Allotment Gardening Advice Help Chat
Growing => Grow Your Own => Topic started by: Asherweef on May 26, 2014, 11:37
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Morning Kids,
I'm currently sat in my garden after digging about 2.5 meters of grass up from what was formerly known as the lawn. As I'm a rather lazy individual I was wondering how many people here have experience of lasagne gardening, or, alternatively, if they have any opinion on just turning the sod upside down.
I'm planning on covering it with newspaper and then putting whatever comes to hand (MPC, topsoil, leaf litter etc) on top in order to act as a mulch and then plant into the mix (I'll cut a cross into the newspaper in order to get it into the grass). Originally I was going to invest in raised beds as under the soil there is very little real organic matter - but after seeing the Great Allotment Challenge thought that planting and growing without raised beds gives a much nicer, naturalistic feel; since I will be looking at it out of the window daily I'd rather it be aesthetically pleasing.. As there is little organic matter (e.g. bits of rubble etc) I will be remedying this over the next couple of years with gradual removal and a build up of manure and soil.
Does anybody have any ideas of how successful this will be & also if I include manure in the mulch whether or not this will interfere with my planting?*
*Essentially I'm planting anything and everything that comes to hand.
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Just to clarify, I am not that experienced with 'lasagne beds' although plenty in dealing with sod etc ;) Plenty of people grow very successfully in the way however.
Turning the sods over and covering them will mean they eventually break down into good loam. This is what I did when I made raised beds at our school, and covered them with top soil, so covering with layers of other materials will have the same effect
Mulches are general either put down after planting (in my style of gardening) or scraped to one side to dig a hole to plant in when I need to, so no, they shouldn't interfere with planting
Hope that is reassuring :D
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I have a couple of questions though.
1) Are there any perennial weeds in the area you are planning to cover? or is it just grass. Best to remove those perennials as covering often doesn't kill them.
2) moving on from the first question. What type of grass is it? if it's couch grass covering it probably won't kill it.
Assuming it's just normal grass and there are no weeds then yes you could just cover the grass with a layer of newspaper several sheets thick (or cardboard) and cover that with a nice thick layer of manure/compost/topsoil etc and plant directly into the growing medium you choose. Eventually the grass will rot down under the newspaper. I wouldn't cut a cross in the newspaper to be honest as that will just leave areas for the weeds to come through.
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yeah I've done this, you can turn them then; cover and plant, or I stack them as a windbreak along the edge of the plot, or to make sides of a raised bed and fill with compost. I found couch dies nicely after excluding light (assuming its covered thickly and can't grow up or through) but if you ever need to dig down into it the roots are very wirery to get out.
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Thanks for the replies!
It's mainly rye grass but there are some dandelions etc in there too which I've been removing when ive seen them (no doubt I've missed several though). My main problem now is that it is extremely bumpy and uneven. I don't suppose there is any other option than covering the gaps with topsoil or mpc?
In other news: next door has just brought 4 hens from her previous house... Turns out I'm now getting two hens from the girlfriend for my birthday! Just a case of making sure it's feasible in our relatively small garden...