Maggie Fry is a freelance writer and homesteader who lives in northwestern Pennsylvania. Her family raises poultry, goats, hogs and way too many cats. Read her blog: Lady of the Green Earth.

If you really want to plant a garden, but you are staring at a bunch of green grass and thinking, “That’s going to take a long time,” take heart.  Sheet composting can come to your rescue.  I first heard about sheet composting when I took a Permaculture design course fifteen years ago.  I fell in love with it and I’ve been using it ever since.

The basic idea behind sheet composting is to put down a layer of mulch to discourage the grass or weeds from growing up through and then forming a planting bed on top of that with manure, straw, and compost.  First, decide where you want to put your garden, and then collect all your materials.  Once you have everything together, the sheet composting process moves very quickly.

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1. Homegrown food tastes better. Plain and simple. Here’s why: the food you grow at home is fresher, and in season, which delivers better taste. And then there’s the “oh, so THAT is what this is supposed to taste like” moments.

2. You will be healthier. You can eat foods at the height of their nutritional value – just picked! You will also find yourself eating more veggies. If it’s growing right there at home, what’s to stop you from throwing it on your plate? Gone are the days, when you gazed into the fridge, saying, “We’re out of kale. Let’s just have cake.” 

A friend and I recently stood over my kitchen counter which was cluttered with just-picked veggies, and we were snacking and catching up. We both oohed and aahed as we spoke, insisting the other try THIS Bloomfield spinach leaf or THIS Deer Tongue lettuce. That never happens over a bowl of chips. It can happen over a beer sampling. Thankfully, vegetables and beer samplings are not mutually exclusive. But countertops of veggies trump a bag of chips, for sure. 

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The first factor to growing asparagus successfully is the soil. (P.S. It’s ALWAYS the soil). Asparagus like sandy, composted soil that has a pH that is close to 7.0. If you should have rock or clay in your soil try and remove as much as you can and fill in with compost.

Asparagus have very fine roots and so weeds can really get stuck in there. Keep your bed well weeded. Another key factor is moderate watering. Water your asparagus about twice a week. The goal here is just-moist soil.

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This video details 4 Tips on Plastic-Free Gardening:
1. Use biodegradable containers
2. Use seed balls to plant your seeds
3. Use raised beds made from lumber
4. Use a soil blocker to start your seedlings

Composting is confounding to a lot of people. Let’s see if we can clear the air and get everyone composting by answering some common questions.

Will my compost bin smell?

This is the most common question I get. There are people who dedicate the better part of their lives to their compost bin. They take its temperature, strictly regulate its diet, feed it expensive activators. For me and my ten jobs and my lackadaisical ways, composting is generally a gaseous affair. It has its own unique smells (rotten eggs) and occasional un-refined sights (slugs, cut worms, maggots). But the result is free, gorgeous, alive, nutrient-delivering soil that keeps my vegetable garden thriving, and my kitchen and yard scraps working for me. There are definitely ways to contain the sweet smell of success to the bottom of the bin and that leads us to the next question:

Is composting a lot of work?

Compost needs maintenance. It needs to be watered and aerated. You need to gather brown materials regularly to cover your kitchen scraps. But everything worth doing is worth doing well, right?

I find composting to be a real return-to-the-earth encounter. The only thing I’ve found to be a more humbling experience than turning the compost bin has been cleaning the kids’ hamster cage –whose soiled bedding, by the way, goes right into the compost bin! (The hamster’s, not the kids’!)  Sure, some folks will tell you they just roll their compost around in one of those plastic ball bins and it comes out perfect, but that has just not been my experience. Compost takes effort, but the effort is well-rewarded.

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