Sheet Mulching for Lovely Soil

I have been working in a beautiful garden for the past 5 weeks in Woodbourne, NY. The gardener there is Paul and he has been at it for 20+ years. He is completely self taught, too, which gives me lots of hope.

I learned a lot from him, but to begin, I wanted to tell you more about the sheet mulching technique that was extremely helpful for his volunteer based work force on an extremely rocky piece of earth in the Catskill Mountains.

This technique requires careful planning and waxed cardboard edging:

cardboard (soaked in water)

compost (this is cow manure and sawdust that has been sitting in a huge pile for a year)
newspapers
more compost

and results in this lovely mounded soil AND it did not require any weeding or tilling