Use Sheet Mulching to Build Your Own Row Garden Right on Your Lawn

After seeing our neighbor’s success with a backyard pumpkin patch the previous year, my kids and I decided we wanted to grow our own pumpkins and gourds, too. And we had what we thought was the perfect unused spot in the lawn for it.

In typical Nicole fashion, I jumped right in, ordering eight yards of compost to be delivered to our driveway. Turns out, I was a bit too optimistic about our ability to move all that compost in one weekend. It was less idyllic time with my children planting pumpkin seeds and more me alone with a wheelbarrow and shovel once my kids got tired.

Nevertheless, we finally got our lasagna-style garden plot all set up and planted with pumpkin and gourds seeds.

Let's look more at what sheet mulching entails and how you can set up your own little no-till backyard pumpkin patch. (Hopefully you'll enlist better help than I did!)

What Is Sheet Mulching?

Sheet mulching is a way of creating a fertile garden space right on top of your lawn—no digging or tilling required. There's very little work involved (except for moving compost from your driveway to your backyard, if you go the same route as me), and you can create a growable space in under a day.

The idea is to lay down a barrier like cardboard over your yard and then cover it in compost, leaves, and other natural things that break down over time. You finish it all off with a layer of finished compost or topsoil. It's these layers that give this type of gardening its nickname: lasagna gardening.

You can grow in a lasagna-style garden right away, or you can let it sit for a couple months while worms and microogranisms break all that organic matter down and turn it into soil.

The Benefits of Sheet Mulching

• Your plants get to grow in really rich, fluffy soil, whether that's the top layer of compost you added or the lower layers of organic materials that will "cook" over time and create nutrient-dense soil.
• As I said, there's no digging or tilling required because this type of garden sits on top of what's already there.
• You can use lots of materials you already have, allowing you to create a garden space on a really small budget.
• You don't have to water a lasagna-style garden much because the organic materials retain moisture.
• The bottom layer of the garden suppresses weeds.

Creating your own little row garden is overall just a simple, inexpensive way to add extra growing space to your current kitchen garden setup. My squash patch is farther away from the back door, which wouldn't work well for the daily tending a kitchen garden requires, but works perfectly for this low-maintenance patch.

The Best Plants to Grow in a Lasagna-Style Garden

I like to divide plants into two broad categories: plants that don't take up much space or time but that need a lot of tending, and plants that take up a lot of space and grow for a very long time but that need little tending. The first group is ideal for growing in a raised-bed kitchen garden located close to your home. The latter bunch is perfect for a row garden or veggie patch that can be further from your home.

Let's look at some plants in the second group you might want to grow at home:

Large Vining Plants

This group includes pumpkins, of course, plus melons, and gourds. These plants have vines that need to spread all over. Some can literally take up the same square footage as my minivan! Trying to grow them in a container or raised bed would mean turning over a lot of precious real estate to these sprawling plants. I've found it's just not worth it.

Not only do they take up a lot of space, they also take months before you get your first juicy bite. Beyond space needs, these larger plants don’t require as much tending and won’t be harvested as frequently as your kitchen garden plants. So, it makes sense to grow them in rows rather than packing them into a tightly controlled space designed for your daily tending convenience. 

Large Bushy Plants

This group includes broccoli, cauliflower, and Brussels sprouts. Each of these brassicas is capable of stretching as wide as 3 to 4 feet. There's also squash and zucchini, which like to spread out.

Perennial Berry Plants

This group includes blackberries and raspberries, both of which are a little too big to grow in your raised beds.

Native Plants and Flowers

Native plants and pollinator-friendly plants don't have any special soil requirements, so they're perfectly happy growing in the ground. I used sheet mulching to create a 3-foot-wide pollinator garden space around my kitchen garden. It's perfect for growing lots of native flowers, grasses, and shrubs since they don't need any supplemental watering or much tending.

When to Set Up Your Lasagna-Style Garden

You can set up sheet mulching layers any time of year—as long as your ground isn't covered with snow and ice—though what you might use to create those layers will vary by season.

If you're setting up your garden in the fall and you live in a colder climate, you can use more materials that need time to break down. Think fallen leaves, grass clippings, etc. Your layers will be buried under snow all winter long and be nice and fluffy come spring planting. Basically, you'll have wonderful soil just in time for sowing watermelon seeds!

If you're setting up your garden during a time of year that you can grow in—spring and summer, plus fall and even winter in a warmer climate—you'll want to focus more on having several inches of compost-amended topsoil as the top layer so that you can plant immediately.

Now, let's look at the steps to set up sheet mulching.

Choose a Sunny Spot

After we'd set up our little backyard pumpkin patch by sheet mulching with cardboard, my kids and I planted five different types of pumpkin and gourd seeds.

Days passed, and things looked promising: there were tiny sprouts of green all over the patch. More days came and went, and the vines grew longer and longer until they were sprawling over the entire area. As the long summer days began to shorten, we had loads of green vines in our pumpkin patch but never a wagon-load of pumpkins. We were missing something, and that something was sunlight. Our backyard was shaded by too many old trees for hours at a time.

Take it from us and our disappointing little pumpkin patch. The type of plants you'd want to grow in a row garden—whether that's your own pumpkins or rows and rows of broccoli—need at least 8 hours of sunlight a day to grow the good stuff (10 to 12 hours is even better).

If you have a wide-open space where there's nothing to obstruct sunlight, that's the ideal place for your lasagna garden.

