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Lasagna Gardening:

an old method with a fresh presentation

If you are a gardener, this is the time of year when you lie awake nights with ideas and thoughts popping into your head of old beds, new plots, and new ways to get what you want out of your garden. "Lasanga Gardening" (Rodale Press, 1998) by local author and gardener Patricia Lanza, is a wonderful book to have on hand to harness those run-away late-night thoughts. Lanza’s method, which she has imaginatively christened "lasagna gardening," promises "a new layering system for bountiful gardens: no digging, no tilling, no weeding, no kidding!"

While the name is new, the method is not. It is actually a time-honored and inexpensive way of building up the soil, called sheet composting or the mulch method. The Tusten-Cochecton Library carries a book published in 1971 called the "No-Work Garden Book," in which author Ruth Stout orders the gardener to "throw away your spade and hoe!" and create rich gardens by piling various mulches on the soil. Interestingly, both Stout and Lanza came upon the method through trial and error, trying to garden without the hard labor of tilling and digging, and both were initially dumbfounded with the richness of their yield.

Lanza is a story-teller as well as a fabulous gardener, and in her introduction she describes accompanying her grandmother during spring plantings in the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee. "I learned to count," writes Lanza, "by dropping seeds in furrows." Her grandmother, sowing and harvesting by old-world methods, displayed great trust in young Pat’s gardening abilities, allowing her to plant, tend, and water. "Seeing a garden planted with a border of flowers each year gave me a longing for beauty … She trained me to be a gardener and a hard worker without ever verbalizing her intent."

The method of lasagna gardening, which can be used for any sort of garden, is defined as "a nontraditional, organic, layering method you can use to create better soil while keeping your gardens neat and attractive … Understanding mulch," writes Lanza, "is the first step to becoming a committed lasagna gardener." The advantages to this method include less watering, less maintenance, high yields, no tilling and minimal digging. It is a method which will sit well with those interested in "living lightly on the earth," and is compatible with new gardening theories which emphasize building soil from the top down and keeping soil disruption to a minimum.

"Lasagna Gardening" is divided into sections. Chapter 1 deals with lasagna gardening basics, and is followed by chapters on lasagna gardening for vegetables, herbs, berries, and flowers. In these later chapters, the book is very specific in identifying the needs and likes of individual plants. "Lasagna Gardening" is a very pleasing book to have on hand, nicely laid out and enlivened with pencil illustrations, charts and diagrams. The book is chock-full of helpful sidebars, checklists, and time-saving tips on everything from where to find mulching materials, to using herbs in crafts, to when to harvest dill. Lanza teaches the gardener how to consider sun and shade spots, how to evaluate the soil, how to begin seedlings, how to work with trellises and supports, and many other similar matters. She describes how to plant "theme gardens," such as an all-white garden or a self-seeding flower patch. "Pat’s Picks" identify various favorite and successful plants used by Lanza over the years.

"Lasagna Gardening," which recently won the Quill and Trowel Award from the Garden Writers of America, is the result of six years of experimentation and expansion of the method by Lanza. As the wife of a military man, she traveled and gardened over much of the country, learning about various soils and conditions and how to get the most from less-than-ideal circumstances. She and her husband settled in Shandalee, in Sullivan County, where they ran a bed-and-breakfast for many years. Eventually, Lanza and her husband divorced and she sold the inn in Shandalee and began to experiment with mulching rather than tilling. She found she was able to create gardens in rock-hard soil that had been compacted by years of auto traffic. She found she was able to create gardens on top of tree stumps. She found that seeds will grow in leaves and peat-moss, and not much else. Lanza has, in those six years, created perhaps 30 lasagna gardens and, lucky for us, decided to share her knowledge with the world.

I made one discovery in creating my own lasagna herb garden this spring: the amount of mulching material needed is extensive, and finding the mulch and laying down the mulch is a labor-intensive activity. Lasagna gardening, like all gardening, is a lot of work, but it is a method with immediate payoffs and it also makes good use of material we might otherwise recycle or disregard.

"Lasagna Gardening" is a useful book for any gardener, whether just beginning or with many years of experience. Lanza now runs The Potager, a garden shop and café in Wurtsboro, and I recently visited her there. A friend and I toured the attractive shop, full of gardening and specialty gift items such as books, tools, candles, soaps and gourmet food packets. The Potager is located in an old church purchased by Lanza and her daughter in 1996. The shop’s exterior is painted a bold mustard yellow, and the inside features original tin walls and stained-glass windows. We walked around the gardens outside, all of which had been created with lasagna gardening, and which I appreciated for their human scale. They were not intimidatingly grand; rather, they were humble and charming, and looked like the kind of gardens an ordinary gardener could create. We went downstairs and had a tasty healthful lunch at the café run by Lanza’s daughter. Then we stopped upstairs for a word with Lanza. The petite, soft-spoken Lanza told us one or two of her off-the-beaten-track tales, dropping garden hints and tips at every turn. "I’m not a chemist. I’m not a scientist. I’m not a scholar," said Lanza. "I’m just in tune with nature."

Lanza is currently working on another book, "Grow Up," detailing intensive lasagna gardening in small spaces. She gives demonstrations of her lasagna method throughout the Delaware River Valley. To find out more information, visit or call The Potager at 914/888-4386.