garden planning

The seeds I ordered have arrived, and I've started the onions, sweet peppers, and parsley in pots indoors. This is my first attempt at seed-starting, and this spring's garden will be exactly my second garden ever, so I'm still very much in the "read lots of internet articles and worry" phase of my gardener's life. But last fall's radishes, carrots, and beets were a resounding success, so that's heartening! I feel like I have some confidence that at least those three things will grow.

The garden I created last August was five rows, with room plotted out for a sixth; I went a bit wild with my seed-ordering this time around, and I have some spare fencing, so I'm planning to expand to eight rows when the snow melts. The no-till method I used last fall was very easy and worked really well for me, so I'll be using the same method for the expansion. I don't remember exactly where I found the instructions for it last year, but it is essentially:

1. Lay down a couple of layers of newspaper over the area of lawn you want to convert to a garden.
2. Shovel rows of compost about a foot to 18 inches apart on top of the newspaper.
3. Put down mulch in between the rows.
4. Plant stuff in the compost.

I benefited last year from having recycling-bound newspaper in the house, a bag of old leaves in the garage, and a compost bin, abandoned with the coming of municipal compost but still about a quarter full, in the backyard. Because of this it was, in addition to being easy, also very cheap; all I had to pay for was the fencing (chicken wire) and the seeds themselves. I've made sure to have the same materials on hand this spring for the expansion, viz. I saved leaves from last fall, restarted the backyard compost, and have plenty of newspaper, so expanding shouldn't be too difficult once the weather allows.

I'm going to use a similar tactic for converting some lawn over to a native-plant garden, though I think that will require covering the whole expanse of newspaper with compost, broadcasting the seeds, then adding some more compost and mulch on top.