DIY lasagna beds- cheaper and cooler than ever!

The biggest challenge I've faced with urban gardening has always been lack of resources. Living in a city environment often leaves you short on amenities necessary for a healthy farm, namely land, soil, and access to compostable materials. Not to mention lack of money.

Raised beds are generally the way to go with city gardening. There are many advantages: you get to choose the quality of the soil, fewer weeds, less bending over, motorized tools not necessary. Planting in ground is always a possibility, but you have to deal with the annoyances of infertile or poisonous soil, compacted ground, debris, and hours of labor with hand tools. With a garden like Roots and Rays in Chicago (pictured left), raised beds are a necessity. The entire city of Chicago is a brownfield, i.e. toxic ground totally unsuitable for growing.

But raised beds cost money.

There's the lumber, the hardware, and then the big expense, the soil. In Tallahassee, mushroom compost costs almost $40 a yard, not including delivery. One yard barely fills a bed that's 8'x4'x1'. What's a community gardener supposed to do?

Build lasagna beds!

Lasagna beds accomplish the same effect as raised beds, just without the lumber or the soil. They are much cheaper, but a little more of a pain in the butt to get together.

Like the name suggests, lasagna beds are layered planting beds. It's also called sheet composting. Following the rules of compost will give you a decent lasagna bed. Rules of compost: good mix of green material and brown material, layered on top of each other with plenty of aeration and moisture.

I just built a lasagna bed in my back yard to expand my garden. We also used lasagna beds our first year at Roots and Rays. Here's how you do it.

First layer- Cardboard to help protect against possible toxic leaching, and to kill whatever's growing under your future bed.

Second layer- Browns of any sort. Browns are organic materials consisting of tree material. They are composed of mostly carbon. Leaves, hay, paper, woodchips, or sawdust are all brown. Paper, woodchips and sawdust, however, are too highly concentrated with carbon and will slow down decomposition in your bed, so try and stick to leaves or hay.

Third layer- Greens of any sort. Greens are organic materials consisting of verdant plant material, like grass clippings, weeds, food scraps, or animal manure. You don't want as many greens as you do you browns- too much green makes your bed stink. In my bed I used unsifted compost from my Earth Machine .

Fourth layer- Peat moss or coir (coconut hull fiber). Peat moss and coir are both sterile materials and add no extra nutrients to help your plants grow. However, they are excellent for helping to provide drainage and aeration to your bed. They are an added cost, and I've had good success using peat, but you can try for yourself if you think you really need it.

Next layers- Browns, greens, peat. Each layer should be 4-6 inched thick. Repeat until your bed is at least 18" high.

Top layer- Topsoil or compost. The nice thing about lasagna beds is that you can plant in them right away, even though the decomposition hasn't happened yet. As long as you have a fertile surface material, your seeds or transplant babies will have an excellent chance of survival. As they grow they will be fed by the nutrients released in the sheet composting process.

There are some downsides to lasagna beds. First of all, because of the nature of composting, your raw materials will shrink as the composting process happens. You will lose volume to evaporation, runoff, and decomposition. You will have to add layers to your pile every year.

Also, you somehow have to find a bunch of dry leaves, hay, manure, or compost. Imagine trying to collect those things in a neighborhood without trees, and without a truck! That's how it was in my neighborhood in Chicago. It sucked. I did strike it rich one day in Pilsen when I found four trash cans full of bales of hay in an alley behind the Jumping Bean. I borrowed Emily West's car, a 20 year old Buick named Miss Kitty, and packed the back seat full of hay with the help of the guys working in the illicit car garage in the same alley. I did spend a lot of time vacuuming out that back seat. However, we had plenty of hay to build our first beds at Roots and Rays.

Now that I'm in Tallahassee, it's easier. In the spring the live oak trees are putting on new leaves and shedding the old, so there are plenty of bags of leaves on the side of the road ripe for the picking. I do have a pickup truck now, so my life has improved dramatically in the area of roadside scavenging. Also, I've visited a horse ranch in Monticello with a giant manure pile and a giant tractor with a front end loader, so I can fill up said pickup truck with as much manure as I want.

But if you don't have the luck to have access to such things, don't despair! Even with a little bit of cash, lasagna beds are possible. Your biggest expense will be peat moss, costing between $12 and $15 for two cubic feet. This will get you about one layer in a reasonably sized bed. Home Depot will often offer discounts to ripped bags of soil, so do your best to collect those bargains. Bags of leaves emerge on curbsides in the fall, and it doesn't hurt to pick them up whenever you see them. Homemade compost is a lifesaver, so make sure to have some on hand when you start your project.

