Gardening organically isn’t just gardening without chemicals. You, the gardener, must work with nature to develop an ecosystem in your garden. What does that mean?

Learn about and encourage healthy bugs like ladybugs, lacewings, and other predatory insects to come into your garden and feed on your pests. You can do this by planting fennel, dill, allyssum, ammi majus, and cumin.

Help your soil feed your plants. Add as much organic matter as you can in order to feed soil organisms. These organisms will break down organic matter and will eventually feed your plants. Try to make your own compost. Not only does compost nourish the soil, making it reduces kitchen and garden waste immensely!

Finally, learn to tolerate a little bit of damage by insects here and there. If you wipe out all your pests, what will the ladybugs feed on?

Garden Site:
Site your garden in an area that is level with well-drained soil, ideally in an area that gets 6-8 hours of sunshine daily.

Step 1: Plan the plot

Step 2: Collect the Materials. Each layer should be 3” thick.

1. Dolomite lime and/or rock phosphate/bone meal. Source: GardenWorks carries Bone Meal and Lime. No Rock Phosphate Cost: 2kg $6.99 – 9.99, 10 kg $29
2. Nitrogenous materials - Source: weeds, weed seeds, manure, grass clippings, comfrey, alfalfa bales, soy grits.
3. Carbonous materials - Source: straw, hay, wood chips, hedge trimmings (not too much laurel or cedar), leaves, sawdust, cotton and wool clothing…’The brown layer”. Potential Source: Great Canadian Landscaping (see above), yourself, neighbours (and their pine trees!) as pine tree needles are also great.
4. Newspaper and corrugated cardboard - Source: you, your neighbours
5. Top dressing material
   Source: hardwood chips, straight straw, leaf mulch, pampas grass, sword or bracken fern, compost, sand, grass clippings

   Great Canadian Landscaping – see above, you, neighbours

   Fraser Richmond Soil & Fibre: Lawn & Garden Soil – 25% sand, the rest is composted materials but not organic
   $30/yard (tax incl) if we pick-up, bags provided. Otherwise, we can get it delivered for a fee (please refer to ‘source’ list).

   1” hemlock fir bark mulch - $24/yard (tax incl) if we pick-up.
   NOTE: As per my phone conversation with Elizabeth from GardenSmart, she does NOT recommend bark mulch on a veggie garden as it is too acidic for most veggies. However, potatoes, blueberries, and strawberries like acidity, so it depends on what you’re planting.

   500 square foot garden, 3” deep, would need 5 yards

6. Plants or large seeds
   Elizabeth from GardenSmart recommends large seeds such as potatoes, garlic (although not a great time of season to plant garlic), beans, squash. Small seeds do not do well (such as lettuce, kale, cabbage) unless they are seedlings.
7. Friends!

Step 3: Lay out the shape of the area to be mulched. It is suggested to use a garden hose to determine the best/most interesting shape.

Step 4: Water the soil until it can hold no more. To do this, water for about an hour (1.5 hours if clay-like soil).

Step 5: Trample the Vegetation!

Step 6: Lay down a carbonous layer. Use weeds from other areas of your yard (or neighbour’s yards), and strew them about. Then lay down a layer of carbon material – brown leaves, dried grass clippings, etc.

Step 7: Sprinkle a few handfuls of dolomite or agricultural lime, or rock phosphate/bone meal around site. Soil pH tests and the choice of plants determine this. Most soils in the Lower Mainland are very acidic, resulting in weak calcium uptake (an important mineral for plant growth).

Step 8: The Nitrogen Layer – at least 3” thick (or more if you have lots of materials to dispose of). You need a layer of high-nitrogen organic material to kick-start the decomposition process underneath the mulch. It can be full of weeds, weed seeds (it will be blocked out by the newspaper layer that will be put on next). Manure, grass clippings, comfrey work well. Compost materials that don’t have enough carbon or have been kept too wet…DO NOT USE FRESH KITCHEN SCRAPS – attracts critters.

Step 9: The Inoculation Layer. This layer is required to kick-start the decomposition process in your sheet mulch. Some mulches are very thick and have poor soils underneath containing few decomposition organisms. It is a good idea to “inoculate” the sheet mulch with “good bugs”. The best thing to use for this layer is compost – merely a few handfuls scattered over the area (no more than this as compost has more valuable uses). If you don’t have access to compost, just use plain garden soil.

Step 10: The Sheet Mulch Layer. The critical component of sheet mulching is the sheet mulch itself. Best thing to use is newspaper and/or corrugated cardboard. You can also use old wool carpet (for heavy weeds) or a variety of other materials. You will need enough newspaper to cover the entire space – approx. 10 pages thick for veggie patches. Overlap the edges by at least 4” (so weeds don’t come through), then water the whole thing again, very well (to create a paper mache-type material). There is no hard and fast recipe for sheet mulching – it’s considered an artform developed by trial and error.

Step 11: Carbon Layer. Not required but preferred as the more layers a sheet mulch has, the better it becomes in increasing the nutrients. THIS LAYER IS ABOVE THE SHEET MULCH LAYER – EVERYTHING HERE SHOULD BE FREE OF SEEDS.

Step 12: The Aesthetic Layer. You can use garden soil, straw, wood chips, bark mulch. NOTE: bark mulch not recommended for garden veggies (except potatoes). Fruits such as blueberries, strawberries DO like acidity though, so bark mulch would be appropriate.

