Welcome to a course which will save you time, give you pleasure in gardening, and health-giving food to eat. All this is achievable, and much easier once you understand how to care for and nourish soil.
No dig is a straightforward, time-efficient way of enhancing soil quality and fertility. We don’t work or see the soil, and you don’t need soil tests to understand it. Evidence is given by plants, and I demonstrate this throughout the course.
My teaching is based on experience and results, from 38 years of growing. The methods I explain and illustrate are sometimes different to commonly held beliefs, and in every case I explain why. These differences are what enable you to save time and achieve more reliable results.
The photos are mostly of the garden at Homeacres where I live now, in South West England. Our latitude is 51N, with eight hours between sunrise and sunset in midwinter, rising to 16 and more in midsummer. The climate is temperate oceanic, warmed by the North Atlantic Drift, also called the Gulf Stream.
Will these understandings apply in different climates?
Yes, very much so. The growing amount of feedback from all around the world illustrates how no dig succeeds whether your climate is hot, cold, dry or wet:
‘I’m now promoting your no dig method here in our country, the Philippines. It really works. We can see amazing results. Finally we found the best farming method that can be easily done by anyone.’
Agri-nihan, comment on Growing Success video, 23.1.20
‘Even though we are in Zone 3a with one planting a year, I am having success with intensive no dig beds. I use less garden space and did less weeding, wonderful! Switching to this method has made great soil and saved me time and energy, thank you from northern B.C. Canada.’
Tall Cedars, You Tube, 30.10.19
‘My new no dig flower garden is doing great in comparison to my neighbour’s gardens. We have had a very hot June this year here again but there was no such thing as a drought in my new garden at all. Everybody around’s been complaining about drought but me!’
Beata Wypych from Poland, email, 22.8.19
‘Hello Mr. Dowding, I am in Northern California, a mile east of the ocean. From your videos I attempted my first no dig garden at the end of 2018. Even through winter storms it started producing, and by the time spring arrived, I had an abundant, healthy, thriving garden, with my nearest neighbours taking notice, and swearing they must take up the method themselves.’
Linda Schneider, email, 15.6.19
‘I wholeheartedly agree with the no dig method of growing …. even through the most challenging lack of rain and disturbed weather patterns here in South East Queensland, my gardens have continued to produce whereas most other gardeners in the area have given up on their production.’
Russell from Queensland, The Free Radicals on You Tube, 01.05.19
‘Our climates couldn’t be more different – I’m in south Louisiana, USA, about 30 miles inland from the gulf of Mexico. Yet I find your gardening methods work well for the vegetables and herbs that will tolerate our heat and wildly inconsistent rain patterns here in Acadiana.’
Sidney J Barras Jr, Charles’ Facebook page, 15.5.18
My background
I became keen on gardening in 1979, when my mother needed help to plant some trees. Something about handling plants and soil made me feel really good. Soon after, I became interested in food and nutrition while still at university. I read Peter Stringer’s book, Animal Rights, and became vegetarian, possibly the first one at my college – the kitchen staff found it amusing.
I joined the Soil Association shortly after, a subscription based organisation of 4,000 people. They were founded in 1946, with a mission to promote and know more about soil health in farming and gardening. They ran a trial in Suffolk to investigate any links between soil, plant and human health.
I had been working on the family farm since learning to drive a tractor at age 14, but was not positively engaged. It was a big farm for those times, with grass and cereals covering 400 hectares (988 acres), and 300 dairy cows in five herds.
Despite living on a farm, I felt separate from it, and the only farm produce in our house was milk. Of more interest to me were the vegetables and raspberries from the garden. I still remember the eureka moment of discovering delicious broad beans at age 15.
In 1981 I worked for a year at the Argyll Hotel, on the small island of Iona off western Scotland, as a ‘maintenance man’. While there, I became interested in their vegetable garden and did some jobs to help out, then grew keen to get home and start gardening.
In early 1982 I made a mound, the original style of hugelbeet, with a base of sticks rather than logs. It ran east to west, and its south side enabled me to harvest carrots as early as May, which impressed my parents. I practised by working in their garden, and I visited and worked on organic market gardens. They were rare in those days because organic was ‘leading edge’ and highly unprofitable.
In August 1982, I used the farm tractor to rotovate 0.66 hectares (1.6 acres) of old pasture. The soil was Cotswold Brash, stony and loamy with over 7% organic matter, thanks to being permanent pasture for the cows.
During September and October, my next step was using a spade to shape raised beds. I shovelled soil from 60 cm (2 ft) wide paths to 1.5 m (5 ft) wide beds. I then spread old hay on some of the beds and old straw in all of the paths, to prevent weeds from growing.
This mulching – covering – with undecomposed materials, resulted in a lot of slugs and damage to new plantings in particular. This led to my using compost mulch instead.
The fact that my market garden was no dig, as well as organic, slipped under the radar (see Lesson 3). I was not proclaiming it, but no dig felt right. By 1987 I had almost 3 hectares (7 acres) of no dig beds, although I always rotovated in the first autumn of converting land from pasture to soil. At the time it was the only way I knew how to achieve this.
