A few posts ago I mentioned Ruth Stout and her ideas of no-dig/no-till gardening, and this started a bit of a discussion on the history of Organic gardening in the comments.
It turns out Organic gardening began much earlier than I thought, and the Organic Guide just made a great post on this topic.
Considering the ease of the no-till method and the vast benefits…how did we stray so far? We just moved to a new home and have gathered all the materials to create a new food garden out of lawn by piling cardboard, leaves, compost, straw, etc. Our goal is an urban forest garden and every year we will convert more lawn to garden. I can’t wait till spring!
Hi Cmarion,
Thanks for the comment. I agree, we’ve taken a long and strange path to get to where we are. Good luck with the urban forest. You’ll be among friends here as you get rid of your lawn, bit by bit. Let us know how it goes.
We covered a 800 sq. ft. area of lawn this weekend with cardboard and topped it with compost, dehydrated cow manure, stone dust, mowed up leaves and grass, fall dead flower/plant clippings from all over the yard. Today a large load of ground leaves is arriving to add another layer, then we are topping with straw. All materials are organic (I know where the load of leaves originated…no chemicals).
We are very excited, less lawn and a garden area preparing itself for spring.
We are also spreading stone dust over the complete property (city lot of .21 acres). Do any of you have experience with re-mineralizing?
Hi Cmarion,
No, I’ve never done re-mineralizing. Mike on PlanB posted about this a year or so ago, I think:
http://mikro2nd.net/blog/planb/
You should create a blog, write about it and post some pictures! Do you have a blog?
We have our 800 sq. ft. garden covered, but since the leaves fell so late here in Connecticut, it turned cold soon after we finished the sheet mulching. I am concerned that we won’t get enough composting going in the layers. Larger plants won’t be a problem come spring, just move aside the mulch and plant, but lettuce, spinach, kale and such may require bringing in some compost to plant in at the start. An then again, we may have enough warm weather this winter to make it all work.
Now we are sitting back, leafing through seed and plant catalogs making up the wish list for spring.
We are picking out fruit bushes and trees and planning the rest of the garden.