Best timings and methods for bigger harvests, my Diary tips for easier growing

Growing great crops is a lot about timing. For example, these salads I'm watering here were sown at 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-sown leeks. So this is a method that'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 sow three or four seeds in a module in the spring, and that requires the same amount of compost, the 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 that is so straightforward really. 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 soil 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 explain in the diary is about the timings of simple things like hoeing helps you control the weeds much more. Here's another example of less weeds growing was this radish was sown between lettuce that were cropping in the middle of September. That's a good time to sow autumn radish. And we have not weeded those radish at all. They just came up. And because the no dig 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 the easiest crops I've ever grown. And look at the quality, really nice roots, thanks to the soil being 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 bed. A lot of it is you, contrary I know to what is normally explained, but no dig means you haven't broken the structure with a four course spade or a 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 drier climate, you could use a less rotted mulch. I like compost because it doesn't encourage slugs. So for example, these Brussels sprouts are cleaner slugs, which can otherwise be a pest. And they've grown very steadily through the whole season. They were sown in May, planted in June, and I'm cropping them now in November. This is actually a first pick here, a decent amount. And these Brussels sprouts will go on cropping for a long time because the compost is helping the soil, 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 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.