Sheet mulching -- party of 2

With spring drawing ever closer, and the day when we finally get to plant all our seedlings just around the corner, we need to get our garden bed ready.  You've heard me mention permaculture many times before, and this is one place where we're definitely putting it into practice.

Though I could easily write a very long post just about permaculture -- in short, permaculture is a design process and theory aimed at placing humans as part of the ecosystem and not apart from it.  The theory centers on the idea of working with the land as opposed to against it by mimicking what happens in nature.  For example, look at a mature forest -- no human is intervening with tilling, weeding, and fertilizing, but the forest thrives and has reached a balance of niche use through competition for resources.  So -- in the long run, this is what we're going for with our garden.  Obviously, there are some constraints to these ideas, and we'll never be able to grow a lot of the annual vegetables we love (tomatoes, peppers, etc.) with no work. We can, however, minimize the amount of work we have to do and minimize the damage we do to the land.  

In the long run, permaculture design practices lead to minimal weeding and garden tending....BUT....at the beginning, it can be quite an investment of time and energy.  The people we're getting to know through the local permaculture community often have work parties to help each other out.  While we have yet to be a part of one of these parties (we're still newbies), we understand there's more hanging out and chatting than actual working but with a big number of people, the work still gets done.  Sounds pretty good to me.  Because a work party is hard to throw when you're new to the area, we're working as a party of 2 -- and that makes for a lot of work.

One practice that is commonly used by permaculturists (permies) is sheet mulching, a.k.a. lasagna gardening, composting in place, etc.  The basic idea is that you can start a garden bed right on top of your existing lawn without digging at all, and with some ingenuity, you can get most of your materials for free.  While I could spend a ton of time explaining the ins and outs of sheet mulching, I'll point you to the 'ultimate, bomb-proof sheetmulching' from the author of Gaia's Garden -- a GREAT book for getting started with permaculture.  The quick and dirty of it is that you layer a number of things on top of your lawn, each with a specific purpose -- newspaper for carbon, seaweed for nutrients, compost for nutrients, etc. 

So....here we go...

We did decide to till this first year, and every time I go to a permaculture meeting, I feel guilty about our decision.  Several books I've read have said that tilling the first year is ok, though, so we decided it would be a good way to get things going on year one.  It also allowed us to level the garden a bit before planting anything. Our next step is to enrich the soil with some sheet mulching.  It is ideal to do the sheet mulch in the fall so it has the winter to break down and improve the soil.  You can do it in the spring and plant directly into the sheet mulch, though, so that's what we're doing.  We did a mini-sheet mulch this spring with plans for the mega-mulch this fall (hopefully with a bigger party).  

We're lucky enough to live on a salty river, so we get a lot of seaweed washing up among the detached, dried marsh reeds.  Let me specify that anything we've collected from the river has been detached -- we're not killing things to mulch our garden here.  So the first layer for us was a seaweed/marsh grass combo -- nutrients and carbon together!

Truck o' seaweed and reeds.

Delicious, mulchy goodness!

Dr. Trafton spreads seaweed like a champ.

After we spread the seaweed/marsh grass layer, we realized we should probably have mapped out our main path before covering the entire bed with mulch.  Since we're doing a lot of our own logging, we have a lot of brush to make wood chips -- perfect path material!  Our garden paths are going to resemble the veins of a leaf.  One other aspect of permaculture -- diverse plantings -- no straight rows, and plants are interspersed.  This mimics nature, and it helps control pests.  If you have a huge bunch of tomatoes, the hornworms are like....sweeeeeeeeet!  If you have one tomato plant surrounded by other things, they are less likely to destroy all your plants.  Here, we're just making the main path.  This one will be wheelbarrow wide with the branching veins being just foot path wide.

Adding chips to define the main path.

The next layer is going to be compost.  I wandered down to a neighbor who has lots of sheep and some llamas and asked him for some of his composted manure.  He was really nice and just gave us a truckload of it!  A few days later, Anna's dad showed up with a dump truck full of his composted manure.  We're still going to need more, but it is a good start for getting things going.

Sheep/llama manure on the left (already sheet mulched) and horse/chicken/yard waste compost on the right -- about to be sheet mulched.

Farm manager performs QA/QC mid sheet mulch -- at least he has a super sweet path to use!

One of many many many loads of compost dumped on the garden.

Seaweed and compost layers done -- that is a mighty fine path.  The traditional gardner in me wants to stop here -- it looks so pretty, but we've got to cover that soil.

After adding all this nutrient-rich goodness, we need a weed block.  Part of the benefit of sheet mulching is that you add a layer to block weeds (and hopefully day lilies, in our case).  This can be a number of things, but we're going with newspaper thanks to our NYT subscribing friends. :)

After the newspaper, you want something to hold in moisture.  By enriching the soil and building more soil, the garden will hold a lot more moisture on its own requiring less additional water from us. Here we were unable to source for free, broke-down, and bought bales of straw.  You don't want to use hay here because it may have grass seeds.  It would be perfectly fine to use hay on your layers below the weed block, however, as they won't be able to germinate and grow.

Wheelbarrow o' wet newspaper -- we still had to add a bit at the end.  

Wet newspaper, then straw.

Mighty-fine sheet mulching, if I do say so myself.

Oh, hey! You made a cozy bed just for me!

Seriously, could he possibly be cuter?

Almost done!

The final product....of half the garden. We have one more epic sheet mulching day in our future.  Also, look closely -- the farm manager is still there. :)

Even though I've read the books, talked to people, and have clearly drunk the permaculture kool-aid, while we were laying newspaper and straw over our lovely compost, I was thinking, "What the hell are we doing?!?!?!" While I totally subscribe to not having exposed, bare soil, it just felt wrong to be putting newspaper and then straw on everything. We're committed to these methods for this year, and I'm hoping the more we learn, the more we find it less crazy.