Planting The Garden

Have you ever heard of lasagna gardening? We did our garden like that year before last and it did so good. It’s loads of work though and much easier just to till the thing and set your plants out. What you do is layers of stuff like newspaper, cardboard, grass clippings, soil, hay, pine straw, etc. When we first did it we didn’t even mess with the grass that was in the spot we wanted the garden to be. We just put some PVC pipes into the ground at each corner as big as we wanted our garden to be. Then we put down cardboard boxes laid out flat. Then piled on some grass clippings, then some newspapers, then some soil on that, then some more paper. Then we put on the pine straw on the top after we cut out small holes to plant the plants into and planted the plants. You can also buy you some red worms and put in your spot and they will help break it all down for you. I bought some at the fish bait shop and put them on our garden. We didn’t use any chemicals at all that year in our garden and that was the best tasting tomatoes I ever put into my mouth. I ate them like an apple and I’m not one for tomatoes usually. I got very sick off of a can of tomato juice when I was a teen and that did me on tomatoes. To this day I haven’t drank any tomato juice.

Well this evening DH got the first row ready in the garden with the lasagna method. We didn’t have any cardboard boxes this time and I like those better than the newspaper because it takes longer to break down the newspaper if you can believe that. We planted our 7 tomatoes in the bed. There is a mound of ants at the end of the row that I have GOT to figure out HOW to get to leave without using poison in our garden! I know if I soak the garden really well they will leave but I don’t want to water log the tomatoes either. They don’t like water logged soil. So I am trying to figure out a way without using chemicals to make them leave! UGHHHHH

I am also going to put down a fence on the outer side of the garden from the tomatoes to plant some cucumber seeds beside so they can run up the fence and not all in our yard. Then when they come up I will mulch them really well so they will do good and maybe we wont have to water it so much.

I’ve already got a couple of banana pepper plants to put in it and we want a couple bell pepper plants and some hot pepper plants to. I’d like to have some squash as well.  I just hope we’re not too late getting all this planted!

I’ll have to get a pic of our garden as the plants grow. The tomatoes were chest high in gallon pots and we planted them deep into the soil so they will have good root systems and do better we hope. Their color isn’t the best in the world but I hope to change that shortly by giving them some good cow manure or duck manure. I will do it like the manure tea you make so it can soak in the water a little while before I add it to the soil. That should make them a pretty dark green. They have blooms all over them now. So now that they are in the soil they should take off.