Step 13: The Plant Layer. You can plant the same day you mulch! Just pull back the top-dressing in the spots you wish to plan, use a garden knife to cut through the newspaper/cardboard mulch layer (cut an “x”), dig a hole for the seed or transplant, fill it with garden soil, replace the mulch layer back and voila!

TIPS
Best Annuals grown from seed in mulch: potatoes, squash, pumpkin, garlic, tomatoes, scarlet runner beans, beans, other large seeded plants like nasturtium. Lettuce, cabbage, kale DO NOT do well as seeds, can work as seedlings.

Fertilizers – Rock phosphate, bone meal, granite dust, oyster shell flour.

Nitrogenous Materials: grass clippings. Collect them in old garbage can…will smell strongly. Seaweed – controversial…try other ideas. Soya grits – high in nitrogen & phosphorous…contact local soy processors. Compost with kitchen scraps – do not use fresh scraps! Chicken manure – use aged manure, horse manure – low in nitrogen, use other materials to up the nitrogen. Alfalfa – broken/moldy bales from feed stores, farmers. Comfrey – considered a permaculture wonder weed.

Sheet Compost “Sandwich”- Manure, Grass Clippings, Leaves, Manure

Newspaper/Cardboard must be well overlapped, OR use an old wool carpet for heavy weeds.

Carbonous Materials: Straw, hay, wood chips, hedge trimmings (not too much laurel or cedar), leaves, sawdust, cotton and wool clothing, most fleshy green plants have carbon but also fair bit of nitrogen.

Top Dressing Materials: the aesthetic layer needs to be seed-free from straw to wood chips. Can use hardwood chips, straight straw, leaf mulch, pampas grass, sword or bracken fern, or any other organic material that is attractive and easy to work with.
‘Seed-Free’ mulch materials– compost, sand, grass clippings.

General Mulch Materials:

• Sawdust: decomposes quickly, good conditioner when worked into soil, temporarily depletes nitrogen at soil surface. Best use for veggies, small fruits, might require nitrogen supplement. SOURCE: Sawmills - avoid scrap lumber that’s been treated.
• Pine Needles: excellent weed suppressant, moisture retentive, acidic. Best use for ornamentals, small fruits. SOURCE – pine trees, landscapers.
• Straw: insulator, could attract insects in some areas. Best use around veggies after soil has warmed, over veg or perennial beds in winter.
• Grass Clippings: decomposes quickly, could deplete nitrogen at soil surface, could contain herbicides. Best use around veggies (best to age briefly b/f using).
• Newspaper: completely blocks lights preventing weed germination, absorbent. Should be wet or covered with topmulch to keep in place. Best used in rows between veggies after soil warms.

SOURCES

YOU!
YOUR NEIGHBOURS! (i.e. you can put up a sign)

Lawn & Garden Soil & Bark Mulch
Fraser Richmond Soil & Fibre (@ the Transfer Station)
20 Riverside Drive, North Van

Contacts who deliver:
Jack Holloway 604.908.1150
Peter Lamoine 604.833.5623

Horse Manure
LauraLynn Stables at 604.986.8714

Bone Meal & Garden Tools
GardenWorks
705 West 3rd Street, North Vancouver, BC
Tel: (604) 988-8082
Fax: (604) 980-9544

GardenWorks
3147 Woodbine Drive, Edgemont, North Vancouver, BC
Tel: (604) 980-6340
Fax: (604) 980-6399

Soy Grits
Sunrise Soya Products
729 Powell Street
Vancouver, BC
V6A 1H5

Grass Clippings/Trimmings
Great Canadian Landscaping
995 WEST 3RD ST.
NORTH VANCOUVER, B.C.
V7P 1E4
OFFICE #: 604.924.5296
FAX #: 604.904.0009

Basics of Veggie Gardening:
Soil: Buy good quality soil and dig in organic matter/compost. Suggested you add 2” of manure compost on top of beds in February. Raised beds are also recommended but should be started in fall/winter to allow soil, etc to settle.
Practice Crop Rotation.
Fertilize: add kelp meal, manure (over 1 year old), or dolomite lime in fall (unless you’re growing potatoes – NO lime).

MAKE YOUR OWN…

Bone Meal: save bones from meat for a few weeks in the freezer, then dry in large batches in the oven. You can either store this way, or crush with the back of an axe or sledgehammer. Bone meal contains nitrogen & calcium – raises pH of soil. Note: it is difficult to get enough bones to produce large volumes of bone meal.

How To Control the Slug Population
Harold Waldock suggests the following… the slug solution. “Get a beer. Get a large yogurt container with a lid. Cut a hole near the top of the container, large enough for a slug to fit through. Pour in a teaspoon of sugar, 1/2 teaspoon of yeast, several tablespoons of flour, then fill to the top with water and stir. Place in the whole container in the mulch and cover it so it is out of the sunshine with the hole to the north. This solution and trap will kill slugs for weeks at a time with out having to check on it. Then drink the beer yourself - why give slugs your hard earned beer?” Another option is to collect the marauding slugs in a bucket each evening and transport them to a wild area near your home (i.e., NOT your neighbour’s yard). Continue this for about two weeks. Slugs are supposedly quite territorial, so once they have been actively removed from their territory over an extended period of time and no young slugs are allowed to establish your garden as theirs, you will no longer have a slug problem. This method has been used by many gardeners with much success.