Dig? No-Dig?

[Jackbb]

Post Its. Don't tell me there are Kindle post-its too

Electronic Notes. Why, of course.

[taff]

No dig - but yields do seem to have dropped off in the beds that didn't have a good amount of compost or falling compost in/on them.
I can't make enough for me, and I've got 2 households waste as well as anything that comes out of the garden.
It's been a bit better since i started leaving everything to compost where it fell before the winter.
I'm also mostly not bothering making teas etc, only for thestuff in the greenhouse now, I chop down the comfrey and nettels [in shade!] to lay on top of the beds or amongst what's growing.

[Jackbb]

Thanks Taff - thats interesting!

[Jackbb]

I am going to try the no dig rule from now on. I think you have much healthier soil, just keep adding a good mulch of home-made compost and the worms will do all the hard work. I used to dig but you just bring all the really clogged up clay to the surface and lose all the good topsoil. Charles has made my mind up with his articles in GW and GYO magazines

Green Fingered - forgot to ask do you place a layer of straw on top of the home made compost? Is any old straw ok to use?

[BertieFox]

I have grown like this for at least ten years, but what is crucial is the nature of your soil and above all the huge amount of mulch that you need for a big plot. If you are thinking of covering your soil with one or two inches of mulch, forget it, and think six to eight inches, if you want to smother the weeds.

On a heavy clay soil (which is what we have here) the ground WILL still go rock hard and dry even under the mulch (though our climate is much dryer than in the UK). And yet the mulch you create will provide a wonderful seed bed for weeds once it starts to rot down. So you must CONSTANTLY be prepared to put on more mulch to smother them or hand weed them out.

You can grow almost anything, but with small seed, things like carrots, the only way is to pull back the mulch and use something like potting compost to make a suitable seed bed to sow them. Once they start growing you can carefully pull the mulch back into position.

I have always found the obtaining of sufficient mulch the biggest problem but we have a very large vegetable garden of around an acre. Even getting friends to bring us all their grass cuttings is not enough and the farmers out here seem to use all their straw and manure on their own land.

[kathycam]

Make sure the straw doesn't have seeds in it! Or you'll end up with it all growing up- like we did.

I've only had my allotment a year and a half. And as I've now got 2 plots I've had to do a fair amount of digging. Just to get weeds out and loosen the soil a little. But will add compost on top. The first plot the soil seems really healthy. Nice and dark and full of worms. I've not dug down deep, but just enough to get some perrenial weeds out that I didn't manage the first time round. Also in autum collect up leaves, you can leave them to turn into leaf mold or use them as a layer/mulch.

For extra compost you could try the council and see if there have any schemes. My allotment gets "soil improver" by the truckload from the council. Basially its a low quality compost. But if you let it sit a while and then mix in with other stuff, seems to be okay. We're also using some well rotted woodchip on ours.

[Jackbb]

I have grown like this for at least ten years, but what is crucial is the nature of your soil and above all the huge amount of mulch that you need for a big plot. If you are thinking of covering your soil with one or two inches of mulch, forget it, and think six to eight inches, if you want to smother the weeds.

On a heavy clay soil (which is what we have here) the ground WILL still go rock hard and dry even under the mulch (though our climate is much dryer than in the UK). And yet the mulch you create will provide a wonderful seed bed for weeds once it starts to rot down. So you must CONSTANTLY be prepared to put on more mulch to smother them or hand weed them out.

You can grow almost anything, but with small seed, things like carrots, the only way is to pull back the mulch and use something like potting compost to make a suitable seed bed to sow them. Once they start growing you can carefully pull the mulch back into position.

I have always found the obtaining of sufficient mulch the biggest problem but we have a very large vegetable garden of around an acre. Even getting friends to bring us all their grass cuttings is not enough and the farmers out here seem to use all their straw and manure on their own land.

The sheer scale of potential mulch required scares me! My plot is 25x35 foot obviously not all of it will require a thick covering but it still may be a sizeable undertaking. I am the top corner plot furthest away from access so any large delivery will require wheelbarrowing across the allotment.

