Grow Tomatoes & Cucumbers Without Feed or Fertiliser – Let Soil Life Do the Work.

Save your money. I want to help you grow tomatoes, cucumbers, a lot of summer fruiting plants without buying feeds and fertilizers. When you are no-dig, that really encourages the soil microbes, the biology in the soil, and enables all the networks that are in there, the mycelia, the bacteria, to help plants find the foods they need. With just a surface application of well-rotted manure, compost, whatever it might be. I mean, look at this beauty. And we've had quite a few off this plant. It's a variety called Sonnenherz, or yellow oxheart. And there's more to come as well. We're in mid-September here, so outdoors, they may not go on for too long now. But it's just been so worthwhile and so easy without having to think, you know, what do I need to feed and fertilize? Do I need to do it? You just don't. I don't think. Once you've got your soil really healthy, these varieties, the cherry ones that I was given seed of in Ireland last year, and I can't remember the name, unfortunately. I'll find that out. But you can see how they're quite abundant. And these purple ones in particular actually have been really good. So I'll just keep seed of that without knowing what it's called. And actually, also, under the tomatoes here, you can see beautiful basil. That's Tulsi basil, or holy basil. And we've been picking a lot of beautiful leaves from that. And also, I've under-planted with spinach. So, you know, being no-dig, no-feed, it enables you to do more things. You get fewer weeds, and you can enjoy the growing without having to worry about inputs. And increasingly, I've come to, I've always felt uneasy about fertilizer. You know, I feel it's been given a bit of a free ride in all the, when people talk about organic and worry about pesticides. But I think fertilizer's insidious. It's just as bad, because it's like giving plants processed foods. I mean, look at these cucumbers here. So they've been fruiting and cropping there for three months, again, without any extra inputs. It's just compost on top. In fact, if we look at the soil here, you can see, I mean, that's the kind of residue of what we put on back in the spring. You can see quite, that's the root of a cucumber that's growing quite close to the surface, depending how much you water. But there's so much growth potential in there that we can't see. We can't see the networks of mycelia, the mycorrhizal fungi that are finding, teaming up with the plant roots and finding them what they need, not in simple chemical element form, but in complex organic molecules. That is how I understand growth happens, through photosynthesis, pulling carbon out of the air, CO2 turned into carbon compounds. That goes down through the stem, in this case, a very long stems, because we just keep dropping the cucumbers, and into the soil where the roots talk to the networks of life in there, which are partly, they're being fed by the compost. So there's a whole wonderful complex biology happening there, and it's not so much about chemistry and nutrients. It's about enabling nature's way of working. And yeah, look at the tomatoes. And again, no feed or fertilizer. What I actually do in here, because it's such intensive cropping, we use a bit of dried seaweed. I get it from Ireland. It's really nice dried seaweed powder that you can buy. And a bit of rock dust, just a bit of that in the spring. When I say a bit, you know, the dusting. And then on top of that, we put the compost, which in this case was well-rotted horse manure, one-year-old, and some eight-month-old homemade compost on top of that. And about that much, you know, we're not here with a slide rule to measure it, but it's around an inch. It looks a bit more when you put it on, and it's a bit less now. You know, it's really gone fine because it's decomposing all the time, which is great. And that's all adding to and enhancing the biology. I mean, look at these leaves. Look at the leaves of all these tomatoes. They're really dark green, you know, and healthy. They've just got, they're just shouting at me, saying, God, we are so healthy. And that, you know, avoids me worrying about, do I need to be giving them anything? If you give feed and fertilizer, you, well, in theory, anyway, you need to know what they need. How do you know what plants actually need? Really hard to tell. And then probably, I think a lot of the time, they've been given more than they need. And then that's leaching out because it's water-soluble into groundwater. So it's not only wasted money and time, but it's polluting as well. Whereas this method, the nutrients in compost, they are not water-soluble. That's the beauty of it. So, you know, you could overwater, and you're not gonna be leaching stuff away because they're just taking what they need when they need it through the dialogue that the plant roots have with the microbes in the soil. And it's a bit like our own microbes. We have a gut microbiome, just as there's a soil biome. And recent studies are showing, you know, how they're really similar. And I think it's like, if we eat junk or processed food, that's a bit like fertilizer to plants. That's how I'm coming to see it. And if we give the soil compost, which is feeding the soil life, not feeding the plants directly, the soil can work it out. All the microbes, the life in the soil can work out what the plants need through the connections they develop. And with No-Dig, you're not breaking any of those connections. They're all still there. So they're in this soil. You know, that famous saying, a teaspoon of soil has more organisms in it, or more life, bacteria, fungi, and so on, than there are people on this planet. So there's just tons of it going on there. It's looking a bit dry now, because at this time, which is, it's actually 10th September today that we're filming this, and I've stopped watering now, because that switches off the way the plants grow, and they go more into thinking of ripening and growing what's there, but not making new fruit. So that's sort of another trick for growing tomatoes and having them all ripen nicely. This is a variety, again, called Sonnenherz, the yellow oxheart, and it's almost going pink. I left these on. Normally, I pick them before they're quite this ripe, and I did pick a whole bucket full of tomatoes from here this morning, but I just left a few on these plants just for this video, just to show you this beautiful abundance that you can have so simply, so naturally.