What Is No-Dig Gardening?

For someone who wants to follow a no-dig gardening system, I have done a lot of digging. Creating the raised beds is an exercise in moving soil with a spade. So I can't really call them undug for a year or two yet. However the point is that now that the beds are constructed from this point onwards they will neither be purposefully dug nor, perhaps more importantly, stood on. To me the logic of raised beds is not to ease bending, weeding and seeding, although that is a bonus, but that they need not be subject to compaction. One argument for digging is to introduce air into the soil but if you have not compressed it in the first place and it is full of compost which has that wonderful capacity to hold both air and moisture in balance, digging becomes an irrelevance.

Of course, when I harvest my tatties I will be digging them out to some extent but I'll do so without inverting the soil. But sometimes soil is dug incidentally. The important point is that I won't indulge in the habit for its own sake. It interests me that many organic farmers who, as opposed to organic gardeners or small-holders, generally, by necessity because of the scale of their operation, use tractors for cultivation (unless Amish), and by doing so are indulging in a practice which is inherently bad for the soil. (One estimate suggests that 30 million hectares of land in Europe have been irreversibly compacted from machine use - see http://ecologyandfarming.com/artikelen/Horses-0411.pdf)

One of the most vocal proponents of no-digging is Charles Dowding. To his credit he has done careful comparisons of dig and no-dig plots which are otherwise identical and he has recorded the crops over a number of seasons. The no-dig plots come out on top, but not by much, and not always with every crop. But, if nothing else, even if there was no difference, why would you bother digging if over time it achieves nothing?

This photo brings the blog up-to-date. It was taken today 3 January, 2012. You can see that most of the work in building the beds is complete. (The green manure in the closest 3 beds is Winter Tares.) There is much work to be done round the edges where I will have fruit bushes and other permanent crops such as rhubarb and comfrey. Then there is the greenhouse - is that an appropriate word for the ramshackle structure to the left? - to sort out. In short the plot looks a bit of a mess but I want to record a start-of-year image for later comparisons.