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It’s finally spring!
I know everywhere else it’s been spring for a while, but up here at 4600 feet above sea level it’s barely spring time. Spring time means garden time!
I transplanted the seeds I started several months ago and will finish getting the rest of the garden planted over the next week.
This is our first year gardening at this house, so we are completely starting from scratch! Since we’re starting a brand new garden, I thought I’d tell you about how we set up our garden bed.
We started trying to decide how we wanted to do the garden last summer. We thought about making raised beds but, since we know that we will be moving in a year or so, I didn’t want to put all the time and money into building them.
We also knew that we would need to amend the soil extremely heavily if we wanted to grow anything. The only sunny spot for the garden was also completely full of gravel. It wasn’t even possible to till it.
After a lot of thinking and researching, we decided to try sheet composting. Sheet composting can be as simple or as difficult as you make it.
Most of the articles I found on sheet composting had a lot of steps and apparently, they were all incredibly important. A lot of them had between five and nine layers of different materials. But, since I’m not great at following rules, and I believe simple is generally better anyways, I pretty much ignored them and did it my way.
Sheet Composting (The Country Penny Way)
At its simplest, sheet composting is simply spreading manure and other compost materials over the whole garden and letting it compost in place. The biggest benefits for us were that it is no-till (because rocks), it should require very little weeding (since I’m actually a really lazy gardener), and it holds water really well.
Since we are using city water, saving on water usage was a huge deal to us. Our water bill is ridiculous in the summer, and it was essential that we reduce the water usage in our garden as much as possible.
We started with lots and lots and lots of manure. Over the next several months we brought in tons of manure. We had a free source for horse manure from a barn only a mile from the house. They were happy to dump the manure at the house instead of hauling it off to the landfill where they had pay to dump it.
I know a lot of people are hesitant to ask for free manure or other materials, but remember that a lot of the time it is a waste product that costs money to dispose of. Many places are more than happy to have somewhere free to dispose of it.
We put down almost a foot of manure across the entire garden area. It took a couple months to get enough manure, but we decided that it was ok to take our time since the manure was free.
Of course, as soon as I had a giant pile of manure on my lawn, I had my baby!
Lots of family and friends stopped by and everybody seemed to have an opinion on the manure pile. My sisters thought I was crazy, and my grandparents were sure I needed to till it under, but we stuck to our plan.
Finishing sheet composting the garden (finally)
When things finally settled down after the arrival of our little one we got back to work on the garden bed. Once we finished bringing in all of the manure we wet it down and covered it all with a layer of cardboard.
We were able to get the cardboard for free as well by asking for boxes from local furniture and grocery stores. If you can get most of your cardboard from furniture stores I would highly recommend doing that. The larger boxes mean that putting them down takes a lot less time.
We then layered about twelve inches of wood chips (also free) over the cardboard. I think I would use about half as many wood chips next time. Twelve inches of wood chips was waaay to much once we started planting and we ended up raking a lot of it out of the way.
Finally, we wet everything down, and then waited.
We started to get a bit nervous over the winter. What if we started planting and the manure hadn’t composted at all? Or what if we planted and everything died because the soil had too much nitrogen?
Since everything was covered under snow and a foot of wood chips we just had to wait. And wait. And wait.
When it was finally spring, we got to see how the garden beds turned out.
We planted the garden a few weeks ago, and the manure was almost completely composted!
It was rich and black and moist. The wood chips hold water in and the cardboard prevented almost all the weed seeds from germinating. The few weeds that did pop up were incredibly easy to pull out.
We will have to wait and see how the plants grow over the summer, but I’m really excited so far! It was so easy to plant in, the little bit of weeding is a piece of cake, and the compost has composted enough to avoid burning the plants.
The only negative I’ve found so far is that you do have to plan ahead.
This isn’t the method for you if you want to start a brand new garden in the next three days. It takes months of waiting. It’s not very hard to set up, but it is a slow process. For us, it was worth it to end up with such great garden soil.
I’ll let you know at the end of the year, but right now I’d call this a huge success!
