Have you ever wanted to grow your own and start a kitchen garden but don’t know where to start? At Crocus, we’ve teamed up with @Charlesdowding1nodig, a no-dig and vegetable expert, to share his knowledge on how to get started.
For more than 30 years No Dig gardening pioneer Charles Dowding has advocated the benefits of grow-your-own where the focus is on feeding the soil rather than the plants. We are delighted to be partnering with Charles to bring his wealth of information and experience to you. Freshly-picked, home-grown fruit and vegetables will always taste better than those you buy in the shops – and being able to watch them grow and ripen, ready for harvest is also an incredibly rewarding experience.
Hello I’m Charles Ding and I’m delighted to be partnering with crocus in explaining to you the wonderful benefits of no dig an introduction to how it works and how you can grow more food and flowers in a small space even there are so many benefits to the noig approach
And perhaps the biggest one is that you don’t need much ground to grow a decent amount of food so if you just got a small patch of grass it could even be gravel actually but better if it’s grass and you put the compost on top and plant into it it is
As simple as that uh if you’ve got grass and soil below then the plants also rooting into that it gives you more rooting depth but the principle is the same that you’re getting olders compost that hopefully won’t have too many weed seeds in that means you’re going to have
An easy run there’s no dig results in far less weeding see it’s a big time-saving approach I think that’s that’s the biggest positive to take from it is the amount of time you will save per the amount of food that you can grow and with the compost it’s fantastic
Organic matter which drains freely so you don’t need to worry about water logging but it also holds moisture it’s like a sponge and so you need to do less watering and you will be keeping all the carbon in the ground that’s there at the moment so it’s very friendly to the
Environment there’s just all these positives and even in your small bit of ground have a go how to start a noig bed the principle is a simple one it’s about light deprivation of weeds but every situation is different you might not have many weeds you might have almost bare ground
In which case just a bit of cardboard on top of the surface and a bit of compass on top of that and you’ve got a noig bed this is extremely difficult here because it’s a situation with some very vigorous prenal weeds and some of you will have
That so what you can do is like there just put the carboard on top it’s actually easier though if you cut the weeds short cuz then the carboard will sit down more nicely we’ve done that here so the this is one method you put the cardboard on and then you put some
Compost on top question is how much on average I would say 4 in 10 cm will be enough and then leave it a little while you could even plant into that if you put enough compost on this is just homemade compost it doesn’t have to be
Perfect it can be quite rough it could have bits of wood in compost does not mean Perfection just means something more or less half decomposed and there is one more option you have if you can get hold of a bit of black plastic if you got really difficult weeds like bind
Weed here we put compost on top of some very vigorous weeds you can see how they’re growing up through so what we’re doing is there’s no cardwood there but we’re putting plastic on top and that will stay there this plastic will be here all summer and we can actually
Plant things through it you can plant potatoes in a hole in the plastic you can plant squash I’m going to do squash over this area we’ll get a huge Harvest for much less work noig is a really easy method three things I’m often asked about noig is what’s the compost you use
Does it have to be like perfect and well no it doesn’t actually you can use any kind of decomposed half decomposed organic matter so don’t worry about setting the bar too high that can make it cheaper as well another one is like how much area do you need to grow and
Because snow dig is so productive you maybe only need one or two beds quite a small area I’ve got one bed in my garden which is 1.5 by 5 m at 7 and half square meters and every year it getes over 100 kilos of food and the third one is don’t
Relax too much in terms of weeds at the beginning the first year is critical and if you’re making a noig bed with a lot of perennial weeds you need to keep on top of them and just keep removing that bind weed or cooch grass or whatever it
Might be until it just gives up that’s the beauty of no dig you can actually get rid of difficult perennial WS but you just keep on it in that first year if you have not grown vegetables before what would you grow well I can recommend you three things that are really simple
Because I know from experience potatoes above all because you just got hold of what’s called a sea potato which is a potato you put it in the ground it’s got a lot of resources in there it will grow big very easily with no dig especially you just bury it in the surface compost
About 7 cm compost on top of the sea potato and and the tubers are there and you pull them out at Harvest Time and then another lovely one is peas and you can start your own like in modules or you could sell them direct but if you do
Modules you’ve got a little root ball there uh it gives you a two or three week advantage and they growing protected you po them in the ground and you can so many different types of peas you can grow from Mo to to snap peas to potting peas and you can grow peas for
Shoes and one more thing is cett because one cette plant will give you so many harvests you just get a hold of a plant of a cette pop it in the ground after the last frost dat late my early June in the UK and you can look forward to
Little and often all through the summer why no dig well there’s a graphic difference here which can answer the question so I’ve got two beds side by side one I dig that’s this one and the compost is Incorporated in trenches and one is with the same amount of
Compost on top and then we put the same plants in each bed at the same time and just watch the growth and see how it varies and I’ve been doing this now for 12 years this is year 12 and it’s pretty consistent the growth on the noig is
Stronger the plants look healthier they have a bit more glow in their leaves and for Less work so you haven’t got to do the laboring the digging there’s also fewer weeds we water less and it’s a win-win
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