Start out no dig - one method with cardboard and compost

I'm often asked, how do you begin no dig? What's the starting point? Well, you know, what's the first step? And these are some beds that we created last December, or started making, simply by putting a light excluding mulch. Mulch means any covering material that excludes light, in this case, on top of the weeds, whatever's growing. So it could be a very weedy allotment, it could be your lawn, could be just weeds that happen to be there. And that's where cardboard or other materials come in, and the compost. If you didn't have weeds, if your soil is mostly clean, you don't need the cardboard. So you can kind of skip that one step. But I'm assuming most people are starting with weeds, and I want to make sure that you know how best to kill them, to not have weeds going forwards, because that will free up so much time. This is the most difficult stage of getting rid of weeds at the beginning. Without digging, though, this is no dig, not disturbing the soil at all, so it's leaving these weed roots in the ground. And the wonderful thing about this method is that leaving soil undisturbed like that, the weeds actually in the end grow less, they kind of give up. Whereas if you try and dig them out and you're feverishly trying to get every last root, they kind of feel battered and bruised, and they want to grow again, and the soil itself feels harmed as well, and so it needs to recover. So that's why it's really difficult if you try and dig, and why no dig is so successful at having clean ground. As you can see here, but not entirely, because it was December when these mulches went down on top of weedy pasture, and it's now March 18th, so it's about three months since this happened, winter months, so not much has grown, but the grass is actually starting to grow through in places, and I just want to show you that to illustrate how you need to react. So what we did was we put cardboard where the path is going to be, and in fact if you look under here you can see the grass dying. This bit of cardboard actually went on in late January, so about six weeks ago, just we widened the edge. Very important to have an edge, like if your bed comes just up to say grass and weeds, they'll spread back in, so maintain an edge using cardboard initially, and it can be two, three, four applications, so in time cardboard breaks down. You never need to take it up because it disappears into the soil. Worms really like it, and it degrades, and what happens then is that weeds, as it degrades, you get gaps, holes, and lo and behold, for example, there's a dandelion coming through the cardboard, so I mean I could use my trowel to lever out a bit of root there. This is always an option, you won't ever get all root, and obviously this is disturbing the soil a bit, and it's very matted with other roots in there, so you know, I think that's a, yeah, actually that's not too bad. So you know, that's one option, you can see a bit of grass as well, but the simpler method, oh now here's one I'll mention too, a bit of burdock, and this is quite a vigorous weed, so it won't hurt just to do that. I'm not getting out the parent root, I'm only removing the top and a bit of root, that will go in the compost heap, but what you can then do is put cardboard on top again. If you've got cardboard like this, this was a box, it's probably best to split it like that, always making sure that the edges are well lined up as well like that. If ever you're laying two bits together, make sure they're overlapped, then you've got a question, how do you keep down this edge? I'll just mention something else here actually, which is the bit of carpet you might have noticed. This is absolutely not obligatory, in some ways I'm afraid it's a bit misleading, it's just how it happened, we weren't planning to do this video at the time, but this is some wool in fact that I was given just to try as a sub mulch if you like. Generally speaking I wouldn't use that and I'd recommend cardboard, just because cardboard is free. A lot of shops and places have bike shops and so on, you know, food boxes that have cardboard, they'll be delighted to give you if you just ask. You just need to take off the tape, remove the staples if there are any, and you're ready to go. Brine cardboard, not shiny, shiny's not good, it's often got bits of plastic in there and inks and things, so this is ideal and that's what I would have preferred to use actually instead of the wool, but you can see how things are growing through even this wool, that bit of grass that looks like couch grass has grown through the wool, so at this stage it needs a bit of patrolling and the wool's breaking actually, that's interesting. I would always try and tuck in edges or get them underneath some compost like that, just a bit, because the edge is where you can have problems of weeds growing up where the mulch is thinner. So that's now good, save for another six weeks before this degrades and if that happened and there's still weeds growing through, I would put another sheet of cardboard on top, so that could take us to May and if you had vigorous couch grass that could even need a fourth application say in June or July and I reckon that you've got a good chance after that of not having any couch left at all, if you've been thorough about either re-mulching it or removing it with a trowel and that doesn't mean removing the parent root because you can't get that, but what you can remove is, I noticed some here, this is couch grass, for those of you who don't know it, it goes under twitch and quack and maybe crabgrass in the USA and it has a very vigorous creeping root which is underground, this is not growing in the compost on top, it's growing through, I've only got a little bit there, in fact that broke off there, but beyond that there's loads of this wiry white root in the soil, very difficult to ever dig out, but doing this it's weakening it and if you just make sure you keep removing new growth like this that you see, you will tire it out, that you know these roots are not inexhaustible, they have a finite life, believe it