This year, I decided to create a no dig garden in my backyard. Back in January, I was actually contemplating not gardening at all. But Jeromey encouraged me to keep cultivating my green thumb. (I love him so much.) I kept saying, if I really dream about owning land one day and growing my own food, I might as well practice and learn now and figure out if that's what I really want. It pushed me to start saving every piece of cardboard we got. And by spring time, we had enough to create a nice sized garden in our backyard.
First we tried our best to mow the grass down as low as possible. Our mower couldn't scalp the lawn so we tried our weed whacker. It worked, but we ended up burning it out and it needed to rest. After, we laid down cardboard and weighed them down with rocks and boards.
We are fortunate to have a compost site near us, and made many trips back and forth, hauling bags full of compost that we got for free. I think in total, we used 36 contractor grade trash bags to build the garden up around 3-4 inches. We were able to turn our backyard from grass to garden in just two days.
I amended the compost with worm castings, BioTome Garden Fertilizer, and Azomite. Sometimes the cardboard beneath the compost would be dry but the soil on top was moist. I watered it pretty frequently so that the cardboard would not curl up. By October, there was still carboard, but the side that had contact with the ground was pretty dissolved. And below the cardboard there was no grass. It successfully killed everything underneath.
From this garden and our other 4x8 raised bed garden, we had harvested 27 watermelons, countless amounts of zucchinni and cucumbers, tatsoi, lettuce, kale, basil, green onion, cilantro, and cabbage. I really love what we were able to learn and grow from this little garden and I'm looking forward to next year.
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