Have you got your seeds ready? Well then, start your gardening engines! The gluing it the hard part. The rest is easy.

Take the sheets out to your garden bed. Actually you can use this technique anywhere you have great dirt. I have 4 ft X 8 ft beds, so I used 32 sheets in my bed. I planted a variety of lettuces plus radishes, beets, turnips, greens, and Swiss chard. I made myself a chart so I wouldn’t forget what I planted where. Frankly, I can’t remember my name some days, much less the location of  9 kinds of lettuce.

Could you remember all that?

Though my paper towels aren’t exactly 12 inches square, you get the idea of how to do this. Make neat little rows. And, please, do this on a calm day. You could be in a world of hurt trying to accomplish this in 20 “foot” winds.

Notice the one down in the bottom right hand corner

The bump in it is from the dirt below the towel. I fixed it, but make sure your dirt is as smooth and level as possible before you put down your paper towels. If you look close, you can see I labeled every sheet with the kind of seed. Again, I can’t remember seeds shapes that well either.

Now grab yourself some dirt

If you’re a gardening novice, you might think it a good idea to grab some Miracle-Gro potting soil. Don’t do that. Seeds need good old-fashioned dirt to sprout. Products with additives (especially fertilizer) will kill the tiny seeds and you won’t have even one lettuce leaf. If you don’t have any decent dirt at home, go buy some Turkey compost. Your plants will love it.

A half done bed

Go lightly on the dirt. 1/2 inch is best. Make sure you cover the paper towels the best you can. If there isn’t quite enough on the edges, no worry. The paper towels will disappear after a few good soakings.

The completed bed

When you look at that, you probably see dirt. I see a salad with fresh lettuce. Oh, I love growing vegetables so…

The next step, and the most important, is to water everything in. Now, just so happens, it had rained the day before and I had empty cat litter buckets filled to the brim with rain water. So, I watered my beds in the old fashioned way with the good stuff.

A lovely shower for the seeds

After that, I went ahead and mulched with hay, but I thought that photo was pretty boring. You could mulch with old leaves (run the lawnmower over them first) or hay or dead grass clippings. Anything that will hold in moisture.

See, now wasn’t that simple? You can start a garden with this technique anywhere including on the roof of a New York penthouse. Of course, if you live in a NYC penthouse, you’re probably more of a socialite than a gardener. In fact, you could probably do a blog on Botox.

Spreading laughter throughout the world…one chuckle at a time.

Mikie Baker
www.mikiebaker.com