or not, and I've seen it here where I moved to this garden seven years ago and there were a lot of weeds like this and thorough mulching and then subsequent thorough removal of regrowth meant that by the end of the year the only weed I had left was bindweed and that took another year after that, so I know all about that process and how long it takes and I know it's achievable and I know that you need to be thorough in this initial phase and be persistent, but the beauty of them on your cardboard pudding compost, and this is what I'm going to show you in a minute actually making a new bed, it means that here for example this is some homemade compost, in fact we're trialing two different ones there, it's the same everything else but just different compost, you can plant into this at any stage, I actually brought along a little seed potato just to show you, this is perfect time for planting early potatoes and people often ask how do you plant a no-dig potato because you're not going to be digging up the ground, well you've got the compost there, I just put my trowel in pretty much as deep as it'll go, that's about 12 centimeters, five inches and I'll pull the compost towards me and pop the potato in and I'll just mention it's got little, that's called a chit, it's the sprout or shoot where the leaves are going to be and the potatoes will form from little stolons that come out of that seed potato and that's it, that's planting a potato no-dig and that the potatoes will develop in this the roots of the potato plant will go down into the ground below, potatoes need loose soil to grow in but they can root into firm soil below so that's why no-dig potatoes actually work really well, when it comes to harvest you just get your hands around all the stems and lift them out, do have a look at the video I made about that and you can actually see it happening, so let's have a look at making a new bed right here, so this is making a brand new bed on weeds, starting steps, next to it we actually have a bed that we made last year which was exactly the same scenario, cardboard compost although in this one we put a little bit of soil at the bottom only because I happen to have a big pile of soil there from some building work but normally I recommend not using soil because you get much better growth from compost but if you happen to have a bit of soil lying around you could use it as base layer, that's possible, so we're doing compost here after the cardboard, so cardboard's going on, these were book boxes actually so that's why they've got these slits which is not ideal for stopping the weeds because we want to make sure that there's no light can get in, so actually I switched these two around and that means the slits are kind of covering each other, zero light going there and this one's a different pattern of box so again that can have nice overlaps, always overlapping, yeah so much of the success of this stage will be from being thorough so don't rush it and just do it nicely and then compost, what are you going to use? Well I brought along some options just to give you an idea what they look like and the ideal state of decomposition, I know it's not always possible and often I'm asked you know could I use fresh manure at this stage or fresh compost, well at a push you can but generally I wouldn't recommend it and the results won't be so good, you know if it was all you had well yeah let's just go for it but it limits your options a bit what you can grow subsequently because using nice compost like this which means it's well broken down, decomposed, you can sow and plant into it straight away and that's what I want to show you as part of this video, we're going to actually put some compost on the cardboard and then we're going to plant, you can do that, you've got to wait for these weeds to die even though the weeds are dying underneath they're still green but they can't, well a few of them will grow through but mostly they won't because we're going to put a fair amount of compost on and here are the options, so this is called green waste compost and it comes from people's garden debris waste prunings whatever and I actually had this delivered a few months ago so it's really well broken down but you can see there's quite a bit of wood in there which is fine it just means it's not the richest if you like and it's not as rich as say homemade compost which is my favorite I'm looking for here about a good 10 centimeters four inches so this is homemade compost and you can see it doesn't look as perfect as the black and it's also more brown and that's partly because it's got a bit of wood in wood tends to break down into a in a fungal way and it goes more brown than black and brown is good and you can also see it's got bits in the bits of wood and fibers and things that we put prunings and all sorts in this heap but small pieces so the wood is cut into lengths nothing enormous that means it packs down better makes better compost and that is all fine you don't need to sieve it or anything like that you know this is a lot of this is about simplicity speed and just getting on with it basically this one is mushroom compost so that rather confusingly it's also called spent mushroom compost people say well if it's spent will it grow vegetables and the answer is yeah it's only spent for mushrooms it's fantastic for anything else vegetables flowers this method by the way works really well for flower beds and borders and there's some worms in there that's always a good sign that's branly worms not earthworms they're busy helping it to decompose and again you can see it's quite brown that's fungal again mushroom and well decomposed all of those I would call well decomposed this one a bit less but enough and they're good to go and I'll show you one more which is some from a sack I'm covering as many bases as possible here just so you can see you know what what's good we have actually got quite a lot here haven't we it's 18th of March it's just starting to dry up ahead of summer this is something else you can do that I think people find puzzling because they've been told that the soil has to be