Starting New Gardens: A Simple Approach
New garden in progress…and anxiously awaiting the arrival of spring.
When I first visited the property I call Balsam Hollow, I was struck by its beauty and its potential. The 14-acre property is mostly forested, some of it boggy, and much of it bordering a small lake. Only about 2 acres have been cleared for use as a yard. One can do a lot with 2 acres.
The cleared area is covered mostly in wildflowers, herbs, and moss. No one had planted them. Rather, they are the natural inhabitants here: yarrow, self-heal, daisy, lupine, wild raspberries, and myriad moss and lichen species. Not to mention the abundance of riparian herbs like Joe Pye weed, boneset, horsetail, blue flag, and calamus. What a yard! I feel like I hit the jackpot. Most of the cleared acreage will remain as is, and I will encourage the continued growth of the native herbs.
The only gardens that were established by previous owners are decorative, close to the house, and sorely neglected. I started overhauling one of those gardens last year (it is loaded with peonies – my favorite) and will continue with that this spring.
One of those gardens is dreadfully overgrown but It has loads of potential as a medicinal herb garden. That site will be cleared as soon as the snow melts. (It is now mid-April and we still have more than 12” of snow in some spots!)
There are no established vegetable gardens here, and it is easy to understand why. Aside from the very short growing season, there isn’t much for soil here. This part of northern Minnesota was never home to roaming herds of bison, whose dung helped build the rich and fertile soil of the Great Plains. The glaciers that moved through this area stripped the land of much of its soil and left sand and gravel in its place. And boulders. My yard is peppered with boulders just peaking through a thin veil of soil and moss.
Starting a vegetable garden here required hauling in a lot of dirt. I was able to find a source of rich soil about an hour away, so I had 10 yards hauled in. It was not an inexpensive undertaking but purchasing bags and bags of packaged soil did not make sense economically (and I can’t stand all those plastic bags).
The next problem was sorting out how to go about converting some yard to garden, which includes killing or removing some of the grass. There are lots of ways to do this and I have tried them all: double digging, tilling, lasagna gardening, and more.
I decided to go cheap and easy for this first set of gardens to make up for the expense of the dirt. Having just moved, I had a mountain of cardboard piled up in my garage. This is not an exaggeration. I could not park my car in the garage for months! There was a pile at least 3 feet deep. There is no recycling pick up here and it took me a while to figure out where the drop site was, which turned out to be a good thing. As a result, I had several pieces of very large cardboard pieces perfect for starting a new garden.
In a nutshell, here’s the process:
1. Place cardboard where you want your garden
Once you have the cardboard in place, get it good and wet. This helps hold it in place and makes sure you have good contact with the grass beneath it. Hold the cardboard down with something heavy like rocks, bricks, or log or you will be chasing cardboard around your lawn when the wind blows.
Think about how you want your garden to look, how easily you will access each bed for pulling unwanted plants, and leave room for future expansion. I want my garden to be arrayed like a flower. This is a start.
Important note: DO NOT use glossy full-print cardboard. Use the plainest, least printed cardboard you can find. Why? Over time that cardboard and everything on it will break down, potentially leaching chemicals into your garden. Chemicals that could be taken up by your plant and that you will eventually eat. You don’t want that. Use the plainest cardboard you can find and make sure to remove staples, tape, and stickers before use.
2. Cover the cardboard with soil
For this step, I covered the entire surface of the cardboard in a few inches of soil. This is not the end of the process but will keep the cardboard in good contact with the grass all winter, as well as hold everything in place. Don’t go nuts here, but don’t be skimpy, either.
3. Cover the soil with a seed barrier of some sort
You don’t want your clean, fresh soil to be immediately full of unwanted plants. (Notice I did not say ‘weeds’ as there really is no such thing. More on that in the future.) I covered mine in black plastic, which is not ideal, but it was cheap and readily available. The problem with the plastic (besides the fact that it is PLASTIC) is that the dark, airless covering of the soil will kill a lot of the beneficial microbes that you want to have in the soil. I will have to add these back before planting. I will describe this in a future post. Plastic works in a pinch, but if you can find something that breathes, that is preferable.
4. Let the whole thing sit all winter
That is it. In the spring you can finish your garden by adding more soil, compost, beneficial microbes, etc. I intend to make raised beds using some simple kits I picked up at the local farm supply store. More to come on that as well.
If you are lucky enough to live in a region that is amenable to year-round gardening, you can go ahead and build a raised bed right away and get planting!
I have to say, relative to double digging and tilling, this is the easiest and lowest-energy input method of garden building that I have tried. If you don’t have a tiller and don’t relish the idea of hours of digging and picking through sod, this method is for you.
In my next post, I will talk a bit about seed starting and the differences between starting herb seeds and vegetable seeds (hint: veggies are way easier!)
Until then, be well and get your hands dirty.
Summer