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!