Rebecca's Interview with Patricia Lanza

Author of Lasagna Gardening

From: Patricia Lanza:
Dear Rebecca,

Thanks for the great review. If you ever want to do an interview let me know. I am at Disney right now where I have finished 4 days at the Epcot Flower and Garden Show 2000. I leave tomorrow for a 4 day cruise on the good ship Magic where I will rest 3 days and do 2 more lectures and demos.

Lasagna Gardening is in it's 4th printing after just 18 months and shows no sign of fading. It's #319 at amazon.com - I have to believe it's because you all “get it.” It's so easy and some want to make gardening too hard.

Thanks again.
Pat

Rebecca :
I was thrilled to receive your email! Suddenly all the enthusiasm I experienced while reading your Lasagna Gardening came flashing back! I would love to Interview you.

Mm - put me in your pocket & when you're on the good ship Magic take me out & let me feel the warmth & wind!

When did you think to write a book about your unusual style of gardening? How long did it take from when the lightbulb flashed to printing?
 
Pat :
I began to talk to garden and service clubs in 1990 and soon had 40 lectures a year. The most asked question was: “when can we buy the book?” I was writing a garden column for a local paper and simply had several of these columns bound into a book. Actually 10,000 copies. Chapter 23 was Lasagna Gardening.

The lightbulb flashed long before I called the method Lasagna Gardening. The name took hold when I was addressing a group of garden clubbers in the middle of the day, after lunch, with a cash bar. They were sitting in the sun and nodding off. I got their attention by telling them they knew how to make a lasagna and they woke up when they thought it was time to eat again.

I wrote the story first for Country Journal Magazine. I took that and the small book to Rodale.
 
Rebecca :
How did you find your artists & team?
Pat :
Rodale provided the editor and the team of artists.
 
Rebecca :
Do you cook with the same humorous panache & what are your least favorite vegetables?
 
Pat :
My cooking is quick, easy, fresh and funny. Rutabagas.
 
Rebecca :
Other than the rototiller that got away from you like a chicken without its head, what was your funniest failure?
 
Pat :
I traded pizza and Coca-Cola to a horse farmer's kid for loads of fresh horse manure moved to my garden spot with a manure spreader. He filled the spreader, drove it to my country inn, backed near the garden and let it fly. After I cleaned the building I covered the manure with cut grass and peatmoss and let it sit all winter. In the spring I planted. The inn was too busy for me to get back to the garden and I watched the weeds grow with great gusto, pig weed, smart weed, dumb weed and jewel weed.

By time I got back to the garden the weeds were 3 to 4 feet tall. I couldn't see the garden. I stomped the weeds down and found one of the best harvest I had ever seen. I picked baskets of rotted and overgrown vegetables but there were many time more that were good.
 
Rebecca :
I loved your horse manure story - when I was a teenager I worked summer holidays up in Herefordshire(England) on a dairy farm & market garden in an ancient walled garden where we grew flowers for sale in the nearest town's florist shop. Three miles further along the country road was an all-round farmer who willingly fed us for mucking out his barns after winter.

You know how teenagers love to congregate - so a handful of us would meet up & spend a few relaxing hours forking the odiferous stuff out into the center of the farmyard. Later we loaded it onto the thrower behind the tractor & drew straws as to who would drive the tractor to the field & spread it. Being a big city girl that first time I had no idea why there was such reluctance for this part of the job. Nothing could be worse than standing shin deep in the stuff, right?

I “won” the privilege of doing the dirty deed. I'd never driven anything much less a huge tractor so I thought I was doing great when I got to the field. The rest of the gang hung on the gate to watch as I released the lever & merrily started off down the field. It was lucky I'd thought to wear my hooded duffel coat as in short order clots of the muck began flying - rather like riding a bicycle through a mud hole with no rear mudguard. I did finish that load & when I looked at the back of my coat I knew my mother's sense of humor would be tested!

You eMailed me from Disney's Epcot Center - would you describe your site there?
 