Springtime is an exciting time for any garden project, so if you're looking to build a new bed or expand on what your already have, try a lasagna bed. You'll love it, I promise.

Full Earth Farm Profile

I'm pretty excited about Full Earth Farm in Quincy. I grew up with Katie Harris, who runs the farm with her boyfriend Aaron Suko. Katie and I went to preschool together, and my mom taught her in first grade. I saw her for the first time in years on a visit home a few years ago at her table at the farmer's market, and I couldn't help but think Oh MAN she has her own farm and she's my age. Pretty rad.

Anyway, this is written from an interview in February, when plans for LATFG were hatching.

Full Earth Farm looks very different during the day. I had been out to the farm for Aaron's surprise birthday party, thrown by his girlfriend Katie, but that was at night and I couldn't get the full scope of the place. As I heard it, Aaron was getting disappointed when every friend he asked to come to the party bailed, until he showed up at the farm and 30 people were there. Zing!

Katie and Aaron met me up by the greenhouse. It was a slow day and they had been checking on their greenhouse starts- peppers, eggplant, and TOMATOES. “I hate tomatoes,” Aaron said. They are a lot of work, planting the seeds indoors at the end of winter, protecting the small plants outside once they’re transplanted, pruning, staking, and harvesting every day. But it’s worth it: Katie said they can make more money in six weeks with tomatoes than they can for the rest of the year. Worth it in the end.

It’s impressive that Full Earth is making any money at all, much less succeeding with a 25 person CSA in their second year of production. “[The farm] way exceeded our expectations,” Katie said. Though the farmers aren’t trying to over-expand, they are trying to increase their CSA to 50 shareholders for this fall, based on the overflow they experienced from last summer.

Katie and Aaron are both new to farming. Both were educated in the liberal arts and sciences, and we all know how much money you can make with those degrees. Katie started out going to Warren Wilson College in North Carolina, and transferred to art school in Boston to learn to be a photographer. “During my time in Boston, I met a lot of farmers,” Katie said. “I became interested in urban agriculture, then started thinking about all this land I had access to in Florida.” The land belongs to Katie’s parents, Fred and Lucy Harris, who used to live in town in Tallahassee, but relocated to Quincy after both Katie and her brother Riley left home. The idea of farming was always in the back of her mind. “It was a pipe dream, it was a secret pipe dream,” she said. She moved back to Tallahassee from Boston. "About that time my folks said, ‘We want to start an organic farm!’” Katie said. “And that’s that, my pipe dream was realized by chance.”

Right now, the half acre garden in its entirety is under cover crops, and when that’s all added up the entire cultivation area covers a couple of acres. Families of related vegetables are integrated into their crop plan along with cover crops, and are switched to different parts of the garden each season to help with pest control and to improve the soil. “The more we use [the soil], the higher the organic matter,” Aaron said. “We feel like we’re on the right track for building the soil.”

Cover crops are a big part Full Earth’s farm plan. With sustainable agriculture, the soil is the backbone of the farm, not fertilizers. “I want to spend less time with compost and let the plants do all the work,” Aaron said. Managing cover crops takes a lot of planning, and take up space that could be used for cash crops. But the sacrifice of space is worth it. “You’ve grown your mulch in place, and as [the cover crop] decomposes, you’re making your compost in place,” Aaron said.

Composting on a farm scale is much more intensive than home garden composting. At any time there are five or six huge piles decomposing at the back end of the farm. Some piles are still being added to, with raw materials like wood chips, farm plant waste, and manure. “We’re getting better at not using as much compost,” Aaron said. “We use it once when we plant, and use unsifted compost as mulch.” As important as compost is, turning, sifting and laying compost uses a lot of tractor fuel and takes a lot of work. “We want to get as much work done as possible,” Katie said. “Sifting compost takes so much time with just the two of us.”

Just the two of them is how they want to keep it, too. Full Earth didn’t start out as a couple’s venture. “I said, ‘No Aaron, you can’t work here, we’ll break up for sure,’” Katie said. Aaron had been finishing his thesis in order to receive his masters in Portuguese translation, and working part time at a bike shop in Tallahassee. He was having a hard time finding translation work, so he started coming out a couple of days a week to the farm. And, that’s that. “After coming out here a couple of times I realized I really liked it. We work well together, and you really needed help with just your mom helping out occasionally,” he said to Katie. “It’s lonely working by yourself,” Katie said.

