We went to buy 50 bags of cow manure Saturday. When we pulled the truck around to load them up, I noticed the bags said "compost and manure." Looking more closely, it turns out the bags were about 10% cow manure and 90% other materials - mushroom compost, etc. Not what I wanted! I was totally at a loss for what to do. I mean, maybe this stuff would be better - or maybe worse. Do we still mix it with leaves? I just had no idea. We decided to halve our order (because that was all we could take anyway...they were supposed to weigh 25 lbs each but they actually weighed 40 lbs each...) and see what happened.
We prepared one bed - the green beans, which will be two rows of 35 ft each. I layered the newspaper down and even though I would not call the day 'windy,' I ended up having to quickly figure out a way to keep the paper down and just started throwing shovelfuls of the compost on each sheet. I layered the newspapers so that their are 3-4 sheets in each spot, overlapping to make it seamless. Then I gave the newspapers a good soaking, and by then it was sun down so we had to call it a night.
The next day I figured I would go ahead and make a solid layer of compost, so I began putting more down. One problem was that in between the piles of compost holding the paper down, air pockets seemed to form that the compost would actually slide off. It was difficult to spread the compost without tearing the newspaper - that might be one reason to have layers thicker than 1". We then put about 4" of chipped leaves on top, covered with tarps held down by rocks, and we'll wait and see how it goes...
We had enough time to get one more bed started, and my spouse and I were able to work on this one together because he had finished the fence by this point. It was SO much easier with two people! I would lay out the newspaper and he would spray it down - it kept it from blowing away, and I bet the newspaper got more thoroughly soaked. On this bed we piled chipped leaves next (just to experiment) and finished with two small rows of compost, right where the broccoli and strawberries will be planted. Just because we're running out, and well, we'll just see what happens.
Friday night I read online forums about lasagna gardening, and I discovered that although every person seemed to go about it their own way and have their own method, I did not find one person who said it didn't work. So I'm going to try a pretty bare bones approach and see what happens.
We still have not figured out how to get cow manure from our farmer. We did find a little trailer/cart that can haul more than a truck from our local rental place, but it's expensive ($66 for four hours, $88 for a full day) and we do not have access to a truck with a hitch. We chatted with him a little bit at the market and he seemed confident that we could come to a price agreement we'd both be happy with. If we have to rent a truck on top of the trailer AND pay for manure, I don't know...what matters to us is our total cost, not just the price of manure. I have no doubts he'll be fair about that. I do think we'll just get enough for 1" instead of doing the whole 18-24 inches. That would actually mean that we would only have to get about 30 more feet! We can get that in our neighbors truck, shouldn't be a problem. We would have enough to maybe even do the full recommended height for the smallest bed, for comparison. If we pull the tarps off the beds in the spring and find that it's not what we were hoping for, we can always do the recommended layering then and plant directly in it.
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