Pat :
I was at Epcot presenting Lasagna Gardening lectures and demos to groups of 200 to 259 in an air conditioned tent. Then I boarded the Magic cruise ship to give garden lectures for the first time at sea.
 
Rebecca :
What are the three most asked questions you get?
 
Pat :
YWhat to do about deer?
How much paper to use and do you use it in layers?
How high each layer?
 
Rebecca :
As I've reviewed your book already I'm putting the Spotlight on it with this Interview. If you have any publicity appearances for the rest of the year, that would also be an excellent time to post them in our Authors Sightings section.

Did expanding from a newspaper column to a book come readily?
 
Pat :
I came to writing after my early jobs were done, 36 years of marriage and 7 children. I went to live at my small farm across the road from the inn my husband and I had owned for 17 years. At first I wrote of my days in the garden “Down the Garden Path” and I acquired a following. They forgave my lack of schooling to be able to share my life. My friend owned the paper and used me as a filler but I wasn't too proud to take advantage of space. My column ran for 8 years.

Another paper took me on and I wrote a new column at the same time “Shandelee Sage” where I told more stories about my herb and perennial gardens, my view of the changing seasons and my travels. Once a year for 9 years I wrote a feature for a regional travel guide telling my first person story of how much I loved the area.

I joined Garden Writer's of America and learned from other members how to sell my work. I continued to learn to write. I made contacts that became old friends who taught me how to get an editor's attention. I sold my first story to Country Journal Magazine.

I published my little book of articles (that has sold over 9,000 copies) and took it with the CJ story to Rodale. They bought it. I wrote it and the history of the book is in the making. It's real gardening by a real person who knows she was lucky to have such a grandmother.
 
I am the grandmother to generations of new and some old, gardeners who have not had one of their own to teach them. I care about the earth but know today's gardener is too busy and just wants to have a garden instantly. That's O.K.! I can show them how to do that without preaching about saving the earth. My method lures them to my side while giving them what they want.
 
Rebecca :
What I seem to be gleaning from all that you write is: a weedful garden produces rich harvests of what we humans choose to eat?. My egg lady Wanda prefers pigweed over chard - it's got NO taste she says. My beloved considers pigweed a pest along the lines of mint - let it go & it'll take over. I relish both!
 
Pat :
No, I don't advocate weed eating or letting your garden go to weed but rather how I got to this point with trial and error. My gardens are neat and let you use what you have to create wonderful soil.
 
Rebecca :
Is there a pronounced gender difference in the people who accept your way of gardening & those who balk?
 
Pat :
Men, nowadays, tend to want to give up machines. I have reduced my RPMs to 0. Smart men who understand soil and growing, men who think about it before making a decision and men who know nothing about growing but understand time and labor-saving methods switch. Others have a knee-jerk reaction to protect their rototiller so NO. Men sometimes don't want me telling them to learn to mow in one direction rather than their way.
 
Rebecca :
Deer - they cruised through in March & ate my first daffodil buds, however, because of all the logging, fencing, dogs, horses, cougars & bears their visits are now rare indeed. When we first came out to homestead, mamas would drop off their fawns in the underbrush on our acre, cross the river & go browse & play in the meadow until sunset when they'd troop back, collect their babies & head up into the rainforest. We crept about each day, watching those little ears twitch in the sunshine. We have now disturbed the continuity of their lives so much that it hasn't happened again. Many of the females are also barren & sadly, carry a disease that's discoloring their hide.

It's slugs for us here on the edge of a rainforest. This is the first year I succumbed to putting out anti-slug flakes & have, tragically, decimated my chipmunk population. This is heartbreaking as we loved & nurtured feisty generations year after year. Now we only use slug hotels & are hoping there is another litter out there that'll want to call our land home. By the way chipmunks are the best sunflower planters!
 
Pat :
No deer or any other animal ate your daffodils for they are poisonous and the only bulb and flower you can grow successfully in deer country. I have a sure fire way to deter them, change their pattern. It's in the book and I will write it again in the next one.
 
Rebecca :
Can city folks with a handkerchief size bit of land use your method?
 
