How to Build a No-Dig Garden Bed and the Benefits of Composting

I want to show you some simple steps about starting no-dig and explain it in some detail in relation partly to questions that I'm asked frequently. I did make a video about starting out no-dig almost exactly two years ago and you can see more in that video there but what I wasn't doing at that point was actually starting from weeds. So this is starting from weeds literally and smothering them. The key understanding is that you don't need to remove any of the weeds, they just stay there. In this case we're going to use cardboard as a base covering and then with some compost on top and there's some details within that. There's a bit of uneven ground where I'm going to put a bit of soil on to just make it level. That's an option. A lot of things I'm saying are options. It's not like there's any rules here, not precise rules except maybe one which is to cover the weeds if you've got a lot of weeds but if you don't have many weeds you don't need the cardboard. It's not like no-dig and cardboard are synonymous. For example the ground behind me was a year ago a mass of weeds. When I say weeds I'm meaning pasture weeds, a lot of grass, buttercups, dandelions, bindweed, some hogweed, some quite perennial difficult weeds and most of them are gone except for the bindweed. There's some of that still there. We weakened it a lot by weeding it last year but basically that area of ground behind me one year ago was a mass of weeds and now it's very clean. We've been cropping it. You can make no-dig beds and plant them straight away on the day even that you make them. This is actually February, it's the middle of February so I'm not going to be rushing to plant anything today except for one thing actually. I want to put in a few pea plants at the end because I think sometimes it's really good when you're watching like this to have a visual representation of what I'm talking about so I want to put in these pea plants. You'll see how they can go in the compost. Is it totally fine to plant into compost? That's another question I'm asked frequently. For some reason on a lot of the search engines and people put is it okay to plant into compost or so and the answer comes up no. It's like what is that? I don't know but it is and I've got all lots of samples of different kinds of compost that I'm going to use today just to show you what they're all like and the possibilities for what you can do. Just going back a step before we begin it's like deciding where you're going to put your your bed if you like or it could be several beds. Beauty of no-dig is you can scale up very easily. Here we're just going to do one small area for the video but you could multiply this by 50 times by 100 times and end up covering a big area and you'd be using exactly the same process and you don't have to do a big area in one go. You can do bit by bit like piecing a jigsaw together and you could do though a bigger area using a different mulch and here for example is a nice demo of that because this is a market garden as well as it's a market garden based on gardening practice if you like. I haven't got a tractor or anything but we can mulch or cover big areas using black polythene plastic like that which we use again and again. It's not single-use plastic and that has been on the ground for just over a month now and already the weeds are weakening. It's the same principle of light exclusion. That's a key phrase to bear in mind if you exclude light from plants that are growing they will be weakened and their roots will gradually die in situ without you having to remove them. That's one of the beauties of this method so it's little work needed and the other beauty is that the soil is not disturbed. This is the other facet of no-dig. This soil here to grow all this abundance of grass and weeds is in a very healthy state. It's got a fantastic structure, all those roots are in there and once they die the structure is still there and not only the structure but also all the biological life process which if we dig it, disturb it, we're breaking so many things. The wonder of soil, most of it we don't see. I actually was looking at some soil through a microscope yesterday and it just blew me away. The amount of life and activity in there in February, actually it was some of it was soil from the polytunnel so a little bit further on if and any kind of disturbance we're damaging that it's the universe under our feet it's really nice phrase to bear in mind so sometimes you will need to disturb soil, you need to plant a tree whatever that's fine but generally with no-dig just disturb it as little as possible that there's all this wonderful activity going on that then we can work with it it can work with us and we can get lovely results like you see behind me where you just keep sowing and planting and you don't need to do any extra bed prep. In terms of light and shade and where you're going to site your plot here this is pretty much ideal it's open ground there's no well shade. Shade is okay if if you're in a town and you've got a block of buildings nearby you can still grow nice vegetables and what you won't get so much is direct sunlight you might struggle to grow in cooler climates you might struggle to grow warmth-loving crops like say tomatoes and courgettes for example but if you've got a lot of shade leafy crops are still fantastic and here just to give you an example that's a quite a tall ash tree there and ash trees have strong horizontal roots that sucks the ground dry during the summer so if you've got a lot of trees and tall hedges near to your plot that's worse than just having shade because they might be rooting into the soil and I don't really have an answer for that you know unless you want to cut the tree down but what you can do if it's a hedge is cut it short if it's your hedge keeping the head short will help that is the beauty of an allotment site that it's open ground of course then that's more windy and that's a whole other thing here it's pretty breezy but generally we're doing fine so let's set to and start doing some work with the covers and I can explain more as we go. First of all I want to mention soil because if you take over a site or your piece of ground is very uneven I'm not talking about slope here slope's a whole other