(birds tweeting)
- I want to encourage you
to grow more of your own food.
It's such a healthy thing to do.
The health of being outside
and the health of the wonderful harvest.
And there are much easier ways
to do it I feel than is often described.
Like no dig, it's such a simple method.
And the wonderful result of no dig
is as you can see, very few weeds.
I spend really little time weeding here.
That means I can concentrate on growing.
Because soil is not being disturbed,
the weeds don't grow in the same way.
There are so many advantages to growing your own food.
You're outside doing it, that's a good start
and then the healthy harvests.
They taste so different to anything you can buy
and they have healthy microbes on them.
A much ignored part of nutrition actually
is the wonderful microbes on food
that bring health and improve our immunity.
So relevant now in this situation with the virus.
You do need to inform yourself.
Like make sure you sow seeds at the best time, for example.
And often, that can be surprisingly early.
I mean, just look at this garden here now.
This is 25th of March.
Frosty morning and 2/3 of my beds are planted up
because a lot of vegetables resist frost.
Onion, carrots, beetroot, spinach, lettuce, peas.
So all of those can be started early
but not tomatoes, courgettes, even potatoes
are frost tender.
So you need to inform yourself
about those kinds of differences.
Don't just go and sow everything at one go in spring.
Do check when is good to plant each vegetable.
You do need a basic amount of information
and for free information,
just use my website, for example.
There's a sowing timeline there.
It just lists out month by month.
This is for best results from your precious resources.
It does cost money to set up a place
to grow food but once you've done that,
you wanna make the most of it.
So inform yourself about best sowing times.
Mulch, feed the soil compost mulch.
You don't need to worry about feeding plants.
We're not talking here about feeds or fertilizer
so you can save money there.
You'll have less weeding to do.
You will have plants that are hardy,
like here we've got shard, rocket, beetroot, spinach,
fennel, lettuce already in the ground.
These will start cropping in May, going into June,
depending where you are obviously.
Just respect your plants
and what they need and spacing is another thing to look at.
You can space plants actually quite a bit closer
than is often recommended
when you get the fertility good.
So that's where no dig helps
and that's where that one, big initial investment
of compose is so worthwhile.
I know it puts people off, I quite understand that.
But it's a one-off about getting high fertility
in the first place and then ongoing.
It's an investment that lasts for several years
because compost, well, it slowly gets eaten by organisms
but fertility remains for a long time
and you just top it up a little bit each year,
three centimeters on the surface.
And that means you can just keep replanting.
Very quick preparation.
Keep your garden full all the time.
Thanks you for listening
and I really wish you happy growing and good health.
Go for it.
(birds tweeting)