Product Description

A gardening system that works— so you don't have to! Turn in your tiller for a stack of old newspapers! Replace your shovel with a layer of grass clippings! Let Pat Lanza show you how you can create lush, successful, easy-care gardens in practically any location without hours of backbreaking digging or noisy tilling. * Practical, first-person advice from an experienced gardener * Great ideas to let you spend more time enjoying your gardens and less time working in them * Specific "lasagna" techniques for the most popular vegetables, flowers, herbs, fruits, and more

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #54150 in Books
• Published on: 1998-11-28
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 244 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This intriguingly titled book?which has nothing to do with pasta and everything to do with layering?serves up a time-saving approach to gardening that will come as welcome news to the overworked and the horticulturally challenged. Lanza exhorts readers to build soil up, "instead of digging down," by simply layering organic materials onto a prospective garden site and close-planting directly into it. Together with generous mulching, she contends, this process eliminates some of gardening's more labor-intensive chores?tilling, double-digging, weeding and frequent watering. After outlining her basic premise, Lanza zeroes in on the specific areas of interest, including vegetables, herbs, berries and flowers, providing an abundance of detail on a wide selection of planting materials. Although this method of creating instant raised beds is not new, Lanza has refined it into a step-by-step procedure that she conveys with simplicity and clarity, and her chatty, first-person narrative makes the text a pleasure to read. Of particular interest to fledgling gardeners, this title will also appeal to those looking for new ways to streamline the demands of their favorite pastime.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

From the Back Cover

Customer Reviews

Fabulous technique for productive, organic gardens
I believe that when it comes to books presenting new ways of doing anything, the only testimony that counts is that which comes from firsthand experience. Well folks, I'm here to tell you after a year of gardening the lasagna way that my firsthand experience shows this book is one of the wisest investments any gardener can make. Let me tell you about my 2003 garden.

First, a short outline of lasagna gardening technique: soak b&w newspapers in water, then overlap sections in a single layer directly on top of premarked sod area. This smothers the weeds/grass underneath. Then put a 4 inch layer of moistened peat moss over that, followed by a moist layer of organic shredded green material, followed by another layer of peat moss, followed by a layer of moist compost or yard waste, repeat the peat moss/organic matter pattern until your bed is built up to at least 18 inches high. Finish with compost on top, then either let it break down for a few months for certain crops or plant seeds and transplants directly into the matrix by pushing aside layers and inserting. As the layers break down, the earthworms will be eating the sod and breaking up the newspapers, mixing the layers together for you. The final result is an organic, self-tilled soil that's rich and free of disease and weed seeds. It's so simple.

Note: the author did neglect to mention the importance of wetting down each layer as you build the beds. I only figured this out because I had made compost before and I knew you needed moist materials for it to work.

In late fall of 2002 I built a 5 foot by 25 foot border bed for perennial flowers the lasagna way after reading Patricia Lanza's book. It sounded almost too good to be true - no digging, no tilling, no weeding? What was the catch, I asked myself. When I was done I planted perennials taken from four inch pots, watered them in, and left them for the winter rains to take care of (we can do that in So. Cal, hee hee). They settled in nicely and grew steadily, but it was cool weather so the roots were doing most of the growth at that time. A few months later as top growth appeared I was encouraged to build more lasagna beds in my vegetable garden - two 5 by 5 raised beds to go with my other two traditionally tilled raised beds (those were a lot of work, double digging, sifting rocks, mixing compost, etc. I wish now that I had known about the lasagna method a few years ago!). After about two hour's work I was done layering my new vegetable beds and watered them down to compost a little. In late May, I transplanted sweet peppers and basil starts to one lasagna bed and planted cantaloupes and flowers in the other.

Those two lasagna beds outperformed the traditional beds in every way. That summer I harvested more sweet peppers than ever before. It was my first try growing cantaloupes, so I have no previous crops to compare, but they did well and I harvested quite a few delicious, sun-sweetened cantaloupes from that bed. Meanwhile the flowers seemed to love the soil in my perennial bed, and they grew to huge proportions, filling in the space nicely by season's end. As promised, there was little watering and even less weeding. As a bonus, I never fertilized because the soil was already so rich in composting organic matter. Best of all, no soil-borne diseases! This was an organic gardener's paradise.

Author Patricia Lanza uses plenty of real-life examples from her own gardens to illustrate the effectiveness of this technique. She explains in detail how lasagna gardening differs from traditional tilling and double digging, what the benefits are and which crops need to wait while the layers compost down and which can be put in right away. There is an alphabetical listing of ways to plant annuals and seeds in lasagna beds, a plethora of tips on maximizing your space and innovating ways to grow vertically if need be. There are also garden plans for flower borders and perennial beds grouped according to watering and sunshine needs.

Please don't be afraid to break with "tradition" - you could save not only your garden tool budget, but your back as well. And if the promise of all those fruits, veggies and flowers with less work and more pleasure isn't enough for you, then you must really love that rototiller!
-Andrea, aka Merribelle

another new way to garden
I picked this book up at the library almost by mistake until I read the book title. It piqued my curiosity and I took it home.

This gardening book is a boon for the upcoming retiring baby boomers, older folks or the disabled. I am disability retired but love to grow things, and we depend on our vegetable gardens to supplement our meagre pensions. I read the book through with my wife as garden co-ordinator and we have made out a plan for our first gartden of this type. We shall have 6 5' x 3' plots using 4" x 4" planks to keep the gardens in place. We shall have one plot for onion sets, one for tomatoes, one for lettuce and leafy veggies, one for strawberries, and one for the cabbage family. We like the simplicity of planting the garden as the mulch etc. will not hinder vegetative growth with the ground becoming hard, not to mention the paucity of weeds. With back pain and arthur and ritis we find it easy to work these small plots as each is narrow and we can reach across to do the planting. This book also contains a great number of ideas for staking plants and different methods of keeping plants growing upward like cukes and beans etc. to save space and get more production.

In short, this handy book we have discovered tells us how to set up this type of garden, what and how to plant it, tips on insect control, the various crops which might be grown from herbs to flowers to berries. Lastly it has many resources of information to draw on. For those gardeners who are looking for a more ecological way to garden using household waste etc, and those gardeners who like to experiment with different types of gardens, I highly recommend this book. It is as compleat in all areas for this method of gardening and profusely illustrated with maps of hardiness areas and an extensive bibliography and other resource information. I don't care who invented it; I just like the idea of enjoying my gardening with perhaps a little less pain of digging and bending. Now to see if it will work and let's face it; we ain't getting any younger... Read it and try it; you just might like it even if your gardening areas are small or large. Oh yes, and if your wife likes it, gardening together will add to the domestic harmony of working together and enoying the soil and its relationship to humankind.

Interesting technique
Composting without the bin is the basic idea behind Patricia Lanza's lasagna gardening technique involving the layering of organic materials to create new, raised gardening beds. Her first chapter explains the technique, theory and materials in detail and is a great how-to guide. However, after the inital explanation, the book turns into a typical, although well organized and nicely written, garden handbook with chapters on vegetables, herbs, berries and flowers. Lanza has a wealth of gardening experience and offers many "tips and time savers" throughout the book. The final chapters include information on gardening for birds, extending the gardening season, and organic approaches to pest control. Finally, Lanza returns to the lasagna technique and adapts it for the reader's use in small and unusual spaces, as well as for container gardening. Although most of us won't have all the materials on hand initially for much more than a small plot, it is worth learning this earth-friendly method, and you may pick up a tip or two from Lanza's vast gardening experiences.