(gentle guitar music)
- No dig explained.
There's a bit of confusion
about exactly what does it mean, no dig.
And people ask for example, what can I do?
What don't I do?
What does it mean?
I came about it a long time ago, 35 years ago.
It's worked for me ever since,
and I've varied the methods a bit,
but the essential thing is
to disturb the soil as little as possible.
In that way you preserve all the soil life.
The organisms which are in the soil are not knocked around,
bruised, battered, killed even, by cultivations.
Instead they're just left to get on with their work
and build a solid structure, aerate, and drain.
And then a very important thing you can do as well
to help them is to feed them.
So that's where mulch has come in,
putting organic matter on the surface.
What kind of organic matter depends a bit on your climate.
Here in Britain it's pretty damp mostly.
We have a lot of slugs.
So I find that compost works the best as a mulch
because it does not give habitat to slugs.
So the compost on the surface, like has been happening here,
once a year only, feeds the soil organisms.
They then are nourished and the soil gets more fertile,
better drain, good structure,
and they help to hold the food as well.
So you don't need to put another layer of compost on.
Most of what you can see here is second crop.
So it's been planted in the summer after a preceding crop.
And in the summer, we don't put anything else on the ground.
I find it works here anyway to put two inches,
five centimeters of compost on once a year.
And to keep an eye on how that all works
and to compare no dig with what happens when you dig,
I'm running a little experiment over here,
which I'm going to show you next.
Here there's a little trial where I've got
two beds side by side,
and one bed is dug every year.
So five times now, this is the fifth summer of this trial,
I've dug this one.
And I put five centimeters of compost in the trench
each time as I go single digging.
This bed simply has the same amount of compost put on top.
So that's no dig, where I'm feeding the soil organisms.
There is the more interventionist approach,
which until recently has been traditional
that we have to get the aeration in there
and that soil can't do it on it's own.
So I'm then growing exactly the same vegetables in each bed
and compare how they grow, weigh all the harvest.
And this is actually the 11th year of doing this trial,
six years in my previous garden and the fifth year here.
And if I add up the previous 10 years to this year,
there's more than a 5% difference in the harvest.
5% more here, no dig, for quite a bit less work.
So for example, here, three hours digging,
plus one hour extra weeding.
Little weeds growing here, there, and everywhere on this bed
that we've needed to hoe three times this year.
That one, not at all, but just occasional hand weeding.
So that's a big advantage of no dig,
less time needed for weeding.
That's a really big one.
And it means you can have more fun with your cropping.
So again, second crops here,
mostly kale after beetroot,
then there's mustards after carrots,
which were then followed by cucumber.
So we've already had lots of harvest here.
Very interesting one here.
This is kai-broc, which is a Chinese broccoli kai-lan
crossed with traditional broccoli.
It makes a very fast growth.
These were planted on the 29th of August
from the same sowing in early August.
So they haven't been in the ground for that long.
And there's just extraordinary difference
between the no dig kai-broc and the dig bed kai-broc.
These may catch up a bit,
but there's something going on there.
And it makes me think that maybe the structure,
which is temporarily aerated by digging,
it doesn't hold it for very long.
We're now nine months since this bed was dug.
And I think the structure slumped,
it was damaged in digging.&
Temporarily aerated and now that's gone.
And that's why the growth, just struggling a bit
at this time of year compared to the no dig.
And in fact, we could have a quick look at a harvest.
So for example, here we've got carrots.
These were sown on the 7th of June, between lettuce,
and here's one from the dug bed, two maybe, if not three.
I think you can see already, they're very variable.
So I do need to pull one, or two, or three.
These are a bit thicker, but what's interesting,
and I see this quite a bit.
So this is the dug carrots
and you see that you have forked a bit.
If people had never done no dig, they think,
well how did the roots go down?
And, well the no dig carrots actually they've gone down
slightly better than the dig ones
and they haven't forked so much.
And that's quite interesting too.
'Cause it's often said that,
it's given us a rule, that you shouldn't spread compost,
or manure, or whatever, before sowing carrots
'cause it makes them fork.
And I think that's because it's a assumed
that it's going to be dug in like it was here,
and there's the result.
Whereas when it's on top,
the seeds germinate in the compost
and there's kind of no confusion in their minds.
They just go down, it's all even, it hasn't been broken up,
no disturbance to structure.
So nice harvest.
