Easiest way to build a great garden: Sheet-mulching

Easy. Do it easy. I believe this so strongly, that I even have an "Easy" tag for posts here South of Sunnybrook. And "sheet mulching" is the easiest way I've ever seen to build a garden. 

While I'm still all about adding veggies into my front flowerbeds, now that the blueberry "shrubberies" are getting larger, I can't plant tomatoes there any more. Plus, I wanted to try a Three Sisters Garden....and our full-sun real estate is our front yard, but the idea of tilling up my hillside seemed both daunting and unwise.

Summer 2013: No room for tomatoes here!.

Luckily, in May 2012, I learned about a technique called sheet-mulching. Basically, you make a big pile of organic matter on top of cardboard and let it sit for six months before planting. How easy is that? I decided to give it a go.

Building Soil

I started with several inches of manure in my bed. I am very lucky to have an aunt with horses. She is lucky to have a niece to help her cart it away! Generally, the sheet mulch begins with cardboard, but I didn't have any yet. It really doesn't matter, as long as the weed barrier is near the bottom -- it's all going to end up as topsoil anyway. A nice feature of this method is that you can make your beds any shape you like. As you can see from the picture below, I have a curve in my garden to accommodate the shade of the magnolia tree.

Wet each layer down well to get things mixing and breaking down. This does need to stay moist for optimum soil development, so I did water it occasionally during the hot Tennessee summer.

So easy, a child can do it.

Here you can see my first layers: manure, cardboard, straw...then compost, lawn trimmings, and other organic material on top of that.

I decided to use my remaining straw bales to act as a barrier to keep all my good stuff from slipping down the hillside. Two years later, I can tell you that was a good call. I am planning this year to grow a living fence just beneath the straw bale layer, using the abundance of forsythia I have on my property. I would love to know if anyone has done this before, or has other suggestions for which plant(s) to use.

I planted a cover crop in the late summer, and then last spring, I had a bed all ready to plant. I have a picture here of the bed in August of 2012. 

Getting into permaculture

Below, you can see the garden in May 2013. I decided to add a path near the tree. I also observed some erosion issues, so I built two hugelkultur berms, with swales to control water, where the two pink lines are. These have worked beautifully.

Below, you can see tomatillos, flowers, and purple basil growing near one of the hugelkultur berms. I also started an asparagus bed near the driveway. This method builds great soil, and it's so easy that I am slowly but surely planting my front yard this way! It's highly recommended here South of Sunnybrook.