created our raised bed lasagna gardening style.