loose for roots to grow in it this this though what I'm doing here is not compacting it this is firming it and that's a different thing so firming is good because that means that when your plants make roots they're going to have anchorage they're not going to put down roots and fall over and it will hold the moisture and it's also the thing it's done is reduce the depth I think we're three or four inches now instead of five or 12 centimeter and yeah the sack of this on top will be good this also illustrates how putting the finer compost on top this to me looks like well decomposed green waste it might have something added it's a it's called a multi-purpose compost which means it can be used for potting for raising plants as we'll see in a minute and a whole sack of this on top which is 40 liters I think it's 40 yeah 40 liters it's also calls itself organic it is certified so approved that's a good sign and you see I might use a trowel here my shovel this is getting it now in a state where it's ready to plant now I'm doing all this in a very small scale just one little bed and I'm not using wooden sides as you can see but you could use wood sides just at this stage to hold the compost in place that can make it a lot easier because otherwise we've got an edge now and keep keeping that maintained stopping the weeds could be tricky but I just want more than anything this is to illustrate the principle of mulching with cardboard and compost on weeds and planting straight away with not having a wooden side here means that any path mulch will come in but I just want to show you this one quickly because this is an option for path is wood chip so very well decomposed it's about six months old and six months ago it looked more like this when it arrived so this is fresher one month old wood which you can also use in a path not deep just usually I put them on about three centimeters one inch and the idea is it's nice to walk on I mean you keep clean boots anyway compost doesn't stick to your boots as you can see with no dig is good but it's more than anything is feeding the soil life you know a lot of this is about organic matter on the surface feeding soil organisms so they do the digging those of you who are used to digging and loosening soil think of it as your your new allies in the soil who you're not harming or hurting in any way allowing them to breed and proliferate and feeding them so it's not compost is not only about feeding plants it's about feeding soil organisms and then it all happens quite miraculously really I'm always so impressed with how this this all just ticks all the boxes keeping carbon in the soil doing this way you're not you know every time you dig or disturb the soil you're exposing carbon to air that's carbon dioxide escapes so it's all staying down there now obviously we're adding carbon on top as well this initial big lump of compost is not every year you've got to do it this is a one-off you know how are you going to get hold of that much compost yeah I acknowledge that can be an issue for people I would say though it's the one main investment to consider making and it will repay you many times because you can for one thing you can start straight away like now we're going to put in some plants these are plants I've been raising in the greenhouse if you want to find out more about how that happens do have a look at late recent video propagation three there's quite a few propagation videos it's really good skill to learn about this propagation raising your own seedlings it can make such a difference to the success of your gardening and here I've got examples because I think also just people find it helpful to see the stage at which to plant things like for example that's multi-sown onions so it's actually spring onions that's why there's so many there's as many as eight or nine in that clump and they're going to go in the ground all together like that you could if the ground was firm I've got a wooden dibber as well you could use that to make a hole but in this case because it's composting even I've walked on it you can see it's still pretty soft you push it in firmly a little bit deep there you go spring onions planted and they will all grow as a clump and you'll come back in about two months maybe two and a half and you'll have a bunch of spring onions ready to eat you could peel out the bigger ones if you want first just to eat as well here we have a pea well actually three pea plants so again multi-sown and that means growing them in a clump they like that and it saves on propagation space and you pop them in you're achieving a lot more quickly now these are not typical spacings here because I wouldn't normally put a pea next to an onion like this but I just want to illustrate the principle of how it can work if you were planting peas I'd normally grow these in a line or two lines even with sticks between just for example but that's planting your pea in the ground and propagating peas is often more successful than sowing them direct why do we bother to propagate and not why just sow them the seeds where mice eat them often when they're in the ground there's quite a few mice running around here there's rabbits as well actually so propagation can be like achieving the the difficult bit of getting them through that tender stage when they're so vulnerable this one is a cabbage so again if it was cabbage same story you're getting the idea by now I'm sure that you just bung them in make a hole bung them in and bury the stem as much as possible that makes a sturdy plant rather than having one that waves around spinach here's another one that actually there's a lettuce as well that's lettuce and this is spinach so again a little hole the lettuce you can see the module is quite a bit smaller spinach and also small module these were sown about four weeks ago four weeks old four weeks actually they're plus five weeks old they're just roughly a month and then here's a nice one which is beetroot it's often thought that root vegetables can't be transplanted because what the roots and you damage the roots but it still happens actually the beetroot the the