This is part of a new series of blog posts for beginner gardeners. These posts may be a little shorter and more specific in nature.
Starting a new flower or vegetable bed can be daunting to the beginner, especially if the area is covered with lawn.
One can, of course, use a sod cutting shovel to take off the grass, before digging into the soil and adding amendments, but this is a lot of work, and if you have pure clay soil like I have, it is MORE than a lot of work.
Luckily, there is sheet mulching.
Some people call this technique Lasagna Gardening or No-dig gardening.
This is the easiest way to start a garden bed, unless you happen to have a chicken tractor full of chickens, in which case you can let the chickens do all the work (before you move them somewhere else, where there’s more grass for them). And even though I have chickens and a chicken tractor (see the photo below, of my chicken Spock, in her chicken tractor), my soil is such heavy clay that even though the chickens did get rid of the grass and leave droppings to fertilize the ground, the area was still so hard that I had to make a sheet mulch bed on top of it anyway.
Here’s how to make a new bed using sheet mulch:
Once you’ve chosen an area that you want to turn into a bed, mow the area with the mower on a low setting if the are is covered with grass.
If you have some food scraps, throw them on there. Add some old coffee if you have it sitting around, including coffee grounds. If you can, try to break up the soil a little with a broad fork.
Lay down a solid layer of brown cardboard.
Make sure to remove tape and stickers, and don’t use shiny colored or laminated cardboard, as these have toxins that will damage your soil microorganisms. If you don’t have any cardboard, you can use black and white newspapers. There used to be a newspaper dumpster across my road, and I used to raid it for black and white newspapers. Use many layers. Whether you use cardboard or newspapers, make sure that they overlap, and no grass is poking through.
Water the cardboard. This does two things: it adds a little moisture to your new bed from the bottom up, and it prevents your cardboard/newspapers from flying away before you have a chance to cover them with organic materials on a windy day.
Pile on leaf detritus, compost, straw, more leaves, more compost, more straw, and so on. If you have some spent potting soil, add that too – it usually has perlite in it, and it contributes organic matter, if not a lot of nutrients. You can add dried out weeds, as long as they don’t have seeds on them.
Just use what you have.
The top layer should be soil or compost – if straw is on top, it can blow away.
The cardboard will decompose and add to the soil, and you’re also refraining from disturbing the soil, so you’re doing two good things by using this technique (in addition to reducing your workload). When we till the soil, we cause it to release the carbon that was sequestered there by microorganisms in the soil. We don’t want that!
Don't disturb the soil like this piggy did!
Leave this bed to cook for a few months if you start the new bed in fall or winter. If you have larger plants that need to go in the ground sooner, or you made your new bed in late spring, simply make a hole in your sheet mulch bed, cutting through the cardboard, and plant your plants in that hole. Alternatively, you can plant your large plants in the ground and make your sheet mulch bed around the plant. The only drawback to this method is that weeds will sneak through right around the foot of the plant, because they weren’t completely covered up.
Done!
You may find that with time your new bed attracts slugs, so check for those and be prepared to trap them. I’ve used the pie tin full of cheap beer, as well as a pie tin full of a mixture of yeast, sugar, flour, and water. Either way works. When your tin gets full of dead slugs, dump those revolting little slime bags in the compost. I’ve tried giving them to my chickens, but they won’t eat slugs, dead or alive.
These huge and delicious onions were grown in a sheet mulch bed.
Dudley the giant metal chicken stands in a sheet mulched bed full of edible native plants and flowers.
With the exception of a few slugs, which ducks will happily eat, by the way, this is by far the easiest and most low impact way to start a new garden bed. And at the rate that we’re losing topsoil because of large-scale plowing, chemical use, and monocropping, we desperately need to build soil. Creating new beds with the sheet mulch technique adds nutrients to the soil, uses up yard debris and compost (saving you money as it reduces the material added to landfills), and saves your back.