This, I think, really helped to explain what no dig is,
and how it works, and how much easier it makes gardening
because almost everything you can see in this pan
are second plantings, put in in the summer
without adding any extra fertility, no extra compost,
and very quick to get going.
So for example, where these cabbage are here,
this was broad beans.
We twist out the broad bean stems when they finish.
In this case, it was mid-June, from a November sowing.
So there wasn't much weeding to do here.
And then we simply planted these cabbage,
which I'd sowed on 8th of May.
And I brought them on in little pots.
So they were quite big plants at the time,
planted them on the longest over year, 21st of June.
And they've been growing here ever since.
And so this is a second crop,
which has not had any addition of fertility since November.
A bit of confusion about the supposed nitrogen
left by the broad beans,
actually that it's a bit of a myth that one.
Most of it they use in growing.
If you take a crop to maturity,
legumes don't leave a huge amount of nitrogen in the soil.
So most of the explanation
for this fantastic growth of cabbage
is the stored fertility,
which, because the soil hasn't been messed around,
knocked around, the organisms in there are all busy,
active, working and able to interact with plant roots.
And particularly microrisal fungi
is the huge success story of no dig
because you've got that network of fungal threads
in the soil under our feet.
I'm walking on them now.
They're probably telling their mates way over there
that, yeah, he's here.
It's some people call it the internet of the soil.
So these threads go yards, meters, kilometers, miles,
over the whole Earth.
They're reckoned to be one of the biggest organisms
on planet Earth, all this network of threads in the soil.
And because they're all connected,
they then team up with plant roots.
They're very busily active and available to roots.
They get energy from plant's photosynthesis
because these fungal threads
haven't got any other source of food.
And then in return they help the plant roots.
They form like a root extension,
so that's mutual symbiosis,
and they fetch nutrients and moisture.
Like it was very dry when these cabbage went in the ground,
we watered them in.
I watered them twice more after that,
in very dry, hot weather, they survived really well.
And the threads can access tiny crevices in soil,
which plant roots cannot.
So there's a way that undisturbed soil,
you can get more out of it
in terms of moisture, as well as food.
And as well as the cabbages here,
this bed was all a very heavy crop
of spring and summer lettuce.
So everything here is following lettuce.
Those calabrese, savoy cabbage,
there's beautiful romanesco broccoli,
and right up at the end, some gorgeous kohlrabi.
So those are all nice examples
of vegetables that you can plant in the summer,
that take just half a year to grow,
and have another harvest.
And the compost which has fed this growth,
that we put on last December mostly, is made over here.
Compost heaps are organic matter
in different stages of decomposition.
So here we have the current compost heap.
That's taken four weeks to fill up at that stage,
everything from the garden.
Plus I go and get, actually,
quite a bit of waste from elsewhere
because to have enough organic matter
to grow great vegetables,
for example, I'm just fishing down here actually,
to see if I can find quite a lot of coffee in here.
Oh yeah, there is.
So that's coffee grounds
that I was given by a local cafe man, as an example.
And all of this is decomposing very fast.
The coffee was a bit too hot to hold really.
Because the thermometer there is reading 70 centigrade.
That's as hot as you want to go really.
You can see it's got a foot long probe on.
And what's going on here is decomposing the organic matter
so that the work of the decomposition has happened
before putting it on the garden.
And then the final product is decomposed enough
that it's not in soggy lumps,
which slugs can live underneath.
And slugs, in this climate, is number one pest
If you're in a dry climate where slugs are not a problem,
then maybe you don't need to do this.
You could put all this matter just straight on the garden,
as a sheet mulch, rather than needing to make compost.
So this is not a given,
but I'm explaining that's what we do here.
And it's a nice kind of way of dealing with waste
and keeping it in a tidy area.
And this one we filled in six weeks
and finished a month ago.
So this is waste mostly from August.
And already this one actually is quite decomposed.
It's sort of half finished compost, or quarter even.
And the thermometer there is reading just over 50 centigrade
which is about 120 Fahrenheit.
And then going further on, we turn these heaps just once.
I find that makes a significant difference
after which it's a bit, law of diminishing returns.
So turning means moving and mixing them up,
break out the lumps, introducing air, oxygen,
to feed the bacteria, which means more decomposition.
And this heap here was turned actually only one month ago.
And at that stage it was two months old compost.
So we're looking here at three months old compost,
and you can see it's three quarters of the way
to being usable.