[Likac66]

The book is "organic gardening" and I bought it on the kindle through amazon.

[VirginVegGrower]

Try sowing green manures as a weed smotherer/mulch for your no dig raised beds.

[BarleySugar]

In the autumn I covered the empty beds with cardboard, then put home made compost, cleanings from the chicken coop and guinea pigs on the top. The guinea pigs have the pelleted sawdust cat litter as bedding, mixed in with the chicken manure (they have pelleted straw in the bottom of the coop) it seems to make a good mulch. The cardboard has now rotted away, and there are loads of worms in the compost layer. I've now run out of compost for the last two cleared, but hopefully will get together enough over the summer to make more no dig beds next autumn. I used a bulb planter to plant out my broad bean plants so the layers were not disturbed and weeds seeds bought to the surface. The potato patch will obviously be dug by the nature of the crop, but I'm hoping to mulch with cardboard/compost instead of earthing up this year.

[alldigging]

Getting big volumes of materials is a bit tricky - we did get the council mower man to leave us grass a couple of times but catching him was tricky and then it was so wet for most of summer he either didn't collect the grass up or got them to bring the little mowers cos it was so boggy.

[Feral007]

I do no dig. Using cardboard then hay/compost or dirt/hay. Problem this year was we didn't have enough compost so bought in some dirt. Crap stuff, didn't do well for some things, altho others did ok. Sweetcorn did good anyway. But just looking at it now, at the end of summer here, and putting autumn crops, the dirt has improved, with one watering it is now soft, and starting to go crumbly, and I had to move a few earthworms to put in seed. So altho it wasn't a huge success for this season, it is still a good thing for us. I have couch grass (the whole farm is infested with it) but with the raised no dig, it starts to move over the edge of the garden and you just grab a handful, pull it back to the edge and break it off.
We are chopping and dropping all the unused plants. When the chard went wild, some of it went back onto the garden, we are building up areas using chopped up branches, grass clippings, and will be seeing if we can get leaves soon, as the trees are starting to change colour today.
I couldn't possibly have as much garden as I do, if I had to dig and weed all the time. This is our 2nd year of doing it. Tried a small garden the first year. Have several gardens this year, about 5 times the size of last year.
I'm not doing compost in heaps, but on the beds themselves. And using the teas as ferilisers and soil conditioners.

[Feral007]

I do no dig. Using cardboard then hay/compost or dirt/hay. Problem this year was we didn't have enough compost so bought in some dirt. Crap stuff, didn't do well for some things, altho others did ok. Sweetcorn did good anyway. But just looking at it now, at the end of summer here, and putting autumn crops, the dirt has improved, with one watering it is now soft, and starting to go crumbly, and I had to move a few earthworms to put in seed. So altho it wasn't a huge success for this season, it is still a good thing for us. I have couch grass (the whole farm is infested with it) but with the raised no dig, it starts to move over the edge of the garden and you just grab a handful, pull it back to the edge and break it off.
We are chopping and dropping all the unused plants. When the chard went wild, some of it went back onto the garden, we are building up areas using chopped up branches, grass clippings, and will be seeing if we can get leaves soon, as the trees are starting to change colour today.
I couldn't possibly have as much garden as I do, if I had to dig and weed all the time. This is our 2nd year of doing it. Tried a small garden the first year. Have several gardens this year, about 5 times the size of last year.
I'm not doing compost in heaps, but on the beds themselves. And using the teas as ferilisers and soil conditioners.

[Thelma Sanders]

That was so important that you had to post it twice, eh? LOL

[w33blegurl]

I've also read the no dig book and am going to try it on at least a few of my beds at the lottie. I was already unwittingly doing it on the beds at home. They are quite small and I'm quite lazy so just dumped a load of compost on in winter each year and left the worms to it. I don't think it will be practical for me to do this on a full scale at the lottie just due to the amount of organic matter it needs, but will be a fun experiment to try on a smaller scale!