Lasagna Gardening

I've got a side yard that used to hold a swing set and trampoline. The kids are older. We've gotten rid of those things and I've been trying to figure out what to do over there, on a very limited budget. There's no running water, for example, which makes it a pain to water. But there is a drip line already run over there that I could tap into. It's on the southeast, getting some nice morning sun as well as afternoon sun. The first year I had a vegetable garden I did it over there and it did quite well. It was mainly toting the water that did me in and caused me to move that all over to the northwestern side.I've been toying with the idea of growing berries. We sure love to eat them! So they seem a natural to grow. And I think they'd do well on a drip.

I spotted a book on lasagna gardening, a technique about which I'd read before. Lasagna Gardening: A New Layering System for Bountiful Gardens : No Digging, No Tilling, No Weeding, No Kidding! You basically prepare the beds by building layers of compostable materials plus peat moss. You start by laying down thick layers of wet newspaper or flattened cardboard, which will smother any grass underneath, then a layer of peat moss 3-4" high, then compost, then repeat, with maybe some wood ash or bone meal or chopped leaves in there if you have some. You want the beds 18-24" high when you're done. They'll decompose and shrink down as time goes on.

So I scraped aside the bark in about a 3x10' rectangle, layered some cardboard over part of it and newspaper over the rest. I'd gone out and bought two "bales" (bags) of peat moss and some bone meal. I layered that, then dried leaves that I raked up from under the apple trees, then some compost, then more peat moss. I probably could have used more peat moss but ran out. (I used some on an existing bed to prepare it for my garlic.)So it's not much to look at but the whole idea of building up a nice organic layer of rich materials makes total sense to me. I'm used to adding shredded newspaper to compost peridiodically and had used it before as a weed block under paths. Seems much better to use it up in my own yard than put it in a plastic (!) bag for the recyclers.