Hi, I have been reading about the lasagne gardening on here...
We took on our allotment a month or so ago. We only cultivated a small bed and grew beets, dill and radishes. The allotment is pretty overgrown. And now even the bed we completely dug out is covered with a few inches of weeds again. I was wondering about doing something 'no dig' before winter comes.
We're both students and with intensive schedules at uni we only had prioritised building a 2-bin compost from large pallets and building a garden box to keep tools that doubles as a bench, thinking we'd focus on the allotment for next season rather than trying to start big.
Is it still worth doing no-dig with winter coming? There will probably be snow in early November till March.
Also, I'm not sure we could come up with enough material to put on top of the cardboard. (And there would definitely be enough people trying to 'help' us if we left any cardboard visible! We had someone 'help' by rotovating half the plot that we hadn't dug yet...)And living in an apartment means no lawn for grass clippings. Wish we had a paper shredder. Maybe we could collect some leaves in the forest, but not the amount we'd need.
We have had half of the plot covered with a tarp for a month now but still have some of these crazy weeds that are about a foot or more deep (and seem to do fine without light or water!) and the time it takes to dig one of them up means there's no way to dig the whole plot before winter. We also have some couch.
So I guess all that rambling was to ask whether you all think we should dig what we can and leave the rest until spring or try to cover as much as we can. Will this do anything to the perennial weeds? Won't the snow kill the annual weeds anyway?
Sorry, lots of questions. I'm new to snow and to having an allotment!
Thanks in advance for any help.
STHLMgreen
