Easy Little Garden

If you need garden space, you need it now, and you have remarkably limited abilities to create a garden, here's THE most basic way of making a garden.  Very few steps.  Just ready to go....

1. get a cardboard box, a plain cardboard box.  I used the bottom half of a box some shelves came in for the laundry tomb, it's about 4' x 2' x 6" tall.

2. put the box on the lawn somewhere, pick a place you kinda want to have another garden next year.

3. open several bags of garden soil from the store, mix with bags of compost from the store if you'd like.

4. dump the soil into the box.

5. add seeds or baby plants.  water, or not if it's going to rain that night.

There you go, you've just made a garden.  The cardboard should suppress most of the grass and weeds, allowing them to die off over the summer as the box itself rots away, by next summer, that patch of dirt will be your garden, all ready to go!  As I'm not keen on tilling (and, BTW, second year after no-tilling last year, barely any weeds at all!), don't even bother next year, just move aside the big leftover chunks from last year, and put your baby plants in the dirt as is.  Mulching helps quite a lot, but isn't a total requirement.

This year, we indulged in a $30.00 purchase of a used (and loud) chipper shredder and used it to grind up all our yard waste (and our neighbors, and their neighbors) this spring to make into mulch. Cheap and easy to do, but it does take 2 people to make it really successful.  We have a plethora of earthworms and the soil is easy to manipulate so far.

With no-tilling gardens, I will fill in a couple gaps that were left out in my experience.  As long as you have a heavy coat of mulch, using seeds will be kinds difficult: many like actual dirt to germinate in, so move the mulch aside and make sure it stays moved to one side to get your seeds in.  Baby plants, just move the mulch aside, scratch the soil beneath just a bit and get the baby in, replacing the soil and mulch around it works wonders.  Nobody told us that, we had to figure it out on our own.  With no tilling, too, two days work is broken down into about 3 hours of work, because you just put your plants in; there is no extra work to aerate the soil (it stays pretty fluffy if you can minimize walking on it).  

So, lazy gardeners, listen up! stop tillling, you don't need herbicides if you mulch enough, don't be walking all over the place, and give seeds actual dirt to do their thing in.  You can get a lot done by pretty much doing nothing at all, hear?