First Steps For No Dig on a New Area

I'm showing you a new project happening at Homeacres in 2021 starting and sort of triggered a bit by this when we made this new bed for the video with Kevin of Epic Gardening in San Diego, California last November, 21st November last year. And this is the last bit of space really I had at Homeacres, sort of wild ground. I wanted a bit edge to make a new bed, no dig, compost on the weeds, cardboard around. It's been successful. There's nice growth there even though it's been wintertime since we've made it. I've been looking at this field and the opportunity came up to buy it just at Christmas last year, a couple of months ago. So I did and it's all happened really much more quickly than I thought it might have. And so now I have nearly an acre, almost 4,000 square meters to think about what to do with. And also this bit of ground now, which is used to be the periphery of Homeacres and is now a middle. It's suddenly become a middle. It's so funny. And there are things that are like these apple trees. I've never really come to terms with them. They're not actually very nice apples to eat. There's three trees here, which were put in by my predecessors maybe 30 years ago and I'll probably get them out. I'm hoping I can get Jack, my son here, with his digger to do a bit of digging to remove them and also perhaps help remove some of these brambles. Although it's kind of nice to have a wild edge, it's because it's not an edge anymore, it's a middle. I'd like to have more of a perhaps an edible hedge here or something like that. I don't still have it. It's all happened very quickly and I'm not the kind of person who makes grand plans. So this is very much an evolving project and I'm kind of having this discussion with you here, thinking out loud in many ways, because then when you come back to a later video, you might find something different has happened to what I just said. So fair enough. I like to be in a place and feel it and do some things and then see how that feels and then carry on from there rather than having a sort of plan to work to. Just ideas. I've got lots of ideas. That's the main thing. Like here we've got the remains of, that was a hedge, an edge hedge. Now, of course, it's in the middle again, that's amelanchia. It's a very pretty flowering hedging plant, mini tree. This was a heap of big soil here that came about as a result of building the cabin, that really nice cabin space. And under there, there's no concrete foundations. It's just sitting on pillars of wood in the ground. And I thought, well, since it's there, we're not going to use that ground. So I've got a digger to dig out the soil, which went there. We've used a bit in making compost and the rest we're using on here actually, you know, I hadn't thought about that, but that's how it's turned out and it's going good. This was all really wild here. It's massively bramble and bindweed. There was a lot of bindweed and with no dig again, mulching and repeat pulling as well, we've pretty much got rid of most of the bindweed here. That's very satisfying. And there's a lot of bindweed here. So this is the new, well the new acre, but we're not going to crop an acre or anything like it. This is just the start. I actually don't want to crop a huge amount more ground too quickly. There's a lot of aspects to that and you've got to scale up everything. I'm employing a new worker actually, partly to help with all the other work that we're doing, education work and YouTube and so on. So it's going to be a year of change this year. And here the growth is quite strong. You can see the weeds, grass, cow parsley, wild carrot, stinging nettles around the edge, a lot of brambles. And in the middle, I'm doing the same approach of no dig where you cover the ground like you can see here with compost, mainly compost on top. There's a bit of the soil underneath and a bit of cardboard along the edge. If we just see this, some cardboard you can see there, for example. So we put cardboard first, then the compost, then soil, then some compost. And I'm very pleased to see how most of the grass seems to have died. There will be though a lot of bindweed. I know there's bindweed, he saw it last summer a lot and that doesn't appear until about May. So we'll see how we go with that. And here also, this is a big sheet of polythene I got from Jack actually. And we only put it on four days ago. So four days ago, that was all just green grass. And it's what is going through mulch because with his tractor, he cut the grass. It was very tall and that's made a lot of dead grass, like hay on top, which is fine. And the grass will grow through that. But here we put soil on it because at the time I didn't have enough cardboard. We now have enough cardboard actually, but the soil is like cardboard, if you like. It's an initial smothering there and then we'll put cardboard on top and then some compost to finish off. So it's that side of things is all taking shape pretty nicely. And it's actually surprisingly quick once you get going. You know, if you've got a bit of polythene, a bit of cardboard, the polythene won't be here for very long. It's a temporary phase. I don't like using a lot of polythene and probably there's quite a few slugs under there, probably some leather jackets in the soil. So pests is going to be an issue. This is a bit of a wildlife haven here. There's rabbits, deer, badgers. Last autumn we had badgers eat the sweet corn, for example. There's a wood just beyond. It's quite wild. I mean, that's what's so nice about it in many ways. But the rabbits is an issue, like they're currently making holes in this compost heap, for example. And this is a heap I had delivered. There's about six tons there to give you an idea of how much. Three loads of two tons, mostly green waste compost up this end, which is very black. And then there's some mushroom compost there. And I'm doing a weed killer test on them with some beans that I've sown into it just to see the pyrolid weed killer hopefully come out negative. So that area is around 260 square meters covered ground that we're going to crop this year all well. And that is an increase of around 25% on what I'm cropping at the moment. And for me, personally, that's quite a fast enough rate of increase. Other people would do more. I've done more before in my youth. And we're now passing an area where there's going to be a pond, we hope. We have to get planning permission for things here. And so that will go in front of the planning committee with our design. And the area is shown roughly by the sticks there. Everyone around here can have an opinion on it and say something and hopefully it'll pass. So that's a pond with an island. And then in this corner, finally, I'll show you roughly where, it's about here actually, there's going to be quite a big shed. Well, not quite big, it's four and a half meters wide, nine meters long, and that's about 15 feet by 30. So it'll be nice wooden structure, a little bit modeled on my compost bay design. It's a design I've done myself as usual on the back of an envelope. It's very informal. And then turned it to something a bit nicer. And the builder works on that. And so yeah, that will be, I hope, quite different. We've got to get permission again for the shed. And I look forward to showing you around here sometime in the spring. It's late winter now, 28th of February, the very last day of winter. The weather's quite nice, as you can see, but still very variable. Spring is starting to happen. So as spring unfolds, we'll come back here at some point and have a look and see how the progress has gone.