What? No digging!

No-dig gardening for minimal weeding

Jacob applying compost to our no-dig beds

No-dig gardening has been made famous largely by the no-dig YouTube guru Charles Dowding. Not only is it a wonderful technique for the home garden or allotment, but it also works remarkably well at our market-garden scale of around an acre. There is, of course, a fair bit of work at the beginning — shovelling and barrowing compost (and most importantly it must be weed-free). But this early effort more than pays its way through the season. A generous layer of weed-free compost, at least 10 cm deep, is enough to keep many annual weeds at bay. Seeds such as chickweed may still germinate in the soil beneath, but without light they simply cannot get going and are smothered out beneath the blanket of compost.

Across spring and early summer we apply a rather formidable 432 barrows of compost and/or manure to the 12 × 34 m beds where we grow the cabbage family. Thankfully this Herculean-sounding task is spread across three sessions of 144 barrows each, matching the different sowings through the season. It certainly sounds like a lot of labour — and it is! But the investment soon reveals its worth. The beds stay remarkably clean of weeds, meaning far less time spent weeding among the cabbages, kales and kohlrabis. Even better, the benefits carry forward as we move through the crop rotation in the years that follow.

So if you are thinking of growing your own vegetables this summer, why not give no-dig a try? We think it is a bit of a no-brainer for the garden or allotment. A perfect place to start learning about the method is with the aforementioned Charles Dowding, whose books and abundance of YouTube videos offer a wealth of guidance. Click below for a lovely introduction.

Cabbage seedlings wait to be planted in our no-dig beds