Use cardboard to turn your lawn, or neglected garden, into a healthy veggie patch. Grow your own veggies or fruit, without using chemicals or sprays, and cut down on food costs, digging and weeding.
You’ll need:
Plain cardboard – boxes can be pulled apart, or brown paper bags from the supermarket are fine, you just need to remove any plastic. Please use cardboard without any laminated covering and print on it.
1. Bricks, stones, or something heavy to hold down the cardboard, to begin with.
2. Water.
3. Quality worm castings and/or compost.
4. Herbi’s All-Natural Fertiliser 4-4-4.
Location:
Pick a sunny location, ideally with at least six hours of direct sunlight a day. Any size is fine, it just depends on how much you want to grow and how much garden you want. Some weeds will eventually appear, but they can easily be pulled out every month or so.
HOW-TO
Lay the cardboard down flat on top of the area you’d like your garden to be, or lay it onto of a pre-existing garden bed.
Don’t pull out any weeds or long grass. Just lay the cardboard on top, this will smother and suffocate the weeds, grass and anything other plant. It will keep roots in the soil so it won’t disrupt any microbes or the soil foodweb, which you’ll be developing or supporting with this.
It’s okay if the cardboard is different shapes, just overlap it to cover up any gaps.
Hold down the cardboard with bricks, stones, or something heavy to keep it in place.
Water the cardboard until it’s soaking and wet through, not just wet on top. Alternatively, you can wait until it rains. It’s good to let it settle for a day or two.
Cover the cardboard with compost and/or worm castings.
Sprinkle Herbi’s All-Natural Fertiliser 4-4-4 on top and use a rake to spread it through.
The longer you wait the better, but wait at least a couple of weeks to plant any seedlings or plants so the soil’s natural ecosystem can develop.
Why grow with a no-dig, cardboard garden?
You’ll enjoy your healthiest plants and tastiest produce using a no-dig approach, super-charged with all-natural ingreients that support and mimic mother nature.
By not digging, or pulling out weeds or grass, you’re supporting the soil ecosystem, rather than disrupting soil structure, or the soil community. The soil community is alive and made up of organisms and microbes, which mostly live in the top soil layer, and form part of a soil food web – a complex trading relationship where plants give sugar to microbes and microbes (bacteria, actinomycetes, fungi, protozoa and nematodes) give nutrients, hydration, and immunity to plants.
Learn more about soil health
The cardboard on top acts as mulch that retains moisture and protects topsoil. it also stops weeds, or at the very least, slows down weed growth. The cardboard will eventually decompose, adding organic matter to soil.
By adding the compost, or worm castings, and Herbi’s All Natural Fertiliser 4-4-4, you will feed the soil foodweb. Herbi’s All Natural Fertiliser is made in New Zealand, and has the greatest diversity of natural ingredients than any other fertilsier on the local market – it’s specialty plant and soil food designed to support healthy, living soil, plants and produce.
Within 6 weeks you’ll see vigorous growth and healthy plants, before enjoying tasty fruit and veggies, free from chemicals and sprays.