Why use "lasagna" no till gardening?

I have already talked all about how wonderful compost is for your garden.  For some people, including myself, there is just not enoughroom in your yard to have enough compost piles to feed your wholegarden.  So why not just turn your whole garden into a compost pile?

Lasagna gardening or a no till garden does just that.  You build up your garden with the same layers of browns and greens that you would in acompost pile and just leave it there.  When done well, you can plant your garden right into these piles of compost with little further effort.  You don't need to till because the materials will compost and turn into a nice, soft bed for you to plant your garden in.  You don'tneed to fertilize because your garden is going to be built out of fertilizer.  You don't need to weed as much because the thick layers will block the weeds from growing where they would normally grow.  You don't need as much water because the organic composting materials hold much more water than standard garden soil and the water is there waiting for your plants to drink it up.  The layers you add on to the garden may even prevent some of the diseases and pest you have had in the past from being able to return to your garden for another year.  

I think this coming year I will dive right in and set up my garden this way.  Starting when I do my fall clean up.  The hope is that I walk out to my garden in the spring and throw the plants in the ground and they are already fed and watered for the majority of the summer.  That and I won't have to do much weeding.  We will see how this works out.

Why compost and not chemical fertilizer?

If you have read all of the previous posts on composting (why, what' happening, what goes in, and where to put it), you may be wondering why you should compost and not just use fertilizer.  Have you ever tasted the difference between a tomato you picked off the vine and ate right away verses a tomato you bought at your local supermart?  That is probably the difference the plants "taste" between compost and chemical fertilizer.  Compost is fresh and alive, teeming with life.  It smells good and feels light and fluffy.  It holds on to water and feeds it back to plants that are so happily living in it.  It becomes part of the soil and bring nutrients and life to anything that grows in it.  Chemical fertilizer is stale and dead, having nothing alive about it.  You can't smell it or touch it with bare hands because it is poisonous to people.  It washes away when it rains and flows down to local lakes and streams and poisons them.  You don't notice it's poison because you think it's helping your plants grow big and healthy.  But what is really doing is stripping the soil of all its nutrients so that you have to buy and apply more and more every year.  When you apply compost, it  works in to the soil and just gets better and better.  You should still add more every year, but if you don't, there is still good stuff left over from before.  If you use chemical fertilizers, there is actually less than what your soil started with.  Nothing left from the year before, it all washed away rather than incorporating into the soil.  In addition, if you throw mulch, like fall leaves, on top of your compost, that will also turn to compost giving you the benefit of both the mulch and later the compost.  Happy plants and happy gardeners!

Hugelkultur mounds

The perfect way to fertilize a tree or bush is a hugelkultur mound.  This will provide food for years with only a little effort  in the beginning.  It retains water so you don't need to provide supplemental, just rain water should do.  It gets nice and warm so that if you are planting trees or bushes that should be in a warmer climate, they have a much better chance of surviving.

 So what is a hugelkultur mound, now that I know I want one?  Basically it is a pile of rooting wood around your tree or bush that is covered with dirt.  It rots and breaks down just like a compost pile which provides nutrients, the spongy water retaining texture and the heating up.
It is very easy to set one up.  When I planted the bush here in the picture, I just set it up around the planting.   I started out by digging an extra wide hole with the deep spot in the deep spot in the middle for the bush to

go.  I put a handful of leaves into the hole and put the bush on top of that.  Then I placed four large logs each on one side of the bush in the hole.  Then I filled in the spaces with large and then small sticks trying to fill in most of the gaps.  Over the top of that, I put a couple handfuls of leaves over all the wood around the base of the plant.  Cover the leaves with the dirt you dug out of the hole.  I did a lot of stomping on the dirt all around the plant because I'm sure that it is going to pack down at some

point.  I did water it some, but it is supposed to rain tomorrow, so I didn't go too crazy.  I assume that when it rains, it will all fall in and I will have to top it off.  Either way, this bush should do fantastic as soon as it settles in. The logs I used were already started rotting, so I don't think it will be long before that bush can begin to benefit from it.

