Don't Worry About Your Bad Dirt: Here's How to Make an Instant Garden and Start Gardening TODAY!

welcome back i'm david the good and i have a confession to make i don't have soil i have dirt i have terrible no good lousy dirt sometimes i'll say dirt in a video and somebody will say no don't call it dirt call it soil i can't call it soil because it doesn't rise to that level until after today's demonstration and then it will be beyond soil it will be super soil it will be amazing if you have a patch of horrible dirt and you want to turn it into beautiful soil today's video is for you [Music] some years ago i heard an interview with a lady named patricia lanza and she wrote a book called lasagna gardening i also read a book by a lady named ruth stout called gardening without work and additionally i watched a great inspirational film called back to eden with gardner paul gauchi and what they all have in common is a gardening method of deep mulching materials on top of the ground to improve poor soil lasagna gardening is probably the most clever name for it the idea of putting lots and lots of layers on the ground back to eden is similar but it's generally a lot of wood chips and compost it's not necessarily the layers of a lasagna garden and if you want to get really simple root stout just threw lots and lots of straw on the ground to crush out weeds but the concept is the same instead of digging down into the soil to build your garden you go up in today's video we are going to take a patch of weeds and turn it into a beautiful little garden that will turn my dirt into wonderful soil and it's a project that you can do in a very short period of time if you've got an hour or so in an afternoon you can build a lasagna garden and you can start growing food right away the first thing you've got to do is cut the grass or the weeds in this spot you're just going to knock it down to the ground doesn't matter how you do it i have a scythe which is really really fancy but you could use a machete you could use a lawnmower or you could probably just go out there and stamp the stuff down the idea is is to just get it shorter so you can stack materials on top of it if you have tall rough stuff it's not going to work as well so just chop it down and we're going to have that layer of stuff and all the seeds on the weeds and whatever there it's going to rot beneath the ground and it doesn't matter the next thing i like to do is put down a layer of something nitrogenous in this case i have some cow manure from our cows if you go and get manure from a farm i've warned people before i will warn you again be very very careful because there are long-term persistent herbicides that are often sprayed on hay and on pastures and it passes through in hay and it passes through in manure and it can even be in straw and these persistent herbicides will destroy your garden so get clean manure i know that sounds crazy but get clean manure if you can i have manure from our cows which i know are on pasture that's not been sprayed and they're not being spread any hay that might be from pastures which were sprayed so this manure goes down in the ground and i filmed it in 120 frames per second and i'm spraying it with a hose so you can see what it looks like when you spray manure with the jet from the hose in 120 frames per second [Applause] wetting the ground is important before you put a layer of mulch on top of it mulch will hold in water but it also prevents water from coming down from the sky and getting into the ground it'll hit the top of the mulch and it'll take some time to filter down through into the actual ground so it's very important to soak the ground really well when you start to make sure that the soil is moist underneath otherwise you may have dry soil trapped underneath that takes a long time to get wet [Music] once i have my manure and the weeds chopped down it's time to put a layer of cardboard on the ground just get cardboard from whatever store you can get strip the tape and take the staples out of it and then just lay it down alternately you can use newspapers but i don't know of anybody that has newspapers anymore except for hoarders so if you have a local hoarder help them clean out the the pathways in their house and just take some of those huge mounds of newspaper and build lasagna gardens out of them it's it's a great way to recycle copies of the sun sentinel from the 1980s do you want to go see mom all right she wants to see you is it still running yes all right just go to your mom love you sweetie where are we this cardboard layer will keep grass and weeds from coming back it will keep the sunlight from getting to them and they're just going to get smothered underneath so this is your weed block layer you could use a lot of different things for weed block but if you've ever pulled up that old landscape fabric or plastic from the ground and all those shreds you don't want to do that you want something that just rots into the ground so anytime i can use something natural like semi-natural like cardboard i use it in the tropics when we had lots and lots of banana leaves and we had leaves from various heliconias and giant gingers and cannas and things like that we would chop them and actually use them for weed block layers i've even used palm fronds and laid them down as a thick weed block layer to just exclude them and keep them from coming up through and just crush them out beneath and eventually that layer will rot down and feed the soil as well it