Erin's Iowa Lasagna Garden

The first step when building a lasagna garden is layering pads of newspaper or several cardboard boxes to smother the grass on your garden site. I ran across church members collecting old newspapers to recycle and took at least seven or eight bundles off their hands.

My dad and I dipped the pads of newspaper in a bucket of water until they were soaking wet and placed them on the grass, overlapping the papers until the ground was covered with news headlines and not a blade of grass could be seen. Then, we layered a few inches of peat moss across the newspapers.