bit we want to eat is not the root the roots there and the bit we eat is the swelling just above the root so they transplant really well and I will just put in three of these or even two actually just to illustrate spacing because that's one thing I've been a bit random about but these multi-sown beetroot where you've got three preferably four and a clump I give them about 30 centimeter 12 inches so something like that to that and if I was going to plant another one I would put it there so that's called planting on the square we kind of go like on a triangle I'd have one there so well maybe they're actually about 12 inches again and then over here and over here and if you think that that's four beetroot that's four beetroot and that could be another four already that's 12 beetroots in not a lot of space and all happened very quickly ten minutes ago this was grass and weeds now it's a bed growing food already this is really worth the investment in the compost because of that incredibly rapid entry point to what you can grow in a pretty small area and this fertility in this compost will last for many crops to come like everything I've planted here will finish during the summer even during the early summer like the spring onions by the early June you know then you can grow something else you could plant you could be raising new beetroot plants to put in after the spring onion you could be raising more lettuce to put in after the peas you could be raising or sowing carrot seed after the cabbage in fact that's a good point if you're going to sow carrots here I would do something like that and put carrot seeds in there about one every maybe three and they will grow what then the question is what happens when they reach the cardboard what happens when all these roots reach the cardboard well the cardboard is temporary it's not here for the whole year in that it's going to decompose as it decomposes the weeds will push up it's it's a temporary break on weed growth and it's very valuable for that then it decomposes say within eight ten weeks and then these roots will be able to go into the soil where the weed and grass roots are dying or have died that soil becomes vacant for them and some of these weeds will push up through and that's where you need to keep removing that's where the trowel is useful so there is a quick resume of all the things you can do and I want to just take you here now and show you the result a few months down the line it's some broccoli that we planted last summer this is some broccoli which we sowed last June transplanted here in July and it's been here ever since being protected from birds pigeons they like to eat it by bird netting so it's it's quite a few months actually it started life as this so it's just you know I'm always looking to encourage people that you know that amazing transformation from that goes in the ground they're they're a little bit bigger than that maybe in about a week these will be ready to go in the ground as I've been showing you and then they turn into this and it is a wonderful thing so without any disturbance of the soil no digging or anything this was broad beans before they finished during June we chopped them off at ground level put them on the compost heap and plant these without doing any other preparation just pop the new planting in so for the summer to come we've covered the kind of starting stages the making a bed and everything keep thinking ahead good gardening is a lot about being prepared for the next few months as well have some plants ready for when the first lot of harvest finish you want to keep eating from your lovely beds all year round ideally and with a succession of plantings this is achievable like this kale in front of me that went in a little bit before the broccoli sown may planted June and we were picking from it all through the autumn a little bit in the winter now it's starting again and then it flowers you get you can eat that as well so long period of harvest these ones we're just picking these gorgeous heads and we'll finish this video with a little look at all the amazing produce that you could be having even at this time of year late winter early spring so to finish off to inspire you a selection of produce from my no dig garden here at Homeacres and some of it was harvested a while ago like that garlic came out of the ground last June you know a lot of vegetables you can harvest and then store for a long period so that's how you can build up a supply which will stand you in good stead at different times of year and that's just been hanging in the house that's a good place to keep it and same with the onions they were harvested early August stored indoors potatoes they can just store in a sack in a shed fresh lamb's lettuce from the garden just now this is the broccoli parsnips so they were sown a year ago actually and harvested just recently carrots sown in June harvested just now so they've been in the ground as well savoy cabbage sown in June so June June June a lot of summer sowing what I've been saying about keeping sowing all year on my website there's a sowing timeline just details it month by month leeks they're sown in April but you can keep them in pots until you plant them out in the summer sometime swede that's sown in June transplanted early July squashes sown in April actually transplanted outside end of May after the frost so lots of lovely food and one added bonus that you get from growing food at home is microbes it's only been discovered recently how valuable soil microbes are to our guts and our whole digestive system and our brain the gut is intimately linked to brain it makes you feel good eating homegrown produce these microbes and there's a immunologist quoted just in the newspaper saying exactly that and you get microbes have a shelf life then they don't last for a very long time so harvesting fresh from the ground even with a bit of soil on and eating it you know a carrot like that you pull out you just wipe it on your trousers and eat it that's do you a lot of good and by giving you some ideas for doing all that i hope you enjoy growing your own it's fun