thing and you can do this making no dig beds on slope by the way it works well if you go up and down because we're not disturbing the soil you don't get erosion problems but with uneven ground it's it's a good plan at the beginning if you can get holders from soil to use it to fill in any hollows or even larger dips and you can see that's what I'm doing here because there's quite a dip in the ground almost like there might have been a ditch at one point now it would be fine to leave that there it's actually you know I could still grow nice vegetables on it but since this is starting up point and I'm making beds that could be here for decades it's a chance at this point to get get the ground nice and level and soil is better at this than compost because soil is much denser like this wheelbarrow full of compost is really heavy and it will hold its density when you put it down so if you filled a hole with soil it won't then sink whereas if you fill a hole with compost within a year or two it'll be less of a hole but still some hole there and a quick word on weed roots because I know that a lot of you worry about them well I do too I want to show you some examples this what was growing in this soil or what is growing in this soil that's bindweed in case you wonder if you ever see a weed root like this and characteristic is these incredible contortions and we have a saying around here we call it the devil's gut devil's gut it's like yeah really doesn't look very attractive I'm going to put this on the compost heap by the way it's fine to compost and here is another one that was growing in the heap of soil and a blanch by plastic that was on top that's dandelion you can see very long much quite quite sturdy root dandelion now if I left that in that that will die because we're going to be putting cardboard on it and then compost whereas this one might not so I'm just paying attention to fish out the bindweed roots but I'm not so worried about dandelion not worried about this one either to give you an idea though what it looks like that's buttercup creeping buttercup ranunculus and you can see very tenacious roots very difficult to weed to get out of soil if you weed but easy to smother with this beautiful method of no dig and now we'll have a look at different compost that I'm going to use a bit of all of them today and I want to show you what they look like just so you're familiar with that and to be assured that you can use any kind of compost for this process this is homemade compost that we made here seven months ago last summer and then it was turned into where it is now we just turn it once and that was in late September and this is what it looks like and you can see it's not perfect compost in terms of the consistency is uneven there's quite a few little bits of wood I find though that this works really well for growing pretty much any plant vegetables flowers and just on top and partly because there's quite a lot of wood in here that's fantastic for soil fungi all the mycelia there's lots of food there for them and they it slowly decomposes while it's sitting on top of the ground and becomes wonderful food for soil life and when we're putting it on top of cardboard as the cardboard decomposes all of this then becomes this is a heap of horse manure which is one year old exactly it was fresh manure a year ago and we fetched it from the neighbor's yard and used it to make a hotbed in the greenhouse for propagating plants and we moved it out in May so for nine months it's been here most of the time covered in a polythene sheet and I'm just scooping some out from in here to give you an idea what it's like more in the middle and you can see there's quite a lot and worms generally indicate that there's still decomposition happening it's fine to use compost manure whatever it might be that has worms busy in it and they will carry on working after you put it on the ground so this is one of the possible compost you can use for no dig in the process that we're doing here putting on top of cardboard on the ground this is cow manure which I purchased last spring so it's been sitting here a long time and look at the difference to horse manure it's quite dry and it breaks up very readily and part of the reason is it's the horse manure was bedded on straw and that's more sticky this is fibrous wood and unfortunately some of the wood fibers were actually kitchen laminates I think kitchen counters bits of plastic in here so that's we're fishing out but it's a nutritious compost there's cow poo and bedding and that's a good compost to use for no dig bed this is three year old wood chip and you can see that it's actually quite like compost but it's also the heaps been here for a year look at all these bindweed roots and so I've been fishing out the bindweed roots before spreading it and there are some quite big lumps of wood still so I wouldn't call this compost and I'd be careful using this as an ingredient for a no dig bed really the best way to use it is on top woody material where you've got large pieces of wood this kind of thing a lot of that can take the nitrogen so best use wood chip of any kind really as a surface material only unless it's really well decomposed this we call green waste compost which was delivered here 10 months ago and it's from people's garden waste it's been shredded and then composted at high temperature that's why it's so black it's not the world's best compost but it's very usable as soil food basically it's carbon rich and nice texture it's improved from sitting here a while and getting some microbes in and again it's had bindweed roots and so I've been fishing them out before putting it on the ground this is compost I buy for propagating so it's really good quality compost just small amounts of this in a proper module cell will grow lovely little seedlings are quite rich and it would be quite expensive to use it as the main compost to make a bed for example so that's why and I'm going to use it just in a very thin layer over the top of the other compost you'll see just to give you an idea of how to get a nice fine surface which is easier for sowing and planting into so this is where we've got to over the last month laying cardboard and compost on top of the grass and weeds and I'm just pushing the polythene back a bit here so that when we put