No dig with Charles Dowding, showing his fourth summer at Homeacres

Hello, I'm Charles Dowding in my garden at Homeacres in Somerset, Southwest England. And I want to show you around a bit. I'll show you how this garden was made. It's an intensive market garden, cropping a quarter of an acre of vegetables for sale locally and using the noted methods. So I'm not disturbing or tilling the soil in any way at all. And it's also a great method for growing flowers and fruit trees, anything you like. The vegetables grow simply and abundantly. We have very little weeding to do, not so much watering as when the soil is disturbed. So let's go and have a look around. Compost is a gardener's best friend. And I make as much as I can here because it's hard to have enough. I'm putting on a mulch every year and that is my main input of fertility. And I use compost because in this climate, other mulches tend to encourage slugs, whereas well-rotted materials, whatever they were in the first place, don't harbor slugs and I can sow and plant into them straight away. So here is my current compost heap and it's taking all the garden waste and getting pretty warm. It's actually only, we started it three days ago and already the temperature's up to 62 centigrade, much too hot to put your hand in. So that's transforming the waste, which are anything from the green leaves, weeds, crop residues, grass mowns, stemmy stuff, woody stuff is good, up to half brown matter, including paper, cardboard, straw. I get from my neighbor, for example. Anything you can get hands on is a bit brown to mix with the greens. And then in terms of how much size you need, you don't need a huge heap for a small garden. This is quite a big garden, three quarter acres, so quite a lot of inputs coming in. This area here, which is about five foot square, will take all the waste from this garden for a whole month in the summer. So a lot of stuff is going in here and turning into, sadly, not a huge amount of compost. But this will make maybe a ton of compost. Behind me there's a heap that we just finished. That was the previous month's input from the whole garden, plus some straw I brought in. And that will make about a ton. And then we're gonna turn that into the empty bay on its right beyond us. So you need, on average, about three bays if you wanna get serious about composting. They could be smaller than this, but it's useful to have three separate areas for making compost. For the amount of vegetables I grow here, I can't make enough compost. So I am buying in some as well. Question is, what does one buy in? Here, for example, is compost that was used for growing mushrooms. So it's already composted when I buy it, and it's been sitting here a year, actually. So now it's really well-rotted. And that's beautiful for spreading, weed-free. And then here are two different potential composts. Well, one is potential, one is sort of finished. This one is green waste compost. So that's compost made from gardens that people take to the dump, and it's shredded and turned into something black and crumbly. Actually, it wasn't really finished when I took delivery, so I've covered it with polythene, and it's still warm. And I'll be using this in the winter. And then under the other cover is some wood chips, which I was given by a local tree surgeon. And these need a lot of breaking down before you could use them, say, for growing vegetables anyway. Although, like that, you could put them in pathways, for example, but it's another potential option for importing some fertility to grow great vegetables. The no-dig approach works really well on all different soils. This is the fourth market garden I've made, and the first three were very different. My first one in the 1980s was on stony brash, up to seven acres by the time I finished there. Then I was in France on really white, sticky clay, potentially difficult soil for growing, and it worked really well. Lovely no-dig vegetables for the local market there. Then I was at Lower Farm, not far from here, growing on an acre of yellow clay. And again, no-dig gave me bountiful crops, very little weeding. And here I'm on Homeacres, quarter acre, silty loam, really fertile soil, and it's got a nice compost mulch on top, which is what I'm sowing and planting into. And this is where no-dig seems to really come into its own because, for example, the parsnips there were ever so easy to get going. A lot of gardeners struggle, it seems, to get their parsnips to come up in the spring. I find they work every year, so I simply sow the seeds into the compost mulch on the surface, and that's it. And there's very little weeding subsequently because this compost mulch, once you've done an initial hoeing of the weed seeds that were in it, there's not many weeds subsequently grow through the year. So to grow these onions, it's been very simple. Some grown from sets, some from seeds, and we've had to do very little weeding once they're established. And now it's just harvest time, you can see lovely bulbs. No-dig with a compost mulch makes growing really easy. So a wide range of crops I'm growing here, all in the same soil with the same amount of mulch on the surface, because I'm feeding the soil, then thinking, right, what shall I grow here? For example, we have peas. These actually have not even picked because they're for seeds, so I'm just letting them all develop, and then we're gonna harvest these little pods, and they've got dry seed in that for next year's pea shoots. And I'm growing flowers at the ends of some of the beds, and that helps to pull in some predators for pests. It just mixes up the pest and predator balance, keeps everything healthy, and it looks nice. And then there's second cropping. So second cropping in no-dig is incredibly simple because all you need to do is clear the debris of the first crop. In this case, it was broad beans. Further up, it was peas they'd just finished. So we've taken that off the compost heap, and in this case, planted some chicory for autumn salad. And in this bed, the beetroot growing here, I planted between garlic. So this already has had a harvest of garlic in this area, and then multi-stone modules of beetroot planted between the garlic as it's maturing. And so you get an overlap of crop, you get more in the growing season. Here we have celery, just finishing from a spring planting. And behind me, some chard, which we're cropping every week. Celeriac, this is an autumn harvest, so this is one of the vegetables that takes a whole season to mature. And that actually needs some water at