only has to last long enough for the plants beneath to smother and become soil let's consider this the pan of your lasagna this is the bottom now you've got your weed block layer so we're going to grow up from here by throwing down various layers if you have seedy weedy material this is the point where you can throw it down [Music] i have some really seedy construction hay that i know wasn't sprayed but it's got lots of seeds in it that i don't necessarily want coming up in my gardens so i'm putting down a hay layer first and just spreading this out knowing that those seeds are not going to germinate because there's going to be more layers on top so we're starting with a cd layer this is probably more of a brown layer than a green layer if you're familiar with composting everything always grows better out of your compost pile and so lasagna gardening is basically a compost pile brown layer green layer brown layer green layer brown layers are higher in carbon green layers are higher in nitrogen this is mostly a brown layer because it's old dry hay as you go if you have dry materials soak them if you want to take a big barrel and set it up and just stuff materials into it to soak and then pick them up and throw them on the ground that works great too but i'm just going to spray with a hose over and over again my next layer is one that i'm very privileged to have because of where i live i live out in the country so i can keep chickens and my chickens are little composting fiends we throw in lots of material for them to eat they get kitchen scraps we'll even get those uncoated paper plates and if we don't want to do dishes or we want to have a picnic we have a birthday party the paper plates whatever rib bones are left on them whatever all that stuff goes out to the chickens the chickens turn it the chickens manure it the chickens make compost for me i have this biologically rich nitrogen-filled soil that i can just scrape out of the chicken coop and load up and throw through here so we would consider this a green layer but it's also kind of an inoculant layer because it's adding more life to it i'm continuing a green layer here it doesn't really matter that much greens browns whatever don't get hung up on it you can use just about anything but my next layer here is some winter rye and clover that i'm using as a cover crop my son cj has a outdoor blacksmithing station and he makes these little sickles so i'm using one of these little sickles to gather up clover and winter rye and this is a nice fresh green layer nice spring growth this is just more to feed the lasagna and to be delicious for microorganisms and the roots of the plants that we're going to plant in it i like to have a good nitrogen layer because the next thing we're putting on are wood chips we got a ton of wood chips literally a ton tons of wood chips because my friend liz saw these guys cleaning the road and she got a bunch of wood chips and then she sent them over to my place to drop a lot of wood chips so i have lots and lots and lots of wood chips that have been sitting since before christmas and just sitting and rotting and getting full of fungi there's a lot of life already forming in there but they're mostly carbon this is a brown layer this is not seedy material so as we're moving towards the top we're covering up the stuff below and there's not going to be enough light for the weed seeds or clover seeds or whatever else to germinate so we're going up to wood chips now and just packing them on along with the wood chips i'm going to throw a little more green material that i know isn't seedy this is perennial peanut hay which i got from a friend of mine perennial peanut is a nitrogen fixing leguminous plant that is used for fixing poor soil and it's also used as a good ground cover and a grazing material for animals and so my friend has 13 acres of perennial peanut that he grows and bales as hay and we feed it to our cows but we're sparing a little bit of it to throw into this mix and add a little more green to our wood chips if you don't have peanut hay if you don't have wood chips if you don't have winter rye and clover don't worry about it just mix up a broad range of material i've used seaweed i've used alfalfa pellets i've used fall leaves i've used chopped material from the garden we've even taken a garden bed that wasn't particularly productive thrown a whole bunch of kitchen scraps and yard waste on top of it for a year and just piled up a big mound and then we ended up harvesting seminal pumpkins out of it because the seminal pumpkin guts from one of our dinners ended up mixed into all this mess and it grew all over the yard so that that area became a super rich area the next year or two we didn't have to feed it anything because it was all full of this rich crumbly soil so don't get hung up on the details of it just grab what you can you got grass clippings use it if you've got leaves use them if you've got stuff that blows around like maybe paper shreds or or your you know oak leaves that sort of thing throw something on top of it that will pin it a little bit of wood chips maybe some pine needles on top maybe some rough straw that you've wet down and soak things really well as you go every layer soak it and it'll hold together better you're making a lasagna and you want it to all glue together when you're done making your lasagna you should have a bed that's at least about a foot tall with all kinds of different layers in it with that cardboard down in the bottom