the new cardboard and compost down it's going to butt up nicely to it and not I don't want any compost landing on top of the polythene polythene is something you only ever want on top of the ground not underneath compost or anything because it's only a temporary stage and here you can see some of the soil that we've put on already and that's going to happen next just a quick word on cardboard there's many options according to what you might have bought recently or what you can scratch from your neighbors and one important thing is just to remove all bits of tape any staples you might see so you don't want any plastic on your cardboard you don't want to use shiny cardboard I don't recommend that it doesn't decompose nicely and you get little bits of plastic in the ground so just matte brown cardboard is great if it's got writing on printing that's usually fine that's vegetable based inks so they will decompose and we just break them open like that the only snag with a empty box like this is you've got these little gaps here and sometimes we'll put other bits of cardboard under them if you want total light exclusion there are many ways of doing this the ideal would be if you've got bigger bits of cardboard like you bought a fridge or a bicycle or something or ask a shop they might well give you those plumbers merchants for boilers and that kind of thing that would cover a big area very nicely otherwise when you've got small pieces like this you've just got to overlap them to make sure that there's no light coming through so the weeds can't grow so that's what you'll see me do just putting little bits of card under here too if this was your edge and you want it's always good to have a clean edge edges are always the tricky bit to keep weed free in our case here probably won't be the edge because we're going to be cropping some more of this area but i didn't put any cardboard where the soil is because we've got a big weight of soil on the cardboard that's absolutely fine to have that light excluding effect added to the cardboard so the soil meant and then here i'm just temporarily putting a bit of compost on top or soil just to hold it down because it's windy and then we're going to put compost on top putting on wooden sides is optional that you don't have to do them like you'll see over there there's no wooden sides at all on the beds at this stage just when you're making a bed it can be helpful to have a wooden piece of wood as a sort of border marker and just to hold the compost to the edge and make a clean edge and stop the weeds coming in and then you can keep them for a while and then take them off and then not serving a purpose anymore and you'll see quite often there are slugs and pests hiding in the wood behind so in the end you're better off without them but you can use them like this as a kind container this is the witcher and i was going to spread it and actually i'm not going to it's more wood in here than i'm comfortable with to use as a bed ingredient and so this is a fantastic mulch for pathways and that's what we shall use it for for example if this is going to be the bed and then you could lay cardboard on the weeds and put this down as a mulch for your pathway and it will feed the soil in the pathway which is very important as much as in the beds your plants root into the pathway and we're going to just finish off the bed now with some fine compost from the sack do you need to wet the cardboard that depends where you are and it depends on the time of year so here in a maritime temperate climate united kingdom it rains a lot and i'll be amazed if it doesn't rain enough in the next week that this cardboard will be fully wet if you're in a damp climate where the rainfall is erratic then i would or you're doing this bed making at a dry time of which can happen here sometimes then i would wet the cardboard before putting on the compost like this so you've got options there just according to climate and weather you can see how this compost is super fine and makes a lovely surface and you know we have a nice surface now for sowing and planting we could i could make a little hole in here and pop in a plant but i will do that in a minute and just to make that point what what i wouldn't want to do at this stage is puncture the cardboard because at the moment for the next six eight ten weeks that cardboard is still intact it stays intact and it's a light barrier to stop the weeds growing up through they'll be trying they're still growing underneath it in darkness and then they exhaust their roots because they can't grow anymore because they haven't got any light to photosynthesize so they die just down there so we want to keep that cardboard intact now and then what i'm often asked is how do the plants that we put in the compost root through into the ground and that's what happens and can happen after six eight ten weeks when the cardboard decomposes the plants that we have growing here can root through into the soil below which becomes available to the vegetables or whatever you're going to grow on top so this has been about the no dig method it's not about creating the finished product just all in one hit like this but you can do if you're clear about where you're going where you want the beds where you want your paths and and make a whole garden like this or you can make just one bed it's understanding the process is what i've been looking to help you with light exclusion on weeds compost on top just in this case and with these plantings i've made here this was just a demo actually i would have put i would put another five centimeter maybe two inches on the cardboard if i wanted to plant straight away because here at the moment you can see the cardboard's right there there's only about three four centimeters in much of this area on top of the cardboard and it's not quite enough for doing a planting straight away but if you didn't have many weeds you wouldn't need the cardboard you could put this much compost on top and plant straight away it's just so many options according to what you're starting with to find out more do have a look in my book no dig gardening about i've written quite a few books about this and also we've put up an online course no dig gardening and have fun trying a few different things and try out some of the ideas i've shown you here