Oyster shell fertilizer

The shells of oysters and many other sea creatures, like lobsters, have shells made up of calcium carbonate.  Therefore, if you eat a lot of seafood and are throwing out the shells, you are wasting valuable garden fertilizers.  I brought home a bag of oyster shells last night to add to my compost pile.  What I am going to do is to first wash them out so that the local critters don't take an interest.  Then I'll sandwich them between a couple old rags and smash the shells into little bits.  I smash them because a whole shell is a lot to break down in a compost and it would take forever.  Next I can just throw them right into the compost pile.  You can do this with many kinds of sea shells and things like eggs as well.  They will all add calcium carbonate to your soil.  Calcium carbonate is basically what lime is just in case you didn't know that already.

Wood ash fertilizer

After cutting down a few trees the other day, we had a large pile of wood.  So we spent the evening sitting around our fire pit enjoying the days work.  This is what was left of our trees the next day:

Lovely organic fertilizer.  Wood ash is an excellent fertilizer for your garden.  It adds potassium and raises the pH of the soil.  If your pH is low, then you can sprinkle the ash over the soil before you plant for the season. If you do not need to raise the pH, then just add the ash to your compost pile to reap the benefits.  When using ash to fertilize your garden be sure that what you are burning is safe for your plants.  Pressure treated wood is full of chemicals that can kill your plants, and is also unsafe for you to be breathing as it burns.  Black walnut trees are full of juglones which can prevent grow of many plants.  And whatever you do don't burn things like poison ivy.  It could really ruin your day.

click for more information

Perennial Vegetables

A huge part of permaculture is perennial vegetables.  Wikipedia defines permaculture as: a branch of ecological design and ecological engineering which develops sustainable human settlements and self-maintained agricultural systems modeled from natural ecosystems. You cannot have a self maintained annual garden.  Annuals take time and care and weeding and watering etc.  You have to plant new ones every year.  I'm not saying that you should give up your favorite tomatoes, but to plant some perennials in addition to your annual garden.  The perennial garden needs very little care.  You plant things once and once they are established they need minimal care.  You don't even have to water them.  The rain water should suffice.  If you put down a good mulch, then you won't have to weed.  These plants can be very different then you are used to but they can be just as delicious.  Asparagus and artichoke are two of the more common perennial vegetables just to give you an idea.  

I am just staring to learn about these vegetables and so I bought this book.  So far, it is full of great information.  I didn't realize that there were so many perennial vegetables to choose from.  I plan on spending my free time this winter learning as much as I can so that I can start a trial perennial garden this spring.  Just think how much work that will save me the following spring... One full bed already planted...     

Drinking Rainwater

We don't drink water from the tap at my house.  There are chemical additives like chlorine and fluoride in the public drinking water.  That could be a week's worth of posts all alone, but skip that part for now.  We have been drinking bottled water, but have voted that out now too.  I can't imagine that water soaking in plastic can be good for you, not to mention the cost and huge amount of waste in plastic bottles.

So now we are drinking rainwater.  I know that there is plenty of bad stuff in rainwater,  but we got this fancy new filter in the mail yesterday from Berkey.  The filter removes viruses, bacteria, parasites, heavy metals, chlorine, fertilizers, and VOC's.  It cost us less than $300 and the filters are good for around 16 years average for our family use.  When you do need to replace them they are only about $40.  Bottled water was costing us about $1.10 a day x 365 days per year = $400.  Paid for in less than one year.  Not to mention the 365 water jugs kept from the landfill.
I know that we can't collect rain water in the dead of winter.  We could melt snow if we wanted to but that could turn into a huge pain.  So during the winter we will be using tap water.  We bought a couple of fluoride filters ($30) so that we could still have good fluoride free water all winter.
The water is delicious by the way.

