Now is the easiest time of year to start a new garden bed (assuming “now” = early fall, day time temperatures around 45f). All you have to do is lay down cardboard:
Top it with still some nitrogen rich compostable matter, in this case grass clippings:
Some carbon-rich matter, in this case old wood chips:
And keep layering until it’s pretty thick:
And then walk away and ignore it until spring. All winter long, it’ll be decomposing, while killing the grass and weeds underneath. By spring time, the soil underneath will be nice & loose and fertile, and you’ll be able to plant straight into it.
(If you want to meet organic standards, then make sure any cardboard or paper is non-glossy and black & white.)
Update to this bed, and replies to comments I remember.
First off, to the person who was very concerned that I was “destroying” the lawn, I think it’ll be fine, there’s a lot of it:
This person, who is not me, has a lot of lawn. I’m allergic to grass (it gives me hives and makes me incredibly itchy) so if it were mine you can be assured I would definitely destroy it the first chance I got. But that’s not the case here, and adding one additional bed isn’t hurting anything.
It’s not got a barrier or border for edging because that matches the rest of the person’s garden beds, and honestly, I’ve found that you still have to edge around barrier, so I skip that and edge twice a year. Here’s what the edge currently looks like:
Would some sort of edging be nice, aesthetically? Perhaps, but this person wanted to make a bed as cheaply as possible, so this works.
Someone else was concerned about wind blown weed seeds, and you can see the resulting weeds in the above picture as well as in this close up:
No weeding had happened at this point, so you can see there’s remarkably few. At least for this climate and time of year.
There are a couple ways you could deal with this. First off, you can hand weed, which is super easy because they’ve had a very easy life in the mulch, so it’s quite easy to get all the roots up. Secondly, you could just mulch more. It just depends on the situation and how developed the weeds are. You could, hypothetically, also just take a stirrup hoe to it, but we just hand pulled the weeds and it hardly took any time.