so now it's time to plant into it i have planted in seeds and i have planted in cuttings and i've planted in transplants in the past this time i'm using transplants we have some chittle pen peppers that my daughter started from seeds that she got from scott head in order to put these transplants in i don't want to put them directly into the mulch so i go in and get some potting soil and then i make a hole right through the lasagna just open it up get down to that weed block layer and take something sharp and puncture through it normal people might use a trowel i use a machete because a machete is the best gardening tool ever invented and i just poke it through there punch holes in it this way the roots can go down through and it's not going to really let the grass and stuff grow up through not with how much you've got on top of it especially when those roots start coming down everything is just going to crush that layer you just open it up a little bit so the roots coming down can get into the native soil fill up that pocket with your potting soil or with compost or whatever loose soil that you have you can even go dig soil out of your garden or something but know that it's going to have more weeds in it the potting soil does not you put a little pocket there and then plant your transplant into it and water it in and that's how easy it is so we're planting the chittle pins in here and we're also planting sweet potatoes i got some sweet potato slips and they're just gonna stick in here and sweet potatoes absolutely love mulch if you've ever grown sweet potatoes and deep mulch you know what i mean they pull out these beautiful almost clean sweet potatoes because they'll just grow everywhere through that mulch and with all the nitrogen that we have in here it's not going to yellow them out and make them have trouble you may hear that putting a bunch of wood chips down will rob the nitrogen out of the soil and that's true but we're layering it up like a compost heap so we have a good mix of brown and green materials which keeps that from happening the long-term soil improvement that you get from a lasagna garden is quite impressive you're putting this big compost pile which is slowly rotting down into the ground and what happens beneath it as the fungi the bacteria the beetles the worms all that soil life starts working its way through is that the ground beneath darkens up and gets richer and looser we put over a foot of materials in my yard in tennessee which was hard rocky clay and it started to get loose and brown and moist and rich beneath that foot of material and that was just some straw some fall leaves some coffee grounds and some wood chips that we got from the town and just dumped it down there and waited and over time it got loose and spongy and excellent in the second year is where you'll really see changes taking place in the soil beneath it gets richer and darker and it just gets better and better but you'll also see the top of your lasagna garden start to sink so if it starts to sink just grab more mulching materials and throw them on top so long as you keep mulching materials on top of it you're not going to have problems with weeds so whatever material you've got that you can throw down that is not weedy just put it on top and keep it up above the ground and it's slowly gonna work its way down into the ground beneath because you've got all that biological activity and the worms and the roots and everything and it's just a matter of top dressing it with whatever material you have available fall is a great time to gather fall leaves and just put layers on top and that feeds the ground as well if you have a bad patch of ground if you have hard soil if you have some weeds you want to crush lasagna gardening is for you it makes a massive difference in what you can grow and it's really easy and satisfying to just put a little patch in you don't even have to have borders on it but you can do it in a raised bed you could do it in a container or you could just do what we did and lay it right on a piece of ground covered in weeds not ever have to worry about digging it and it is a beautiful no-till system that starts to enrich the ground bring in lots of biological life and it gives you the instant satisfaction of having a garden particularly if you plant it with transplants boom there's your garden already mulched already beautiful and the soil gets better and better over time you can learn more about lasagna gardening in the links below i'll put links to paul gauchi's work and ruth stout's book and patricia lanza's book and of course i cover this and many other methods of soil improvement and composting in the book compost everything the good guide to extreme composting and i'll put a link to that below as well thank you very much for joining me i'll catch you all soon and until next time may your thumbs always be green [Music] is a terrifying place so i try yes i try as i try as i try to keep a smile on my face [Music] oh my gosh man that's a lot of fire ants you

Channel: David The Good

Views: 967,956

Keywords: David The Good, composting, lasagna garden, sheet composting, back to eden, how to garden, make a garden fast, quick garden, garden idea, epic gardening, organic gardening for beginners, fix bad soil, fix bad dirt, garden in bad soil, easy gardening, easy gardening idea, vegetable gardening, make a garden, easy gardening method, instant garden

Id: MGqesDSC224

Length: 19min 48sec (1188 seconds)

Published: Wed May 04 2022