Low-Compost Gardening Could Change Everything

I want you to know that you can have a productive vegetable garden without ever needing to put compost over your beds. I know that is a bold statement, but I kind of want to share with you my process and use these two beds here as proof that you can use other things in place of compost to create healthy, productive, vibrant beds. And as soon as you understand that, I think for so many gardeners, that's only going to make growing food feel so much more attainable and also a lot more cost effective. I didn't put any compost down in autumn, winter, or even spring this year. What I did was whatever was left here last year, I remember I had lots of mashua that was growing and lots of green material. I just piled it. I just piled this green material and I left it over the winter months. And come spring, it had all pretty much broken down. And if there were any big bits left over, I could just pull them out, remove them, or I could just use a rake to rake them off. And what ended up happening was I created beautiful soil and I didn't need to use a single drop of compost. And as you can see from how these plants are looking, they're certainly happy enough without needing any compost. Like even these beans, I haven't added anything to this bed apart from the mulch material. And I look at this bed and it's nice and productive and it's happy. And yes, it might need a little bit of water because it hasn't rained here. It feels like in weeks and there's still no rain on the forecast. So today I've given in and I'm here giving the garden a good water, but none of the plants in these beds look stressed from a lack of water despite how dry it has been. And one of the really important things to know with gardening is one of the best solutions to solving or plastering over a lot of the problems is just adding organic matter to your beds. Now, of course this can be compost, but compost is expensive. It takes time to make. And so one single molecule of organic matter can hold on to about four molecules of water. And that is essential, particularly when we're having all of this much warmer weather, much drier weather over the past few years, being able to hold onto all of that moisture helps keep your plants nice and healthy. Now, this next bed along, which I'm now watering, this again, I didn't add any compost to it. Whoa, I'm going to get Sam, the cameraman, wet by accident. I didn't add any compost to it. In fact, what was added just to this bed, the only source of fertility was a load of chopped up raspberry canes that I put through the wood chipper. And you can see by the health and the abundance, I'm going to be naughty. I'm going to stand on the bed. And I did harvest something earlier, but I can harvest something else here just to prove a point. Look at that. I think maybe I added a little handful of compost to the base of the transplanting hole for this courgette, but everything is so vibrant. But I'll show you another example. Here, we've got this beautiful cavolo nero kale. Look how beautiful that is in the backlighting. And I kind of just really wanted to make a video to show you as like proof, rather than making the videos in spring and saying, oh, I'm using compost differently this year. I was like, well, you know what? I'll just show you that you don't need to worry about making enough ever. That's suddenly the thing that I've realized this year is that actually I have no worries if I don't have enough compost next year, because I know exactly what I'm going to be doing these winter months. Well, that makes a nice difference. I'm just jumping in quickly because this is another thought that formulated was that what I'm doing this winter is I'm not going to be mulching a single bed in this garden. Yes, a couple of beds have been mulched with compost, probably about 30% of the garden. I'm actually going to stretch to 0% of these beds in the garden from being mulched with compost. I'm just going to mulch with material, whatever I can find. Leaves are fantastic. Grass clippings are fantastic. And just use that to build that natural fertility. It's going to break down and turn into compost. That's the thing. And then the compost that I do make, that is what I'm going to use as a precision tool. And come spring, it's broken down. So you don't have to worry about slugs because that mulch layer has disappeared into beautiful chocolate cake-like soil. And then I'm set up for another nice abundant growing season. And that's probably the simplest way to have a productive garden. I don't feed my garden during the summer months. I'm not coming around with different fertilizers or anything like that. I really just keep an eye on everything and make sure everything has a nice water. And that's it. Because there's plenty of soil life. There's plenty of microbes that are working hard under our feet, making sure that the nutrients are staying plant available. And so they're doing the job for me. If we can feed the microbes, the microbes can work on making and breaking down those nutrients to make them plant available. And really our role now as gardeners is just to go around and give things a nice drink, to give things a nice little prune, and to keep things mulched and just make sure that we're putting the plants in when we end up harvesting. Because nature doesn't like to have empty ground. Empty ground is not like bare ground is not a natural thing. So even like these sunflowers here, what I ended up doing is I've got a mulch of wood chip on top and that's going to break down. It's already partly broken down wood chip and that's going to feed the soil. And what I need you to know is this is acting like compost. So it's not like one or the other kind of thing. You can use compost, but you can also just use organic material. Like look at the amount of biomass coming out of this nasturtium. I can chop up all the nasturtium, place it down on some bare ground when I'm planting out my brassicas, and it's going to break down and it's going to act the same as compost, but it's also going to activate the whole soil food web. So it's not just about the microbes and fungi. It's also making sure that you have the ground beetles in. Ground beetles are excellent natural predators of slugs, which is important to know, but also the centipedes, millipedes, earthworms. Earthworms want that organic material to pull down into the soil and that then helps with aeration. It helps with how well the soil can hold on to water and let water permeate. So this is just proof you don't need to feed your garden over the summer months. You just need to make sure that you add that organic material, organic matter. If you want it to be compost, it can, but I'm here to tell you, you don't need to put compost down on your beds to have a healthy thriving garden. And I wish that every gardener knew that.