How to Layer Your Garden Box
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We've got dirt! Back in the fall, Wiehan and I built a garden box and you can read all about the process here and view the video here. More recently, we built two more garden boxes, but this time, we decided to make them half the height of the original box. We repeated everything about the process of the first box, but just made two smaller boxes, rather than one big box.
To fill the boxes, I'm using a combination of two methods, lasagna gardening and hugelkultur. For the lasagna gardening method, gardeners alternate layers of green matter, such as grass clippings, kitchen scraps, manure and fresh leaves, and brown matter, such as paper, sticks, cardboard and dried leaves in their growing space. Hugelkultur is a German word, translating to hill / mound culture. This method, while similar to the lasagna method, incorporates much more wood, by utilizing a base of logs and sticks, along with other green and brown matter to fill in the gaps. The wood takes a long time to decompose, providing an extended source of nutrients to the plants atop the mound. Both methods include a layer of topsoil on top of the pile, several inches thick.
Over the fall and winter months, I added cardboard, leaves, compost, sticks, shredded paper, coffee grounds and ash to the original box. I filled the new boxes halfway with sticks, pine cones and leaves from our yard. We ordered 10 cubic yards (7.6 cubic meters) of topsoil and leaf compost mix from a local company called Mulch and Stone, for a big investment of $423.89. We filled the remaining space in each box with the mixture and now the boxes are ready for seeds! We’re setting up a composting system that should hopefully reduce the amount of soil that we’ll have to outsource in the future. Stay tuned for more about that. In the meantime, I've already planted seeds in the boxes and I'm so excited to watch them grow! Check back for updates as our garden makeover continues!
Check out the video for this blog post here!
- Christin
And tell us! Are you growing any veggies this year? If so, what are you planting?