This heap gives more of an idea of how I like it to be.
And I recommend it, if you've got slugs as a problem.
So here we have compost that is now eight months old.
It started life as garden waste early in the year.
The heap was finished in April, turned here in June.
And it's been sitting here ever since, another three months,
so eight or nine months old.
And I'm just pushing my hand in
and it's beautifully soft and fluffy.
And there it is.
So you can see a lot of that is nicely decomposed,
broken down, quite friable, quite lumpy.
And actually, two more things I'll just pointed out.
One is sweet smelling.
And that's partly helped by the roof.
If you haven't got a roof and this is in a wet climate,
you could have a sheet of polythene
or anything to keep the rain off
'cause otherwise it goes a bit soggy.
And the color, it's not black black, it's very dark brown.
It's a small point, maybe,
but it's a good sign of healthy compost.
And moisture levels,
you can squeeze it and no water comes out.
If you get more than two drops of water from compost,
it's a bit too soggy
and maybe needs a bit of turning and fluffing up.
This is a pile of wood chip
which a tree contractor delivered here 15 months ago.
And it's been sitting here ever since.
So it was, oh, look at that, worms.
This is, it's got wet, it's turning into compost.
So that is a great addition to garden
in terms of adding fertility.
That's high in fungi
'cause it hasn't got so hot as ordinary compost.
And if you put this on fresh,
it's not so brilliant because it's probably
getting in the way as much as anything,
but in a heap like this,
it does start initially to break down.
I would say that's about 50% broken down.
And so you sort of short-circuited
the breakdown process a bit
in terms of adding fertility more quickly.
On it goes and I'll put this around my raspberry, asparagus,
probably more the perennial plants this winter.
With no dig, a very common question is,
well, how do I get my potatoes out, or my parsnips?
And, well, funnily enough,
potatoes actually is really not too difficult.
Potatoes do root very deep,
but the tubers develop quite shallow.
So they're developing in the crumbly soil,
where people who dig they earth up.
We don't dig so they're near the surface
so you can pull them up,
just get your hands around the stalks and pull.
With parsnips that doesn't work.
You pull and they just stay there.
So they go deep.
It's actually one of the beauties of no dig in a way,
that it shows how well it works.
That the parsnips, these were sown in March,
so that's eight months ago, seven months.
Let's see what happens here.
October, it's the first parsnip of 2017.
And you can see how it's a nice long root.
These are growing quite close.
I go for aiming to have lots of medium parsnips
rather than a few giant ones.
So you can see that now as they come out.
Look at the length on that root.
And that's broken off too.
So here's a root that's 18 inches here,
half a meter already.
It's probably going on as much again.
So just to illustrate how, with no dig,
you have got a lovely loose soil.
This soil has not been disturbed in any way for five years.
Well, much longer actually,
'cause when I came here it was pasture,
weeds which I mulched.
It's never been disturbed, probably for 30 years actually.
And it is beautifully crumbly
and clearly the plants are loving it.
So with this parsnip harvesting
there has been some soil disturbance.
I don't like doing that, but it's inevitable,
it seems to be the only way to get the parsnips out.
What I do though, is try and minimize it.
So that's why I'm putting in the spade
pretty much vertically and then
levering, and levering, and levering.
I do it sometimes from the other side as well
until the parsnip comes out.
And today there was a bit more upheaval than normal,
partly 'cause it's the first ones.
I find once you've got a way into the row,
it does get easier.
But the nuts and bolts of it is, with no dig,
just disturb the soil as little as you can.
No dig explained.
To sum up, it saves time, so much time.
Not only the time that you otherwise
would have spent digging or tilling.
The subsequent weed growth is so much less
because soil has not been disturbed.
It doesn't need to grow weeds.
Also the moisture is conserved,
so big saving there of the moisture
and of time otherwise spent watering.
Soil organisms are conserved and they can build a structure.
So it might seem lazy or passive to some people
who were used to always being busy,
intervening in the soil in their garden.
But it's a very positive thing.
You're really helping the life in your soul
to do the work for you.
And I think you'll have noticed through this film,
the wonderful, strong growth here,
that's happening in untilled, un-dug soil.
And I'll leave on that note
with this beautiful panoply of strong vegetables
and you can see that no dig
is a very simple, very clear method.
Actually not difficult to practice.
Thank you.
(gentle guitar music)