Katie and Aaron aren’t the only ones involved, with the farm, either. The business end is run by Lucy and Fred, Katie’s parents. “Aaron and I do everything on the farm, and they have the finance for startup,” Katie said. “Without them we couldn’t do this for a lot of reasons. I had a year of learning, then we just dove in. We wouldn’t have been able to do that without financial help.” Fred and Lucy already had the land, the tractor and the implements, they just needed the farmers. “We’re paid a wage,” said Aaron. “It helps make our time valuable, thinking of it in terms of economics helps us prioritize.”

With the expansion of the CSA and the soil becoming more productive as the seasons progress, Full Earth is on its way to becoming a self-sustaining enterprise. “My goal is to take over the business without depending on someone else,” Katie said. “What is sustainable? Financial sustainability should be taken into account, too.”

The idea of jumping into farm life can seem intimidating, especially when you look up tractor prices online. And being so young, the Full Earth farmers find themselves in the same situation as many new farmers. “The main difficulty is land access. Startup costs and access,” Katie said. But when most of the nation’s farmers are pushing 60, it’s especially important that young farmers like Katie and Aaron succeed. “I don’t know if young people in their first years have that kind of commitment [to owning land],” Aaron said. “But there are a lot of people who have money who want people to farm their land. ‘Such and such farm has such a good reputation and it’s on my land.’ I think there’s a lot of potential between landowners and young kids.”

Fortunately, for up and coming small farmers, the sustainable produce market in this area is still unsaturated. Unfortunately, there aren’t too many farmers to learn from. Katie spent a year working for Herman Holley and Louise Divine at Turkey Hill farm, where she gained her experience, but no one in the area is doing any kind of formal training. “I think apprenticing is most valuable, especially in the South,” Katie said. “There are so many regional differences.” It would be easy to go to California and work on an organic farm, but California won’t prepare anyone for growing in Florida.

Prioritizing can also make the leap into farming more palatable for young people. “I think people have a false notion that farming has to be homesteading. You can focus on what makes sense,” Aaron said. You don’t have to do it all- livestock, fruit trees, lumber, etc. There are even options for equipment that aren’t as costly, like walk-behind tractors (“It’s basically a mechanical donkey,” according to Aaron).

And, there’s always the added perk that as a farmer, you’re your own boss. “We always take August off,” Katie said. “You said you wouldn’t do this unless you got a month off,” she said to Aaron.

“I don’t romanticize hard labor year round at all,” Aaron replied. During that month last year, Aaron went to Germany, Katie traveled and rested, and neither of them talked about the farm much at all. Because of good planning and working hard in September, they had their starts ready and brought as much produce as everyone else when the fall markets started.

Right now it’s high in the spring season, lending much potential for success, for the farm, the business, and for the farmers. It’s pretty much established that Katie will never be a photographer and Aaron might not be putting his translation degree to use for a while. “It’s hard to do another job once you’ve done something you really enjoy,” Katie said. “ What else would we do? It’s hard to measure up.”

Red Hills Online Farmers Market open for business

Shopping for produce at midnight? Check. Helping small farmers sell their product more easily? Check. Socializing with lovely, hardworking farmers and taking home exactly what you wanted? CHECK.

After over a year of meeting, planning, and organizing, the Red Hills Small Farm Alliance is ready to debut the Red Hills Online Farmers Market.


This is how it works.
1. Register as a shopper. Fill out the registration information and pay your $10 annual shoppers fee.
2. Start shopping! The market is open from Sunday mornings at 9:00 am till Tuesday nights at 11:00 pm. Farmers from the Tallahasee area (within 100 miles) upload products-- from produce to mushrooms to pasture-raised meat. Fill up your shopping cart, and check out with your credit card online.

3. Your food is harvested to order. Farmers receive a pick ticket, and wonderful farm employees rush to harvest it.

4. Pick up your food! Every Thursday, farmers bring the harvest to Bread and Roses Food Coop, located at 915 Railroad Ave in Tallahassee. You have from 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm to pick it up. Volunteers from the Red Hills SFA will be there to get your order together for you to take home.

The Red Hills Online Market offers more security for the producer and convenience for the shopper. I've worked my fair share of farmers markets, and there's nothing worse than finishing up a ten hour day with a cooler full of unsold food. With this system, farmers know exactly how much to harvest, and the produce is paid for, guaranteed. And, instead of sitting at market all day, farmers only have to drop off their harvest, leaving them more time to work in the field. Shoppers don't have to worry about showing up first at market to make sure their favorite product isn't sold out, and can take home exactly what they want without spending a lot of time shopping.

So get to shopping! Don't forget to register as a shopper, and check out what local farmers have to offer this Sunday.