The great You-Dig? No-Dig experiment.

I got my allotment at the start of 2015 and it was just a wild jungle of pernicious weeds. Couch grass, bindweed, horsetails, their roots making thick mats of tough tangle in the soil. Soil that would've been SOOO much work to dig over. 

Despite being a very lazy person, I have somehow managed to end up with a job that requires a lot of time and effort, a 3 year old person to look after (that also requires a lot of time and effort), a million and one hobbies and a 10 rod allotment in my sole care (apart from the 3 year old person sowing the occasional seed).

Imagine my delight when I peeked inside the cover of this book:

Charles Dowding: How to create a new vegetable garden from scratch.

I'd read his articles in 'The Garden' magazine and thought he seemed like a bit of a dude, so ordered his book and followed his advice for creating a new no-dig veg garden.

So what is no-dig gardening? It's just gardening without digging, using a thick dressing of mulch and relying on the gardener's friends, the little wormies, to look after the soil. 

Soil has a delicate balance of helpful microscopic life in it, and undug soil suits these little friends just fine. Digging can trash the structure of the soil and is not necessary for plants to thrive, as I was to find out.

Being a bit of a chicken, I used the bottom third of the allotment as my top secret experimental no-dig test bed (kind of like Q's lab in the james bond films, but with less exploding pens). I just dug over the rest of the allotment as normal.

But the no-dig beds? Well, I spent several weeks asking every shop in the local area for their old cardboard boxes, flattened them and plonked these straight over the weeds. Then, I bunged on a load of straw from our local riding stables, which came loaded with handy bits of horse poo (aka manure). Next, I collected up as many grass cuttings as I could and chucked them on top. I covered the whole lot with landscape fabric and forgot about it for a couple of months.

Meanwhile, I had a brood of little squash, courgette and tomato plants growing in pots at home. Come May, I scooped out some little holes in the mulch, put in some compost and planted the seedlings, crossing my fingers that the un-rotted straw and grass cuttings wouldn't poison them with a nitrogen overdose. See the photos below for what happened...

February: the plot before the no-dig attack.

 mulching with cardboard, straw and grass cuttings

May: The seedlings are planted out 

August: It's a jungle!

October: 1 million tomatoes

 November: The plants have died back, been pulled up and the whole thing has been tickled with a rake. The soil is lovely soft, rich, friable compost-y stuff. My onions and garlic are in under the fleece and I'm left with the warm glow of maximum results for minimum effort! Hooray for no-dig!!!

I ended up getting 8 big Crown Prince squash, tons of tomatoes, loads of courgettes, a little bit of lettuce, 2 vegetable spaghetti squashes and one tiny, wizened turks turban squash (a mole dug under the roots and the plant wasn't happy). I can safely say that my spade will be getting considerably less use next year, as I'll be going no-dig on the whole plot. Thanks Charles Dowding!

Allotment Update

Remember this:?

My allotment, feb '15

Well here it is now:

My allotment, July '15

There's a willow playhouse covered in purple and yellow french beans at the back, parsnips, baby and regular sweetcorn, 2 types of peas, bush and broad beans, courgettes, nasturium, sunflowers, calendula, chamomile, coriander, parsley, stripy chioggia beetroot, borage and black cumin. The white thing in the middle is my 'carrot cage' made of old net curtains, trying to keep the carrot fly off my multicoloured carrots. The ramshackle arches behind it are some pvc pipe I found in a skip, with netting stretched over to protect a motley assortment of cabbage, brussels, purple sprouting broccoli and dinosaur kale (cavolo nero) from the caterpillars. 

And that's just in the top half of the plot!

The rest of the plot is home to strawberries, red orange and yellow raspberries, plums, 'discovery' and 'james grieve' apple trees (not fruiting yet because I only put them in this year), a morello cherry sapling, blue honeysuckle berries, worcesterberries, blackcurrants, whitecurrants, blackberries, japanese wineberries, cucumbers, 4 types of tomato, 3 types of squash, 5 types of potato including purple fleshed ones, rainbow chard, spring onions, elephant garlic, leeks, lettuce, mixed oriental salad leaves, rocket and radish. Oh, and some chervil too.

Try reading that list without taking a breath!

More photos to follow soon, including a scintillating (tittilating even!) glimpse at the no-dig experiment I'm running on the bottom half of the plot. 

Of cabbages and kings

Who would of thought that allotments, those gentle havens of giant cabbage growing, would have an equally thrilling and horrifying history? It involves violent oppression of the poor, riots, revolts, bloodshed, deception and theft from the vulnerable. It is a story with many heroes, and an equal number of villains in surprisingly high places.

For anyone interested in knowing more, this fascinating book is well worth a read:

Of Cabbages and Kings: The History of Allotments by Caroline Foley

Going back to well before the 'dig for victory' campaigns of the 2nd world war, it goes right back to pre-Norman invasion times, and looks at the way society was structured to allow everybody, even the poorest members of society, access to enough land to live, grow fruit, veg, and cereals, keep animals and feed themselves and their families. There were large swathes of common land, belonging to everybody, where people could graze their animals and grow crops. 

       Then, already wealthy landowners started to petition parliament to let them enclose the common land and claim it for themselves. The Enclosure (or Inclosure) act of 1773 (which still stands today) allowed these toffs to implement a wholesale land-grab, booting the poor subsistence farmers from the land and taking away their means of existence. This ushered in dark, difficult times for the poor folk who depended on subsistence farming, leading to the horrors of the Victorian workhouse as peasants became paupers and no longer had the means to feed themselves.

        The book follows uprisings, protests and riots spawned by the theft of the land, and the heroes who kicked against the degredation of the poorest; from the enigmatic figure of 'captain pouch', to Winstanley and the Levellers sowing carrots on the enclosed land (his house was burnt down by the authorities for this heinous offence).

       Luckily, there were a number of philanthropists who recognised that people who could feed themselves would be less likely to cause problems, so land was donated to be used for allotments. and in 1908 it was made law that councils had to provide allotments if there was a demand for them. 

        This was all BEFORE allotments helped us win two world wars, and became a valuable tool in the fight against malnutrition, the current dominance of a processed junkfood diet, and an antidote to the stress of modern life.

        The book really highlights the incredible value of allotments, how hard the fight was fought for them, and how precious they are. 

A New Allotment for You Dig? Gardens

Apparently, the allotments that house the plot I've just taken on have been allotments for over 200 years. And mine seems to have 200 years worth of brambles, thistles, couchgrass, nettles and bindweed growing on it. None the less, it's a magical place, expect regular photographic updates as I battle the weeds & get it ready to grow.

From top to bottom:

My gorgeous, if overgrown, 300 sq yards of happiness

Making friends with the allotment creatures

The first plum blossoms of the year

Shed (with possible pot of gold) on next door's plot

View through my shed window.