To prepare our garden to have the best soil possible for the spring, we decided to
try Lasagna Gardening. We followed the article from Urban Farming
http://www.urbanfarmonline.com/urban-gardening/backyard-gardening/lasagna-gardening.aspx to a tee. The first thing we started to do weeks ago is to collect carbon sources.  Any box we had or newspaper we kept rather than recycling them. We gathered leaves from our yards and a few bales of straw. Carbon sources were plentiful and easy to store. Our nitrogen sources took a bit of research. We called a few farmers to see if they had aged manure available and decided to go to Stan and Delores’s farm for sheep manure.  Pictures are shown in the previous blog.

Other nitrogen sources came from our parents coffee grounds, kitchen scraps
and we stopped by the Java house on our “community day” to pick up a whole
garbage bag full of coffee grounds.

All day on Friday we worked to transform our garden. We removed our garden
beds (except our strawberries) and tilled the soil.

Once the whole area was tilled we laid down all of our cardboard (I was amazed we didn’t collect enough cardboard to cover our entire garden!) and some straw
which was our first layer of carbon.

Then we laid down a nitrogen layer.

We repeated the layering and finished with straw (carbon) on top.

Since the wind really blows and we wanted to speed up the composing process,
we covered the whole garden with black plastic. Now our only challenge is to
find a secure way to keep the tarp down…every day we come to school a little
adjustment needs to be made! We are very excited to see how rich the soil will
be come spring!

We went on a little excursion today.  First stop was Stan's house to get some aged sheep manure.  Stan is on the board for the Cosgrove Institute and has been a wonderful resource for us.  Check out our pictures below !