Soil Building

The most important part of organic gardening has got to be having good, healthy soil.  If your soil is healthy, then your plants are healthy.  Good soil provides food, protects against disease and maintains good water supply.  You don't need fertilizers, bug poison or tons of water to maintain your garden if you start off by building up your soil to be as healthy as it can be.
I am just beginning to really understand the importance of the soil, so I am a little behind this year.  Ideally the soil would be in great shape before I plant, but I'm working the soil up as I go instead.  My garden is currently clay, which is really no good for a garden.  What I am doing this year to begin to fix this is to add as much organic matter to the soil as possible.  I mentioned mulch and cover crops previously, but I'll explain better now.
At the end of the summer last year, I planted hairy vetch and winter rye.  I think I must have waited too long to plant them because they didn't really do much growing until this spring.  The hope with these crops was that they would grow during the fall and then in spring I could cut them down and use them for organic matter in the garden.  They also prevent erosion during the non-growing season.  With my garden on the side of a hill, I need this help too.  The hairy vetch is also a legume which fixes nitrogen in the soil for the plants to use during the growing season.  Well since my soil is so bad, they only grew in places where the soil was so-so and there a lot of bald spots.  When I went to cut them all down I discovered that hairy vetch has tendrils like a vine and was attached to everything.  I missed a bunch when I was cutting so the vines grabbed on to my pea plants and it was a mess to separate.  I'll likely just do winter rye this year.

Once I cut down all the cover crops, I spread newspaper, leaves, manure and compost throughout the garden beds as mulch.  In the town I live in, our dump composts all the fall leaves and brush and puts them in a big pile for dump pass holders to take for free.  We have used 3 truckloads so far this year.  This may not be the best option because I don't really know everything that is going into the compost.  I don't know what chemical fertilizers or pesticides people have used on their lawn waste before they drop it off at the dump.  I do compost my own yard waste and the waste from my neighbors, but like I said before, I'm a little behind right now so I take what I can get.

Flower garden

This is my flower garden.  I know there aren't any flowers to speak of, but I am new at this flower gardening thing.  I never did feel the need to plant flowers.  What do I get out of flowers.  I  would much rather grow yummy fruits and vegetables.  But this is a special flower garden.  This garden is going to be full of perennial flowers that are put their to attract beneficial insects to my garden.  (Perennial flowers so they come back every year.)  Bees and butterflies help to pollinate my fruits and vegetables.  Since there aren't any of these yet, I need flowers like the Angelica in the pictures to attract these bugs so that they will hang out in my garden.  Come time for my garden to be pollinated, it will be full of helpers to do the job.

 Another kind of bug that these plants will attract are parasitic wasps.  They aren't the big wasps that you are used to, but little tiny ones that don't sting.  What they do is help to rid the garden of unwanted bugs.  Bugs like tomato horn worn can destroy my plants.  The parasitic wasps lay their eggs on the horn worm and when the eggs hatch, the babies eat the horn worn and the horn worm doesn't eat my tomatoes.  This is a much better option than nasty chemicals any day.

For more information try this link Beneficial Insects

Bird houses

Since permaculture is also organic we don't use any chemicals on anything.  This means we need another way to control bugs that bother our garden plants.  Birds eat lots of bugs so we should do our best to make friends with some birds.  I put birdhouses all over my yard.

This is my very first visitor.  I should point out too that if you put the houses or a post out in your garden, then when the birds poop, they are adding nitrogen to your garden.  I have seen one garden where the post can be moved around depending on where you need the nitrogen.  Permaculture is all about many uses for everything.  

My whole family helped in the birdhouse making.  We made a day of it.  We all sat down together and painted and then I fed everyone dinner.  It was a nice family gathering and I got quite a few nice painted birdhouses out of it.  I think we will do it again next year.

Rainwater barrel

This is my rainwater collecting barrel that I made to water my garden.  It cost me about $50 to make but you could do it for a lot less.  Store bought they are closer to $100 or more for a good sturdy one.  It was very easy to make.  

First you need about a 55 gallon food grade barrel.  You can get these free from soda bottling companies.  They fill them with syrup and then throw them away.  I had no luck with this option and got mine for $40 on ebay.  The hole on the top for the water to come in has to be mosquito proof.  I took an old piece of screen and attached it over the hole in the top with a large hose clamp.  Then I drilled a hole on the side at the bottom for the spigot.  The spigot cost about $4.  It was threaded so I just screwed it into the hole I drilled.  If you warm it up a little it helps it go smoother.  It took a few tries for me to get it to go in straight too.  Once it was in place nice and straight I sealed it with waterproof caulk all the way around the edge of the spigot.  A big tube of the caulk cost about $4.  Done.