DeKALB – A lasagna garden probably isn’t what you think.

Author, lecturer and gardening innovator Patricia Lanza came up with the term about two decades ago. It describes a garden in which flowers and vegetables are planted in carefully constructed layers of organic material rather than in topsoil.

“I continued to alternate layers of waste material and peat moss,” Lanza wrote in an article for the magazine Mother Earth News. “Midway through, it struck me that the peat moss was akin to the cheese layer in a real lasagna.”