Lasagna Gardening: A Layering Method For Great Soil

On Wednesday, April 12, the Town and Country Garden Club of Newtown will sponsor a program titled “Lasagna Gardening: A Layering Method For Creating Great Soil With No Digging, No Tilling, No Weeding… No Kidding!”

The program will be presented by Mickey Lanza at Senior Center, 14 Riverside Road in Sandy Hook. Ms Lanza is the daughter of Patricia Lanza, whose book Lasagna Gardening has sold over 500,000 copies. Mickey and Patricia Lanza have traveled all over the United States for the last 15 years promoting this gardening method.

Lasagna gardening began as a lucky accident, stated Mickey in a recent interview. Her mother owned a country inn located in Shandelee, N.Y., where it was customary to gather all the food scraps (without dressing) for the compost heap. One year the man who tilled the compost into the garden didn’t show up so Patricia Lanza layered the material on the ground in a haphazard manner only to see all sorts of plants begin to emerge.

She then asked a neighboring friend who ran a horse farm for some manure that she also added, but found that produced too many weeds. One day she decided to use newspapers to keep down the weeds and the production of any unwanted seeds.

It turned out that worms loved newspapers and they proved to be the missing link since they not only aerated the soil, their castings helped enrich it as well.

As the years passed, Patricia Lanza kept on experimenting until she finally developed the “lasagna” technique that has become so widely popular.

Last year, Mickey Lanza put in a garden using this method on brand new, bare construction ground. She put in hundreds of plants using no shovel or trowel; the only tool she needed was a kitchen knife to cut open bags of peat moss.

Even though it is still early spring, the garden already looks fabulous with bulbs and seedlings sprouting everywhere.

Mickey will demonstrate how this idea can work with large areas as well as small. She will be bringing pots and other containers to show how easily plant material can grow in this soil.

Mickey Lanza owns The Potager (in French that means “the cook’s garden” or “the many diverse items used to make soup”) in Wurtsboro, N.Y., a gift shop surrounded by herb and perennial gardens. She and her mother continue to travel together and her mother will be at Disney World this year on Memorial Day to lecture to sixth grade gardeners from all over the United States.

The garden club meeting will start at 7:30 pm and the public is invited.