Lasagna Gardening

I am putting cardboard in one of our flower beds.

I know it sounds crazy but the idea is to cover the concrete ground in the flower bed and layer it with kitchen scraps, greens, browns and soil.

Then I mix it up with some water.

After that I will top it with normal soil to rest for the winter.

All the greens and browns are of course from my pruning and weeding sessions. I chopped them up into pieces in the old factory with an old paper cutter guillotine, made of heavy metals, probably already 50 years old.

The idea is to make it easier for microbes to settle in and do the composting work. It’s like a kitchen scrap, greens and brown salad sandwich for the microbes.

The cardboard should decompose slowly, but more importantly it should work as insulation against the cold concrete in the winter, preventing the compost from freezing.

It’s an experiment of mine and in spring time I will see what the result will be.

The other two thirds of the flower bed I will leave as is, except that I will pick out as many stones and pebbles from the soil in the flower bed.

If you look closely at my pictures you can see that I already layered pebbles around that big mushroom like looking shrub.

I was hoping that beneath the shrub I could somehow make moss grow but the conditions to grow moss there are not ideal. So I decided to put decorative pebbles there.

I am not sure why there are so many pebbles and stones in the flower bed, but I am determined to pick them out the flower bed everyday piece by piece.

I could of course go buy beautiful pebbles in the shop and just scatter them around the rocks to get that Zen-like Japanese garden, but that would miss the point of using permaculture as an applied principle.

I really want to use everything that I have in the garden without buying anything in the shop.

Admittedly, I am also super frugal.

To be continued.

#GardenExperiment #PermacultureLiving #CompostingMagic #GardenDiscoveries #FrugalGardening 🌱🌿🍃