Double Reach Garden Bed from the 'Permaculture Soils' DVD

Here’s a fast way to build a vegetable garden directly on grass or lawn without digging. Permaculture teacher Geoff Lawton demonstrates this method on his farm and has been using this method for years with instant results using discarded cardboard packaging, junk mail, newspapers etc.Here’s what you need to get before you build your no dig sheet mulch garden bed.

• Cardboard sheeting or newspapers, junk mail etc
• Straw mulch, hay, grass clipping. Lots of it.
• Horse, Sheep or Cow Manure
• Plant Seedlings

Placing the cardboard sheeting.

This method really doesn’t take long at all to do. First find a sunny spot in your backyard and make sure you can walk around your new garden bed to get easy access to it.

This system uses the “Double Reach Garden Method” which means your garden bed width will be twice the span of your outstretched arm when kneeling down.
Because this system will employ billions of bacteria and little micro-organisms to feed the roots of your plants you will have to make sure that you never step on the garden bed and compact the soil.
Compaction will limit the life in your soil so stepping on the garden bed should be avoided. Your garden bed will be only as deep as you can reach with your extended arm and touch the middle.

Define the boundaries of your garden and then sprinkle out a thin layer of animal manure directly on the grass surface . Then start laying out your old cardboard sheeting making sure your new manured garden bed is completely covered with cardboard.
Now cover the cardboard sheeting with mulch or hay. The mulch height should be around a foot deep. You can never add too much mulch. More is plenty.

Then create a small hole in the mulch, until you reach down and touch the cardboard layer. This where your plant seedlings will go. Use a sharp knife to cut through the cardboard base. Make a little hole here. You can also just slash the cardboard or newspapers with a knife to open it up a little and add a little extra compost in there if you have it and start planting out your seedlings. Water well.

Geoff Lawton describes the process. “I’m imitating the forest floor.” he says “The soil organisms down there – those millions and millions of soil organisms, will think a forest floor has just landed on them!”

Five weeks later when we visited the instant garden, the seedlings have grown very well.

Instant Garden 5 weeks later

The cardboard was still there. It hadn’t disintegrated yet, but the soil had changed. Geoff Lawton digs under the mulch bed a pulls out the darkened moist soil. A worm wriggles in his hand.

“There all kinds of soil building activity going on here.” he says, “Soil Bacteria, worms, Fungi, all kinds of imitations of layers.”

“This system is so simple.” said Lawton, “but it creates soil as quick as it creates surplus products.”

“This is an easy system to put an instant garden together and it will create half an inch or up to 4 or 5 cm of soil per year for your garden.”

“You are never sustainable in a garden unless you are creating more soil than you are using to produce.”

“You must be creating soil as you produce your food and then you’re sustainable. If you keep going that way – and use that as an indicator of soil creation – you’ll be sustainable forever.”

How to build an instant garden will be featured on Geoff Lawton’s “Permaculture Soils” DVD that will released later in 2010.