My Amazing Instant Plantbed

I have been wanting to share this with you all summer. I did something so good, so easy and so effective that it was amazing. So easy that very few gardeners thought of doing it.  I too didn’t think of doing it. I heard this method from Geoff Lawton in one of his Q&A videos from his 14-day isolation in his travels back in April. Someone asked him how to make an instant garden. I did what he instructed and it was brilliant.
Here is my instant garden that performed like no other, was a power of fruit production and required almost no watering throughout the whole growing season, which was an exceptionally dry and hot season with almost no rain all summer long.

In my front yard pollinator garden, I once planted a carrot. I started this garden with not many plants and I heard that carrot flowers are beneficial to pollinators. One carrot over-seeded many wild carrots which over-seeded the whole entire garden with a wild carrot mat. I wanted to get rid of the wild carrots in favour of better behaving plants. As happened to most of us through COVID I had time in early spring so I meticulously pulled out the entire wild carrot infestation, along with some dandelions. These weeds filled up a number of buckets. Maybe 5-6 5 gallon buckets. I stored them in my garage feeling that they are a great organic material that should somehow add value to my food forest.

Thank you Geoff Lawton for your instructions! I had an area in my food forest that use to be part of a perennial garden but got infested with quack grass. I could not maintain this section and I wanted food production so I removed one perennial of value to me to my pollinator garden and using a hard fork I aerated the soil by stepping on the fork to force it into the ground and pulling a bit to lift the soil. I then decided I would plant in a “U” shape that will allow me a comfortable access to all the plants in the bed.
I took all the filled buckets and spread their content on top of my chosen area exactly where I wanted to plant my vegetables. I placed dead stems that I cleared from the pollinator garden on the area I would be stepping on to help reduce compaction from my weight.

I then harvested all the comfrey leaves that grew in my food forest. I have 5 plants. I took the leaves and spread them on top of the wild carrot and dandelions. I had some mullein growing wild so I harvested those too and added on top. Then I took a bag of composted chicken manure and sprinkled it on top of the leaves.
If you don't grow comfrey that is OK. All Geoff Lawton instructed was to use scrap leaf vegetables such as cabbage and other kitchen scraps. I am sure that used coffee grinds would work great as well.

I took construction paper and spread it over the whole area, overlapping and layering quite a bit. Then I watered the paper so it hugged the piles underneath.

I then took a couple bales of straw and spread a thick layer of it over the entire bed. Its thickness was at least a foot, more like 18”.

In a day or two some of my vegetable starters were ready for planting. I pulled the straw away a bit to create a hole in the straw where I wanted to plant and tore the wet brown paper apart at the bottom of that hole. I filled the hole in the straw with triple mix and tamped it down. I then planted the young plant in the triple mix and pulled the straw back around it. There was plenty of straw! This was the only time I needed to water this plant bed.

Worms feasted under the paper, converting all the weeds into worm castings, feeding my vegetable plants the entire season.
In May I got a truck load of wood chips so I added that around my U shaped garden bed but not right over the plant bed. I however did add them over the place I would be stepping on.
Now I just stood back with great satisfaction watching how vigorously the plants grew and quickly started producing fruit. They all grew so strong and healthy. I got to watch the power of working with nature and reusing the waste from my own garden.  

I repeated the same method in another area, this time using thick layers of newspaper instead of construction paper. I planted zucchini in this area. They seemed to start off not so vigorous but as summer progressed, they gained vigour and continued to produce delicious zucchinis that we thoroughly enjoyed all summer long. Oddly, they are still producing now, in the last week of October! In our growing zone I have never seen this happen. Zucchini plants are supposed to be long gone by now. I attribute this success to the fact the plants enjoyed even moisture and nutrients, probably also protection of the microorganisms at their roots. They never suffered from the drought, although I had not watered them. All I had to do is harvest, and that’s how I like it.

Try this in your garden. Let nature do the work. Enjoy a zero worry garden bed.