It's been busy outside this place the past few weeks. Eating a vegetarian diet, no animal products including dairy or eggs  (I don't say vegan because I will eat honey and wear leather, etc...it isn't for ethical reasons,) and basing my eating on whole starch foods (a variety of whole rices, oats, and potatoes) with lots of vegetables, plus many fruits and the occasional nut  and no added fats or oils, has got me so energized I'm fair busting at the seams with it!

So, after a good take down inside the house, when I got done vacuuming the ceiling, I looked around outside. What needs doing? hmmm? and saw the monster rambler rose pushing up on the eaves of the house and completely overshading the front porch. One week ago, I took that baby down. Piled all of the sticky poky overgrown stems in a heap near the driveway.

note the recycle bin, for perspective. That was a heap o'brambles!

Over this past week, I've decided I want to grow veggies my own self, but the garden areas are severely overgrown. Four o'clocks and fennel are the bane of my existence. You can hack 'em down, but you can't make them stay away. Well, I was ready to do battle with standard hoe, shovel, trimmers, gloves and good ole elbow grease (and back grease, shoulder grease, etc) when someone suggested Lasagna Gardening to cut back on weeds and unwanted plants while enriching the soil at the same time, with much less extreme effort. Mind you, I did put in some of that effort on Saturday, getting lots of four o'clocks out, before layering this section...But today I ran to Lowe's and bought two big chunks of peat moss and this is what I did.

put down newspaper then peat moss.

I put mums in there, and newspapers on top, this time tearing the paper into strips. I later changed my mind about the marigolds because...they are sort of insect resistant and I don't know what that means for earthworm attraction, so I pulled the mums out from the paper and put in comfrey leaves instead.

and another layer of peat moss

wetting everything down

And for good measure, I snipped some elm saplings that were in the corner, and laid those over the top of everything. This is how the bed on the south side of my house, near the back door, looks. We'll see how it winters over, and what it may look like in the spring. The lasagna webpage and my own Wormhaven Gardening Book assure me that worms love this stuff and I should see lots of them when I'm ready to plant next year.

In the back, I'm going to place black plastic and weight it down. Let the heat and the winter decompose the unwanted plants back there, and have a second garden plot :)