Results from lasagna gardening

Here are the beds as we left them for the winter. It does not show in this photo, but each was piled approximately 6" high with aged cow manure from a local farm and chipped leaves. We spent many hours on many weekends working on converting this area from grass to garden and though the goal was to get every bed 2 feet high, we had to settle for this. I figured it would be a good experiment since according to all of the forums I've read, there is no way to go wrong with lasagna gardening.


Here are the beds after we started working them in the spring. As you can tell, some of the beds are littered with weeds. It seems a little random, some of the beds looked good and others were a mess. Anyway, at first I thought that there must have been weed seeds in the cow manure or the leaves, but when I started to work on getting the beds weed-free again, I am pretty sure most of them came from below the newspaper. Additionally, in some place I can tell we didn't do a good enough job making sure the newspaper and cardboard was overlapping - a line of grass would be poking through.

My understanding was that below the newspaper, the earthworms would eat the dying sod and aerate the soil, making the beds soft and easy to work for several inches below the newspaper. That did not happen at all. As you can see from the second photo, we ended up buying a small electric tiller to make the ground plantable. We did our best to keep the earthworms safe but I know we had some casualties.

A week after the first tilling when the ground warmed enough to do some seed planting, there was a plethora of earthworms. Either we did a sufficient job protecting them (I would follow my spouse and grab all of the wriggly earthworms I saw, placing them in a bed that he had already tilled) or tilling doesn't do damage to the soil the way I was warned.


We ended up taking all of the leaves-and-manure mixture and piling it on two beds (see photo above). Not only were they the smallest beds, but they were the beds for carrots, onions, and spinach, three crops that are especially grateful for raised beds prepared lasagna gardening style.

All-in-all, I was disappointed with the results. It seemed to take an enormous amount of effort collecting and spreading the materials, especially trying to keep costs down. Even in hindsight I can't believe how much time and energy it took. Plus, the results were far below my expectations. (Especially now, as the carrots and onions are barely growing - more on that later.)

I don't think I would try it again or recommend it. If I did, I would just choose a couple of beds (so that material gathering was more manageable) and try to do them perfectly - thicker pads of newspaper (4-5 sheets), substantial overlapping, materials piled two feet high. I estimate that this spring, we've spent a comparable amount of time and energy preparing these beds as I did in my previous garden (which I hadn't touched prior to that spring). Considering how much effort we had already put into this garden, this was a fail.