Sharptop Visionary Garden| Our Vista

A group of students created the map for our vista.
We focused on edible, native, and medicinal plants.

Our vista site had very poor soil.
We decided to build it lasagne-style!

Our wonderful group of helpers began building the
dry creek bed. Lots of water flows through
our vista so we needed to build a drainage system.

After digging a shallow trench
we placed all the river rocks.
We did need to go back and add landscaping cloth
under the rocks to prevent them from sinking
into the soil.

Check it out!
What a beautiful dry creek bed!
Terrific job team!

There are several names for this gardening style
including lasagne gardening and no-till gardening.
Basically, you build your soil.
Here we're adding leaves and other forest waste.

We put several layers of newsprint
under the leaves. This helps prevent
the grass and unwanted weeds that were already
present from growing in our new garden.

We covered the layers of
newsprint, forest waste, mulch,
and other organic matter with a layer
of garden soil.

We built this soil in January 2011.
This gives it time to compost and turn into
healthy, nutrient-filled soil.
It will be ready for a Spring Garden!

You can see the paths to the door and
to the wall/bench that we will build
around the air conditioning unit.
The soil mounds will flatten as the
leaves compost. In a couple
months it will be mostly flat.

Check out the dry creek!
This will help the water drain.
Pretty!