Fox Street Gardens' birthday

A rather unique garden was born in Appleton, Wisconsin, on Saturday, April 25. Four families worked together to create several shared garden sites to grow both food and our sense of community. This blog is part of our mission to share what we learn with others. We'll tell you more about our inspiration, our neighborhood and how our gardens grow.

After two planning meetings, our group of seven adults and several adorable children gathered at 7 a.m. on Saturday morning to build our no-till "lasagna" garden in the backyard of Daisy & Pepper (we're all adopting garden aliases to protect the innocent--and the guilty).

Our original plan was to build the gardens Sunday, but based on a rainy weekend forecast, we changed our work day to Saturday, but we still got wet!

We were excited to start our experiment with lasagna gardening, which doesn't mean we're growing lasagna, or even the ingredients, but layering materials on top of the soil to build our garden bed. This "no-till" method means that we didn't start by digging in the soil, which was met with some skepticism by conventional gardeners.

Layers #1 & 2: Fox St. Gardeners laid cardboad, then several layers of newspaper in a 20' x 25' area. The layers are then watered to the dampness of a wet sponge. Plus, we had a little help from Mother Nature in the form of rain.

Layer #3: Composted cow manure is laid out in rows with walkways left between them. Because it's composted, there's no odor. It's nutrient rich and a great way to recycle cow manure from nearby dairy farms.

Layer #4: Pulpwood mulch goes over the compost and in the walkways.

Layers #5 & 6: Greens & browns, better known as grass clippings and dried leaves, were saved from our yards and spread next. They also need to be dampened to the "wrung-out sponge" stage. Here, Daisy smooths out layer #6, a half & half mix of topsoil & composted manure.

Last layer #7: Chopped straw tops our rows to help control erosion.

Breakfast break: After about 3 hours, we took a breakfast break for pancakes.

After our breakfast break, we built a smaller version of the no-till garden in another yard for a raspberry bed. Then we moved the remaining piles of compost & soil for our next project--bag gardens. But, these will wait for another day.

Building the 20' x 25' no-till lasagna bed took a total of 21 labor hours (7 adults for 3 hours). We completed the other 2 projects and clean up by 3 p.m. It was a long, wet day, but we loved it!