Sheet Mulching

This is one technique that I recently learned about and just absolutely fell in love with! Mostly because (in my opinion) the biggest deterrent to starting a garden is the idea of ripping up the sod, and tilling. The process is so labor intensive and then you have to figure out a place to put all of that plant matter you have removed from the ground. If you feel the same, then you're probably going to just love this idea. Next time you plan on starting a garden, don't rip up grass, and don't worry about raking up and removing the plant matter from the plot you've cleared, simply layer over it! Yes, that's right, plan on just going right over it!

I know it seems pretty crazy, everything we learn about planting a garden seems to tell us to rip out those weeds and get them as far away from the plants you want as possible. However, one of the biggest points of permaculture farming/gardening is that you want to do everything you can to encourage proper soil health. Healthy soil is living soil, it is full of decaying plant matter that encourages worms to be present, and it should smell like the dirt on a forest floor. Personally, I love the smell of dirt on a mountain trail, just something about it makes you feel so grounded (ha! I crack myself up).

So how do you do it? It's not completely labor free, but honestly compared to the alternative it's like the difference between running through a waist deep field of grass, or through waist deep water. Here's a basic how-to:

1. Look at the area you want to plant, and decide what kind of soil you want out of it (basically if you need acidic soil, add some acidic plant matter, like pine needles etc). Determine what you need to add to the base layer, and mark out the area you will be turning into your garden.

2. Mow/Cut/Knock over the plants. You want everything laying flat, but you also want to remove the large pieces of plant matter (branches, thick stems). Basically if you can't step on it and have it lay flat for a bit after then get rid of it.

3. Put your initial layer of compost/mulch down, and soak it with water.

4. If you have any trees or shrubs to plant, do so now, but be careful to not pile up compost/plant matter too closely to them as you prepare the rest of the layers.

5. Place your layer that will act as a weed barrier. You can use anything biodegradable here, but the most common choices are newspaper/cardboard. You will need about 3-6 layers of newspaper, and you need it to be a nice even cover, with the edges overlapping quite a bit, the point here is to prevent weeds from popping through. After you have that placed, do yourself a favor and wet it down a little to keep it from flying away as you complete the next couple of phases.

6. Layer mulch/compost on top of the weed barrier. Basically this layer mimics the way a forest floor works, you have plant matter and dirt layered to help break down everything below it by encouraging beneficial insects to be present. So aside from compost you can layer in wood chips, dead leaves, straw. Basically put the compost down first and then the plant matter on top of it, your goal is at least a 2 inch top layer.

You can plant seedlings in the mulch/compost layer, or more well established plants can get planted right below the weed barrier by poking a hole right through it for the plant. This is also something you can pretty much do for free if you plan it just right. Personally, this fall as I rake leaves I am going to get some cardboard/newspaper from the bins at the dump and harvest some local dirt to get my garden plot mulching before the snow falls. Doing it this way means that come spring my garden will be all ready for planting and the soil should be enriched by the plant matter that had all fall to decay and turn into compost.

The Three Sisters, Forest Gardens, and Hands Off Gardening

Companion gardening is nothing new, and in fact the Native Americans utilized it as a way to plant crops that involved little to no work once they began to grow. I am doing a lot of research on this topic, and on permaculture gardening and pretty soon I plan on starting to design a homestead so that it is mostly hands-off, and will share what I learn along the way.

One of the first articles I encountered while starting to research this subject explained "the three sisters." Which for those of you who are not familiar, is a specific way of planting corn, pole beans and squash where the three plants grow together in such a way that they are beneficial to one another. The corn provides a "pole" for the pole beans to grow on, and the squash is a low spreading ground cover that prevents weeds from getting enough sunlight to grow while also helping the soil retain moisture. This system is just so intuitive and so natural that it just intrigued me. So I began to research further which is what lead me to permaculture and forest gardens.

Forest Gardens with Robert Hart

Now, this video on YouTube gives a very brief introduction to the idea of forest garden, and the documentary I linked to the other day mentioned this as well, but it's an entirely low maintenance system of planting. It involves Hart's "7 Layer" technique to gardening, which shows how interplanting and proper planning can maximize the yield of an acre, while nearly eliminating the work involved in such a garden.

Now the diagram to the left (drawn by Graham Burnett) wonderfully illustrates the 7 layer technique introduced by Robert Hart, and the seven layers are as follows:

1. Canopy layer consisting of the original mature fruit trees.
2. Low-tree layer of smaller nut and fruit trees on dwarfing root stocks.
3. Shrub layer of fruit bushes such as currants and berries.
4. Herbaceous layer of perennial vegetables and herbs.
5. Ground cover layer of edible plants that spread horizontally.
6. Rhizosphere or ‘underground’ layer of plants grown for their roots and tubers.
7. Vertical layer of vines and climbers.

So not only does your garden not look like a traditional garden, it really resembles a forest, a forest of edible human friendly foods that you can harvest and eat, but also takes super low maintenance because through resembling a forest you're helping to not overwork the land, and the diversity of plant life helps to enrich the soil and keep the beneficial bugs present. Often we forget in gardening and farming that there are beneficial bugs, much like we forget in modern medicine that there are beneficial bacteria. So this sets up an eco-system in your garden, and the people feed per acre is definitely comparable to modern farming, but this system is sustainable in that, you don't need to let the fields lie fallow to recover for a year, this maintains year, after year. I am beginning to plan out which plant to obtain, and I want to just say for anyone reading this, that my garden is being planned in zone 4b, so keep in mind that I also need to select plants that are cold hearty, as we have long cold winters around here.