Front yard with lasagna garden method used to control aggressive plants.
As a long time gardener, I have a love/hate relationship with plants that are too successful and in fact become weeds. I have a long list of those pests that start out so sweetly and in fact need a bit of help getting established. Then, when my back is turned they flip into pest mode and try to take over the world – or at least a good portion of the garden. Plants such as asters, spiderwort, purple violets, bishops weed and Japanese anemone just to name a few. It is really disheartening to find that a plant I originally liked and may have even shared with a friend becoming a garden bully! Left alone many of these can become so aggressive that other plants are simply choked out and disappear.
In my efforts to contain some of these bullies and eliminate others, I discovered Lasagna Gardening, a book by Patricia Lanza. Basically it is a way to make weed control easier while improving your soil. Her instructions involve laying down newspapers, peat moss, and mulch in layers until the bed is 18 to 20 inches high to create a new garden space. Then if you let nature take its course, the mound will settle and decompose, killing the weeds and grass that were originally in the bed. This method produces a garden with dark, loose soil that can be planted just as you would a traditional garden.
Mulching Tip
Since I already had a garden, albeit full of unwanted plants, I decided to try a variation of her idea. I layered the wet newspaper, at least 10-12 pages thick, close to the plants I wanted to keep. Those newspapers were placed right on top of the unwanted plants, being careful to overlap the edges by at least an inch or two so that no sunlight would penetrate. Then mulch was added to hide the newspapers. It worked out great!
That lasagna layering saved a lot of backbreaking work and opened up the garden for better air circulation around the plants that I kept. It worked so well that some of my friends and family are now doing the same thing in their gardens. It’s a great way to recycle newspapers and improve your garden at the same time.
This garden shows the layering method for lasagna gardening.
Well – how totally fabulous is that solution? What a great idea! you’d never know once it was finished that yesterday’s funny papers are under there!
I know and this is just the start. In a few weeks the plants will fill out and it will look just like a normal garden, but without weeds!
I’m also going to try to “rid myself” of some undesireables per your method. I’ll keep you posted as to results.
Great idea! I’m using it in my garden as well and it makes all of the difference in the world.
Just rereading some posts . . . I am doing some Lasagna Gardening this year. I made a strawberry bed from scratch. Instead of putting wet newspapers down, I used old IRS tax forms that had been put in the recycling bin at our local library. Perhaps my strawberries will taste all the sweeter thanks to Uncle Sam! It was strangely gratifying to bury all those 1040 forms under layers of peat moss, grass clippings, and compost!