Pat :
My new book is Lasagna Gardening for Small Spaces and touches on containers and city dwellers' really small spaces. It works so very well I could go on and on and I will in the new book.
 
Rebecca :
Why garden when you can buy just about anything your taste buds desire at your local super- or farmers' market?
 
Pat :
Lasagna Gardening isn't just about vegetables and eating but about all your senses. The love of growing would be enough but the beauty of home grown flowers brings me to tears of joy. The art of surrounding your home with a setting you have designed and installed yourself is wonderfully satisfying. Home is the biggest thing you will ever buy, home is where you keep your family warm and safe and home is where you come to at day's end. It seems only right to indulge yourself with the setting for this most important jewel.
 
Rebecca :
For some reason mulching seems to give me fits - we have raised, covered beds because of the rainfall - over 200 inches most years. Doesn't mulching encourage sluggery?
 
Pat :
Stop thinking of it as mulch but rather as food for the earth. Food that feeds the roots of plants that grow and bloom and feed you, body and soul. If it makes you feel better and works better in all that rain, dig it in but don't tell anyone I said to dig. I'm talking thin layers not mountains of bark. More on that at another time.

I love this conversation and really enjoyed your experience as a teen on the dairy farm. My daughter was married last Saturday in her back yard. She wanted a new garden near the pond and since I just returned from Disney I had only one morning to buy and plant it. The mother-of-the-bride wore cow manure under her fingernails.

Cheers
 
Rebecca :
My dear Pat, you are a delight to converse with - I feel as if we're walking about your garden, there's a pot of tea steeping on a picnic table & we're chatting up a storm! I did, I did it! I went out & mulched my beets & they have perked up & look SO much better.
 
Pat :
My head is reeling from the numbers, books sold, promo packages sent, letters of satisfied customers (readers/gardeners).

Lasagna Gardening for Small Spaces release date has been moved back a year to February, 2002 to give me time to write the book I want, not just one that will sell. I love selling but I want to follow up Lasagna Gardening with another smash hit that's even bigger!

I hate slugs! I mean I really hate slugs. My treatments are sadistic and they work. A combination of cheap beer in giant shallow pans, roofing shingles along the side of the garden to trap them in the A.M where I lie in wait armed with salt and ammonia. Rings of wood ashes, collars of sandpaper and chickens and geese in the garden (they feast on them).
 
Rebecca :
You need to get one of your artists to draw this scene: “I hate slugs! I mean I really hate slugs..” especially: “...in the A.M where I lie in wait armed with salt and ammonia.” It is hilarious!

Yes, I've been out harvesting them, I suppose in time I'll not feel quite so much yuck about them. I've begun dropping them down our outhouse - maybe I can put'em to use?

Wood ash? Wow, I've got lots of that - it's still so chilly I light a stove when I get up! Hm - off I go again - you do wonders for me.

My egg lady Wanda has offered the loan of her ducks except we're too close to a logging road & a creek & she says they'll wander - now SHE hardly has any slugs!

Sometimes I stare out at the undergrowth of the rainforest that borders our land & wonder about the gazillion gastropods out there - what do they eat? The salmonberries are unassaulted, the huge leaf skunk cabbages bear no sign of sluggery, oxalis & false lily of the valley grow unhindered & all the ferns arc in unslimed symmetry. Of course, they eat the decaying leaves & such, then they get a whiff of our fresh human fodder & the stampede of slithering slimers is on. Jeez!

Thanks for being there
 
Pat :
We are a long way from a decline in promoting Lasagna Gardening. The public has taken to it like a duck to water. It has the power to change the way people garden. At the same time those same people will be changing the amount of organic material that goes to the landfill. This alone is no small feat.

The main message is that you can have the best garden with the least amount of work in least amount of time. The good stuff will take care of itself without me preaching the message. Thanks for all these wonderful messages.
 
Rebecca :
Check out my poem on “Dull Sluggery” in my Thoughts. You are listed on Authors Sightings. It has been a great pleasure meeting you, my dear, you have inspired me!

Published June 25, 2000