Groton Garden Club has installed a new garden bed at Town Hall. This bed has been created this fall and will be ready for planting next spring. It will be planted with the native plant Foamflower - Tiarella cordifolia under the existing Crabapple tree. This garden bed will create a Soft Landing which is a type of shelter and habitat for more than one life cycle of our many beneficial insects such as bumble bees, moths, butterflies, fireflies, lacewings and beetles. In addition to benefiting wildlife it will also make it easier to maintain for the club by covering the soil with a green and living mulch. This will cut down on the weeding maintenance.
The new bed was created using the lasagna method of gardening, also known as sheet composting. It is a no-dig, organic method that involves layering compostable materials to create a rich, nutrient-dense soil. The name comes from the layering technique, which resembles the layers of an Italian lasagna dish. We used a layer of newspaper, a layer of compost from Black Earth, and a layer of pine mulch. This will smother the weeds growing underneath and give us a clean slate to plant the plugs of the Foamflower. Creating a new garden bed this way is the easiest method and is easy on the pocketbook. The only thing we needed to buy was the mulch. The garden bed under the Elm tree at Town Hall was created the same way only the first layer was cardboard.
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