the moment, so we're watering that twice a week. It's very dry. One of the harder vegetables to grow, but once you've got your soil really fertile, it becomes easier. And then some nice plants here. Tree spinach, very pretty little shoots for putting in salad bags, and perennial kale behind that. So that's a three-year-old plant of kale, Taunton Dean, which gives kale leaves every week for much of the year. Because I'm cropping my vegetables very intensively and using only one third of the area here at Homeacres, there is plenty of room for growing lots of lovely flowers, which I really enjoy. And no-dig makes it quite simple, in fact, because there's so little weeding to do. Once I'd cleared the ground, this was really messy weeds when I arrived, full of bindweed, brambles, ivy, and thorough mulching in the first year to starve them of light. And it's now very clear of weeds, a little bit of bindweed that I remove with a trowel, and I can grow this wonderful range of annual and perennial flowers, both here in front of the house and in different borders around Homeacres. It really makes the garden look pretty for a large part of the year. This is the east side of my market garden. At the moment, it happens to have mostly salads growing for the summer salad bags of mixed leaves, which we pick for twice a week, and quite a few vegetables for boxes sold once a week, all mixed up quite a bit to get a better balance of pest and predator, and with a few flowers for the same reason, to attract some predators for the general health and well-being of all these crops. These two beds are a trial, a comparison of how the same vegetables grow in an undug bed. So same sowing, same plantings. This bed, I have dug it every year in the winter, incorporate compost, and this bed, I simply put the same amount of compost on top, and then at any stage of the year, you can have a good look and compare the growth, and all the harvests also are weighed so that there's a record of the productivity of each bed, and at the moment, it's middle of July, and this bed has given 42 kilos, the dug bed, and the undug bed has given 41 and a half, so very similar cropping, and this pattern of cropping actually repeats, this is the 10th year now, and it's more or less the same all the time, so then you wonder, all the extra work of digging, why? At the moment, we've got a lot of second crops, which is why the vegetables are quite small. Carrots, for example, following lettuce. Endi following shallots and onions. Kale and cabbage following beetroot. Cucumber following potatoes, and parsnips that have been there all spring. In the heart of Homeacres garden is this beautiful cedar greenhouse, where I'm cropping summer tomatoes, cucumbers, melons, aubergines, and basil, and then salads in the winter, and also, this greenhouse is brilliant for propagation. It holds a little bit more warmth than the polytunnel, and so I've got plants being raised all year round here, and in the spring, I make a little hotbed of fresh horse manure, which is fantastic for providing warmth to get the first sowings underway, starting in the middle of February. At Homeacres, I have just one polytunnel, very intensively cropped, and very simply, too, in terms of soil preparation, three inches of compost once a year in May, and that supports growth all through the whole calendar year at the moment, high summer, so it's tomatoes, cucumbers, and basil for salad, all growing just fed by that compost mulch, no other feeds given, and supported on strings, the summer crops here, so I'm using the full height of the polytunnel, making maximum use of every bit of light, and then in September, October, these plants finish cropping, and we pull them out. Very simple preparation, again, for hardly anything, actually, popping in plants for winter salads picked from November through to April. This is the west side of Homeacres, a 3,000-square-foot strip, where, as well as vegetables, I'm growing some perennials, so there's perennial vegetables, artichokes, kale up there, and soft fruit as well, and a double-strip bed of asparagus, which I planted the crowns on undisturbed pasture, very weedy ground, compost mulch on top, and that's less than four years old now, really abundant, and we were picking spears already this spring, and here I have another little trial where strips two meters wide each, this one has a mulch of well-rotted cow manure, and the middle one has a mulch of green waste or mushroom compost, so it's comparing the effect on growth of different composts, and then a third strip has the same compost as the second one, but each bed within it has been dug before planting, so that's a comparing simply dig, no dig, and it's the fourth year now of this trial, and so far, the middle strip is slightly ahead in terms of yield, I'm weighing all the harvests, so the no dig with green waste mushroom compost is doing really well. I'm growing a range of fruit trees at Homeacres, and this is a line of 14 different varieties of apple tree, which when I planted them only three and a half years ago, they were like little sticks, and I made a small hole in the ground, bare root transplant, and now they're turning into beautiful little trees which I'm pruning in the summer as well as winter, and key to their establishment has been keeping the ground really well weeded all the time, so thorough mulching of initial weeds, and then an inch of compost or so every winter to keep the ground fertile and help to keep it weed-free and healthy growth on the apple. When planting fruit trees, the thing to pay close attention to is rootstock because that will affect how big the tree eventually grows, and the apple trees we just saw are grown on a medium-sized rootstock, M26, MM106, whereas these plums are grown on a dwarfing rootstock called Pixie. My idea is that I don't want them to take up too much room here. It's only quite a small shed, keeps everything nice and small and tidy, easy to pick the fruit, which are developing very nicely, and on each side of my shed, I've planted three dwarfing plums of different varieties, Victoria, Opal, and Marjorie Seedling on the other side. For more information on organic no-dig gardening, check out any of my seven books on different aspects of this subject, growing vegetables above all, and my website has fortnightly updates to keep you up to speed on sowing, planting, harvesting, and also you'll find information on my website about courses I run, day courses here, weekend courses, courses around and abroad even, and lots more all about no-dig organics.