Simple Ways Wednesdays - Episode 4

Posted by A. Caleb Hartley on August 13th, 2008 filed in Simple Ways, Uncategorized, flower, gardening

Prepare your flower beds eco-smartly!

If you’re a gardener, a simple way to reduce your impact on the Earth is to recycle your newspaper and yard waste into next spring’s flower bed.

A good time to prepare for planting next spring is coming up soon - autumn! If you prepare your flower beds right in the fall, they’ll be ready to go in the spring, when you need them. By using layers of material you would most likely throw away anyway, you can have a great flower bed prepared come planting time. You can even create a new plot - right over existing grass!

First, make a one-inch layer of wet newspaper over the area you would like to prepare (don’t use colored newsprint - only the black and white (and read all over) pages).

The next layer should consist of a couple of inches of peat moss, then do a few more layers of some kind of organic material like compost or grass clippings or chopped-up leaves (it will be autumn when you do this remember). Each of these layers should be about 4 or five inches deep. No more than three layers of organic material is necessary above the peat moss.

The last step is to plant your bulbs, then cover them with another two inches or so of mulch. Your total depth after all is said and done will be somewhere between one and a half feet and two feet or so. Over the course of the fall (before it gets to freezing temperatures), keep the plot watered (about an inch of water per week) and the “pile” will begin to disappear… it will sink right into the ground.

Once spring has sprung, you’ll see that your flower bed is now full of excellent, good, clean dirt. And the newspapers have acted as a weed-barrier, so you should have very few weeds to deal with, too!

And if you don’t keep the packaging or mark the type of flowers you planted (and your memory is like mine) you’ll have a nice surprise in Spring when they begin to grow and bloom!

Namaste,
A. Caleb Hartley

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Do you garden? What do you think of the “lasagna” method of flower bed preparation? Leave a comment and tell us!

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