New Beginnings & The W-O-R-D

Today, I finally got out and picked up some extra materials to start my new lasagna bed for the year. I got two bales of peat moss, some compost/manure, a bag of potting soil (for containers) and my tool for the year, a spaded fork. I looked at plants at both Wal-Mart & Lowes, but they looked nutritionally deficient.

I weeded my bed from last year. (I thought the idea was that you wouldn't get weeds?), and actually built some walls from some freebie lumber. I took the old wood scraps to lay out the new bed, but it was getting too dark to do any more. In the next couple of days, I hope to get my broccoli, cabbage, brussel sprout, & onion plants. Ace has had decent plants in the past, for better prices actually, and I have also been dying to check out the local feed & seed store I just found. I will lay the compost/manure as a new layer and get that bed planted. Hopefully, I will get my new lasagna bed made and planted in the next week or two as well. We'll see what I get done.

I just finished The Vegetable Gardener's Bible: Discover Ed's High-Yield W-O-R-D System for All North American Gardening Regions by Edward Smith this last week. Over all, it has pretty similar concepts to the Lasagna Gardening method. WORD is an acronym for Wide Rows, Organic Methods, Raised Beds, and Deep Soil. Smith does choose to till the ground rather than building the soil up, but the concepts remain basically the same. The plants, including the roots, need lots of room to grow. He has good information on composting, disease/pest control (with recipies), companions, rotating, and a huge section on individual vegies/herbs with everything you need to know from sowing to storing. I wish I had discovered this book earlier because it is a better one-stop source for info instead of the two or three other books I read for specific stuff such as companion planting. I took a lot of notes and definitely plan to copy a few of his charts/recipies. At some point, I will probably add it to my library as well.