Jodi and I recently watched a documentary online called Back to Eden. They have the documentary available for viewing directly from their website. In short, they convincingly show how to garden in a more natural, less toilsome way without the need to till, water, or struggle against dug in weeds.
Yes, it does sound too good to be true. But, feel free to watch the video yourself for all the details on why this is NOT too good to be true.
We're thoroughly convinced and have already begun the process to build our new garden using the methods that the documentary demonstrates. We'll be documenting our
This video shows us going through step one, which is to wet three layers of newspaper and layout over the desired garden plot. It's important to overlap all the connecting edges since this will be necessary to suffocate out all the growth underneath it. This newspaper will itself break down and compose the first season, but not before it's killed everything growing under it. Once the newspaper was down, we placed roughly three to four inches of composted horse manure. This stuff was great. It was already composted so it was pretty much unrecognizable from just regular dirt. I got it from a local horse ranch for $20 a truckload. Two truckloads was enough to cover our huge garden plot which measures 22' x 41'.
We all were able to pitch in and knock it out over the course of a few days. It made for a fun video and I look forward to making a lot more. We've already begun the second step, the covering, and will have it completed soon.