Paper patch gardening

by Sara Ready                    

“I’m heading out to mow the garden” my dad announced. Then I heard him mutter, “I never thought I would put those words together in a sentence.”

My garden had been a source of embarrassment for years. I was raised better. My mother was a fantastic gardener, I learned and helped her throughout my childhood. I thought gardening was pretty strait forward. 

Then I married, and moved to a bentonite hill. I borrowed a tiller, and started my first garden. For three years I scrached my so called garden out of the bentonite. My rows were hard packed. Weeds in between rows shaded my struggling plants. Mosquitos billowed up as I walked through the weeds.

When my dad came to visit and decided to help by mowing the garden, it hit me, I was going to have to change my approach. 

This treacherous land would not win.

I started asking around, and many of my friends and neighbors used raised beds. Others gave me tips on how to improve my soil. I watched a few youtube videos, and was intrigued by “lasagna gardening.” The main selling point was covering weeds with newspaper! After the newspaper, you add compost, then top it off with woodchips.

I was undecided as spring arrived the next year. I received three rhubarb plants. “Rhubarb will live anywhere” I was told. Pressure. I decided to give the lasagna method a try. I threw down a few newspapers and dumped my not-so-composed compost on it. Then I topped it with woodchips, and stuck the rhubarb in the middle of it all. 

The rhubarb thrived, and as a bonus, I grew a bunch of honey dew mellons from seeds in the compost! I got excited and went to the Independent Record office and got 20 bundles of newspaper. I started laying it out over my whole garden area. Then the wind picked up... my fence and neighbor’s fences, looked like the dump fence. Lesson learned. Compost as you go.

I now have rich dark soil on top of my bentonite. And it gets better every year. I have treated it as an art instead of a science and have made many mistakes along the way. If you passed my garden this week, you might have thought it was a dump. But now, I only mow in the garden if my newspapers won’t lay flat!