'Tis the season to be planting your garden. Like many, the past few weeks I've been cleaning up my garden beds, adding compost from my compost pile to the beds, and building up the soil using a technique called sheet mulching.
Sheet mulching is a standard permaculture technique used for growing vegetables. Rather than digging down and turning over the soil, in essence, disturbing the natural layers of soil and various organic matter and critters (think worms, and other detritus-loving invertebrates), instead, sheet mulching builds up the soil, creating additional layers.
For my existing beds, this meant a narrow layer of leaf litter, covered with single sheets of newspaper wetted-down to act as a weed barrier, then several inches of compost. Once I plant into this, I'll then cover the beds with a layer of straw. The straw helps hold in moisture.
Above is a photo of the weed-barrier step in sheet mulching, from my friends house in Maine last summer.
Sheet mulching is also an ideal technique to use when you want to convert lawn to garden. Here's a link that outlines the sheet mulch method for converting lawn to garden. They use cardboard, which is essential when trying to cut out the grass and other weeds. For existing raised beds, newspaper will suffice.
And for those interested, I also often try to follow (loosely), the Farmer's Almanace Lunar Planting Calendar. See my earlier post from last summer that discusses the technique of gardening by the moon in more detail. Here's the current lunar planting calendar for the northeast.
Happy Gardening!
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