Transform your Garden from Dirt to Soil by Lasagna Composting

By: Emma Rauschert

Soil wants to support life. Soil has indeed supported every life form that has ever existed on this Earth. Nothing is anything without soil. Soil has been made out of things that were once living. And while soil is the foundation of life, I find it ironic it also absorbs life to give itself life. It is a beautiful cycle. Anyone who studies soil science can tell you that even in just a teaspoon of soil, there are millions, possibly billions of living cells.“For you were made of dust, and to dust you shall return,” God tells Adam in the Garden of Eden. And all the while his journey on this Earth will be fueled by the fruits of dust. Everything we eat comes from the soil. Everything will return to the soil. We are, as Kerry Livgren once said, dust in the wind. But I take that as quite the compliment. Dust, or soil, is amazing. Anyways, I won’t get too philosophical.

After buying my first few acres of land, I immediately began planning for the garden I would create in the spring. As soon as the weather was warm enough, I bought a rototiller and began ripping up the mowed grass growing on an abandoned cattle lot, exposing clay underneath. I didn’t think anything of it, except this is where I wanted my garden to live. It was a sunny, open spot on a gentle slope. Once the ground was good and chopped up, I began sowing my seeds over the next few days in straight rows. Sound familiar? The ground very quickly became quite hard, and I struggled to dig even a couple of inches to plant my seeds. After getting in my crop for the year, I began the long wait all gardeners face: waiting for the seeds to come up. They sure came up, and so did a heep of weeds. The weeds grew so fast and so tall, and very quickly covered the entire area I tilled, as well as anything coming up that I had planted. My garden was overrun with weeds. I was diligent about weeding. I would go out daily and get my little trowel and dig into the rock hard “soil” and try to get the weeds to come out. I look back now and shudder at the memories. Weeding became impossible very quickly. I blamed my weeds on the fact that I had clay soil. It must be impossible to grow a garden in such a medium. Except, the weeds were growing great. Gardening became miserable for me. The weeds were nearly impossible to get up. I often just pulled off the tops of the weeds and left the living roots to grow even stronger, and up they would come again with a vengeance. Sound familiar?

Then I remembered weeding in the garden at my cousin’s house when I was younger. The weeds would rip right out, the ground was so soft and loose. The crops grew beautifully. Did his land perhaps have more topsoil? I dove into researching what could cause such a stark contrast. I discovered my saving grace, a mix of the Back to Eden and Hugelkultur methods and lots of compost. I started with this one philosophy to entirely change my approach to gardening: soil wants to support life, soil does not like to be bare, therefore; I must give the soil what it wants: life. If soil wants to grow things, it should either be covered so it can’t grow something, or, it should be covered with companion plants.

I began to layer things within my garden. It became a massive layered composting operation. I obtained compost from local nurseries and my uncle who makes it himself (whom I mentioned earlier). I got wood chips from a neighbor, sawdust from my dad, cardboard boxes from a recycling dumpster, straw bales from a local farmer, bagged leaves from people in town, and manure from a friend who has horses. I sold my rototiller and promised to never buy one again. I covered the soil in my garden, I didn’t expose it. I became a madwoman overnight, or maybe a gardening genius. I made my poor husband come with me everywhere to help load up stuff. We loaded the materials in the back of his truck. He is still traumatized to this day.

I layered the materials in my garden as follows: cardboard, compost, straw, manure, leaves, sawdust, woodchips, repeat: compost, straw, manure, leaves, sawdust, woodchips. That first year of gardening I actually had a terrible garden. It was just a pile of stuff laying on top of tilled clay. I did grow tomatoes successfully though, and some really sour broccoli. I noticed something else about my garden, there were no more weeds. I was smothering them out and killing them by layering all of this material on top. Throughout the winter, I continued layering here and there, whenever I had free time to get more materials for my garden. And then spring rolled around.

The cardboard had decomposed. Everything had decomposed. There was no longer cardboard, compost, straw, sawdust, manure, woodchips. It was just, well, soil. And some half broken down wood chips. There was about 5 inches of soil that infiltrated into the clay. I saw red wiggler worms. I could dig and break up the soil easily. There were no weeds in my garden. I planted my seeds for that year in my nice soil. They came up fast. I mulched around them again with wood chips and straw to keep any unwanted plants down. The soil was healthy. The plants grew healthy.

Fast forward a couple more years, and my garden has completely changed. I haven’t tilled since. I no longer use cardboard after reading that some cardboards contain unwanted toxins. I don’t add many new layers. I only mulch in the spring and in the fall with rotted straw, leaves, or wood chips. I still have weeds, but not nearly as many. The weeds come up and out very easily. Depending on how good my mulch game is, I can eliminate my weeds almost completely. But, I enjoy weeding now. I’m crazy, remember? It is quite therapeutic for me to go and pluck weeds at the end of my day and reflect on life. I listen to the birds, watch the sunset, and connect to the life-giving soil. I even thought up this entire article while I was out weeding my strawberries this evening.

I wanted to write about the health of garden soil this month because I know someone out there is struggling like I did. Gardening can be completely miserable if you don’t start out with good soil. I recommend buying some compost (or making your own) and getting some straw bales to start out. You can even buy bags of undyed shredded mulch and use it for your garden, just like you do to keep weeds out of your landscaping. Another great thing I have incorporated into my garden is companion planting. I plant close together (not within rows), so that it’s more of a forest than a row crop system. I like to follow God’s perfect design of how he created things to grow. Nothing in nature grows in rows or by itself. Planting together allows the plants to benefit from one another. Some examples of this include: carrots and onions, tomatoes and herbs, squash, beans, and corn, strawberries and asparagus, and so on. You can plant many different things within a square foot and they will all support each other under the soil. I will go into this topic in much greater detail later on.

I would also like to add- I don’t recommend selling your rototiller. While I dislike tilling because it breaks up the soil structure, if I could go back, I wouldn’t use cardboard. Instead, I would till into my soil compost, then layer it with wood chips, sawdust, straw, leaves, bark, etc. Put your heaviest material on the top. Leaves blow away easily. I recommend putting your wood chips on the very top to weigh down the rest of the materials. I would only till the garden once, just to get it started. It is convenient to be able to remove weeds so fast. Another option is if you plan ahead, you could tarp off your garden plot with an old heavy blanket and bricks, or a literal tarp in the fall and let it sit all winter to kill the weeds. Then you could add your garden lasagna on top of the bare soil in the spring and begin planting. And remember: bare soil in a garden is a sin!! Bare soil grows weeds. Covered soil sustains life.