Starting a Garden the Lazy Way

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How’s your garden coming along?  Start any new beds this year?  Yes?

So how’s your back – ready for a nice hot Epsom salt soak?

It may be too late for this year, but there’s no reason ever to strain your back or arms starting a new garden bed again.

Lazy gardeners – Rejoice! Eco-gardeners, too!  With lazy gardening, you don’t ever have to go through the slow, hard, blister-raising labor of breaking sod again.  Nor do you have to use a smelly, noisy, gas-sucking tractor or plow.  All you have to do is spread stuff around.

The idea is to mulch the heck out of your new plot until it submits to cultivation.  Have you ever picked up an old board that’s been lying out in the field for a few months? You know how it kills all the grass, and the soil underneath gets all loose and friable from the worms tunneling through?  That’s what you’re going for.

Here’s how to do it:

Starting Your Lazy Garden Bed

1.    Measure out your plot.  The lazy gardening technique works best for home gardens.  If you’re thinking more along the lines of a cornfield, stick with the plow.
2.    Collect a bunch of cardboard boxes – the bigger the better.  Refrigerator boxes are ideal.  Cut them apart into sheets of cardboard.
3.    Get the cardboard really wet.  Like, saturated. If you haul water and want to conserve it the easy way to do this is to let them sit out in the rain.
4.    Get your garden plot really, really wet.  The rain does a great job with this, too.
5.    Lay the soaked cardboard pieces out so they cover your plot.  Make sure the edges overlap, or you’ll get little lines of grass growing up through the cracks.
6.    (You can also use newspapers, if you’re not concerned about the inks in your food plot.  Use lots of layers and make sure they’re soaked.)
7.    If you have it, spread the paper layer with compost.
8.    Now, pile on the mulch!  Anything you’ve got – moldy hay, grass clippings, sawdust, dead leaves, whatever.  If you have extra compost or manure and want to layer that in, so much the better.

Now you have your bed.  Ideally, you’ll want to let it sit for a while, the longer the better.  (I didn’t say this was going to be fast!)

The best time to start a lazy garden bed is in the fall after the harvest.  Usually you’ll have a lot of mulch available at that time, and you can just let it sit until spring.  Very early spring works well, too.

Planting Your Lazy Garden Bed

Don’t even think about direct-sowing the first year.  You’ll want transplants – and make sure they’re big enough that the mulch doesn’t shade them out.  Tomatoes and squash work fine.  Just take a trowel and dig right through the mulch.  Throw a little compost in the bottom of each hole and tuck ‘em in.

When we (sob) moved back to the city a couple years ago I was too busy at work to do much in the way of gardening – but I did take an hour and put in a 3’x 20’ lazy garden bed.  Last summer was the first season.  My tomatoes didn’t do too well (got them in late), but we enjoyed many bouquets of marigolds and zinnias.  This spring I raked back the mulch and the soil looks great – I’ll just dig in a few amendments and it’ll be ready to plant.  I’m looking forward to at least a few meals from our little urban homestead!

I’ve known people who swore they never would have gotten a garden started at all if they hadn’t found out about this method.  Whether you have a bad back, are short on time (but long on patience), or are just plain a Lazy Gardener, give it a try.

Anne Michelsen is co-founder of Marathon Renewable Energy, Inc., specializing in solar hot water systems. You can read more of her work at YourGreenLifestyle.blogspot.com

Tagged as: gardening, urban homestead