manure cont.

Okay, I picked up Patricia Lanza's 'Lasanga Gardening' book and it answered some questions for me. First, you can put 'raw' compost materials in your lasagna garden - vegetable scraps, etc, basically anything you'd put into a compost bin. If you are putting ready compost on, you can actually plant immediately - so if you already had an area where you had gardened before or you didn't have to worry about killing the soil, AND you had goliath-sized compost bins that would be full of ready compost in the spring, you could just wait until spring to do this. Second, you do want to put down black plastic if you are 'cooking' it over the winter. Cooking it heats it up so that compost happens quicker - in her experience, in six weeks. We will put the plastic down just to be sure - checking it once a week and removing it when it is ready. I don't know what happens to overcooked lasagna gardens!

There are still two things I am confused about: first, she says that you should let it 'cook' for six weeks. But I am wanting to prepare it now to plant in six months. I'm not sure if it's okay to go ahead and do it now, or if I should wait until mid-February to layer the materials. Second, she says (and everything else I've seen) to layer until materials reach 18-24 inches. This seems especially important for sheet composting, because that will ensure that the pile gets heated to the point that compost happens and kills bacteria and disease. Now that I think about it, that's not confusing, it's just not what I was hoping to hear. Purchasing manure is crazy expensive for the size garden we're planning. I was hoping we could do a short stacked lasagna garden.

She recommends layers of about 4", but also says that she uses four times as much leaves/brown material as green material. This is consistent with what I have heard about ideal practices for composting, but then you would only have one layer of green material, such as manure. Would it go on the top, the bottom, or somewhere in the middle? To make it easier on us, I'm wondering about doing the layers much smaller - because 50 cubic feet, enough to cover the entire garden to a depth of 1", is all we can get in the truck.

So I think we're going to do a little experiment - we'll do some of the beds with 4" layers, and others with smallers layers. I was feeling anxious because I thought this had to be done in the fall, but it turns out we can take it easy as long as we use the black plastic. Plus, we could prepare the beds dedicated to early crops now, and prepare the beds that are planned for vegetables that don't get planted until later in a month or so. That will give us time to collect manure for free in a few weeks when we have more energy. Easier on the pocketbook too! This is supposed to be cheaper than buying vegetables at the store all winter long - I was expecting some upfront costs this first year, but not what I was estimating earlier this week. Ahhh! I feel so relieved to finally have this figured out!