Another thing to consider when you're picking a spot is whether a hose can reach it. This is especially important if you'd like to grow something like watermelons in a hot, dry climate.

Clear the Space

Clear the area you've selected of any rocks and large objects. There's no need to rip up sod or remove existing weeds.

Use some wooden stakes and twine to outline your future garden bed. If your garden will be visible from the front of your house or from your kitchen window, you might want to frame the space with some stones, bricks, or blocks for a neater appearance. Framing the sides can also, of course, help hold the materials in place.

Put Down a Barrier

The first layer of your lasagna is there to suppress weeds and grass. You can use weed barrier cloth, newspaper, or cardboard. I used cardboard boxes to create our squash patch and my pollinator garden. I happened to have a lot of boxes, and the cardboard also attracts earthworms, which are great for the soil in your garden. (Make sure to remove any tape and labels from the cardboard before putting it down.)

The goal is to avoid having any gaps in this layer, so overlap your cardboard boxes a bit and make sure to extend them across the entire space.

Water your barrier once it's in place.

(Note: In these pictures, I'm demonstrating on a small-scale space. I wouldn't need 8 yards of compost to cover this little patch!)

Add Your Layers

It's time to add dried leaves, grass clippings, pine needles, hay, whatever you got.

Some people get really technical about mixing greens (nitrogen-based materials) and browns (carbon-based materials) in their layers. This is more important if you're practicing sheet composting where you'll be adding more and more organic material over time. If you're using kitchen scraps to create your garden, then just make sure the layer with these green materials is about half as thick as the brown layers (dry leaves, shredded newspaper, etc.).

My main focus is having a top layer that's at least 4 to 5 inches thick and made of either pure finished compost or compost-amended soil. If you're growing melons, pumpkins, or gourds, they need a lot of nutrients to produce their large fruit, so they love growing in straight-up compost. The compost/topsoil also helps hold organic materials like leaves in place while they're decomposing.

If you're planning on growing right away, focus on this thick top layer and avoid using kitchen scraps and other greens that need a long time to break down.

One thing to avoid using in your layers is plant material that shows signs of disease or pest damage, since these could spread to your new garden. I also don't recommend using anything with seeds, such as weeds you've pulled from your yard; your lasagna is not going to "cook" at high enough temps to prevent sprouting.

Once your layers are added, your lasagna garden might be anywhere from 12 inches to 24 inches tall. Don't worry—it'll settle within weeks.

Plant

You can leave your layers to "cook" (in other words, heat up like a compost pile) for a couple months if you'd like. All those materials will break down and turn into nutrient-dense soil over time. If you need to speed that process up, you can make sure to water the layers occasionally or cover the space with a tarp to trap moisture and heat.

I prefer to plant right away, which is why I focus on that thick top layer of finished compost and topsoil. It's really easy to plant right in this layer if you're sowing something like pumpkin seeds or zinnia seeds.

If you're planting something like a native shrub that already has established roots, you can use a hori hori or knife to cut a hole in the cardboard layer the size of the plant's rootball.

Tips for Planting in Sheet Mulching Layers

• Use plant tags to mark where you've sown different types of seeds. Otherwise, you might be waiting months to be reminded what you planted where.
• Before planting a Cucurbit (pumpkin, squash, gourd, melon, etc.), broccoli, or cauliflower, add a nitrogen-rich fertilizer to the bottom of each planting hill or row.
• Follow the plant spacing rules on the back of the seed packages. In general, you'll want to plant in rows or mounds that are an adequate distance from one another so that your plants will have plenty of room to grow to maturity without blocking sunlight or bumping into one another. 
• Large vining plants can be planted either in mounds, where each vine grows in opposing directions, or in rows, where each plant is given plenty of room to spread wide and long. Pumpkins, for example, should be planted about one inch deep, only three to five seeds per mound. Once seedlings appear, thin them to two or three per mound. Planting in mounds keeps the soil nice and warm, which aids in germination.

• Brassicas like broccoli, cauliflower, and Brussels sprouts do well in rows spaced 3 feet apart.
• Fruit bushes can also be planted in rows spaced every 2 to 3 feet. You might want to give your bush some type of vertical support, like a trellis or cattle panel, to climb.
• Keep your plants well-watered for the first couple of weeks. After that, you should only need to supplemental water if you're not getting rain.
• Even if your little patch isn't intended to be a flower garden, I still recommend adding some flower seeds. This is especially important if you're growing pumpkins, watermelon, or squash, which need to be pollinated to form fruit. Low-maintenance flowers like zinnias and sunflowers will attract all the pollinators you need. If you have rabbits or other pests, you might want to cover your flower seedlings with burlap or garden mesh until they're more mature.

Time to Gather Some Cardboard Boxes!

There you have it. That's all there is to creating your own little pumpkin patch or broccoli bed.

You'll likely notice you don't have to water your lasagna-style garden as often. I mostly let nature do its thing, only lugging out the hose during periods of drought. You shouldn't have to worry about formal irrigation unless you live somewhere extremely dry.

You can refresh your garden each year by adding some more compost to the top.

If you've been thinking about creating a new in-ground bed, I encourage you to just go for it, if for nothing else, than as a fun little experiment. Even if you set your expectations very low, you'll likely be amazed what a sunny spot covered in compost can nurture—at the very least, you'll learn something new! If you end up creating a super-productive little patch in your backyard, then you now have a new place to grow all your favorite flowers and veggies.

Thanks so much for bringing back the garden with me, one spot of the yard at a time!