Growing great crops is a lot about timing
For example these salads I'm watering here
We're sown as a very precise time close to the autumn equinox
And that is a way that you can have plants of a decent size before winter
but not too big and then they survive all through the winter and give you regular harvests over a long period and
in my diary that I've just written I explain all this to the nth degree really and yet in a very
simple and clear way because once you distill out the unnecessary details and
discover these
Key timings so many other things become quicker and simpler
For example here. I'm harvesting
Multi-zone leeks. So this is a method. It's been around a while. I've refined it and
Spread it over doing quite a few crops
in fact the leeks, for example, I so three four seeds in a module in the spring and that
Requires the same amount of compost or same amount of greenhouse space
the same amount of effort and you
Have more harvest from a smaller area
these leeks have been cropping very heavily for quite a long time now, so
I want to show you and explain in my diary
this very simple approach there are methods and techniques, but it's based on a
way of treating the soil it is
So straightforward really it's it's almost unbelievably can that really be true? It's no dig and
with no dig
You leave the soil
undisturbed to grow great crops for you with very few weeds and
in the climate where I'm growing in
temperate Atlantic weather
Compost is the best mulch for doing this. So the soil is never disturbed in any way at all
But it's fed
It's not about feeding crops. It's about feeding soil and the soil food
I use this compost that I'm spreading here is some homemade compost. That's eight months old
It's some of the better compost
I've made my compost isn't always that brilliant
But I also mentioned in the diary actually some tips for making compost and the great thing about
Good compost is that it holds food. So it's not a fertilizer in the perhaps more commonly used sense of the word
It's a soft food that enables you for example to have second harvest such as this chicory, which was grown after peas
It's also not been watered much because the compost helps the soil to hold moisture and that means you can do second cropping very easily
and
You also have less weeds. So here I'm hoeing for example, and the hoeing is a very surface easy
thing to do just going through the surface compost to tickle the weeds really almost before you see them and
A lot of that is about timing. So again that comes into what I explained in the diary
It's about the timings of simple things like having helps you control the weeds much more
Here's another example of less weeds growing was this radish was sown between letters that were cropping in the middle of September
that's a good time to sow autumn radish and
We have not we did those radish at all
They just came up and because the no dick soil has very few weed seeds left to germinate in the autumn
It's really easy to do a catch crop like these radish have been and they've been cropping heavily
this is a third pick of this radish bed and
It was one of these is crops I've ever grown and look at the quality really nice roots
Thanks to the sobbing in very good condition
Very good structure as well. This is an intriguing thing about no dig is that you can sometimes walk on the beds a
Lot of it is you contrary
I know that what is normally explained but no dig means you haven't broken the structure with a fork or spayed or rotavator
So sometimes it's good to walk on it just to break up the lumps in this case of the surface compost
And then with the dressing of compost or if you're in a dry climate, you could use a less rotted much. I
Like compost because it doesn't encourage slugs
So for example these brothels pool cleaner slugs
Which can otherwise be a pest and they've grown very steadily through the whole season. They were certainly made planted injury and
I'm cropping them now in November
This is actually a first pick here a decent amount and these Brussels sprouts are going camping for a long time to cause me
Compost in is helping us all the undisturbed soil to hold the nutrients
Compost doesn't leach out its nutrients. It's not like fertilizer. So
Look at these carrots another second crop after spinach. This bed had a very heavy crop of spinach in the spring and
We simply sowed some carrots in the middle of June after clearing the spinach and this was the harvest again with very few weeds
so my diary
I'm looking to explain all of this wonderful simple way of growing to you giving you the timings the outline the framework
It's a non complicated approach. I take you through step by step week by week
There's regular guidance and I hope that you enjoy using this book to have great harvests
You