CHARLES DOWDING & RICHARD PERKINS TALK NO DIG

so we're here with the great chalice darling and it's such pleasure to have you and stuff here at the farm and we've got a little video today talking with Charles about some of the questions that you folks posed on yesterday's video and excited to share our perspectives because although we both really keen on no big gardening we have slightly different approaches and I think it's good to address some of your questions in both of our perspectives which is a really healthy way to go about things it's fascinating for me to be here actually because as you say with no big gross but you do yeah yeah I think we should get into it what's your first impressions on the farm I'm loving the variation I like the way you've got all different gardens and terms of the market garden yeah different blocks that makes it much more interesting and I could see that you've got some difficult soil here you yeah you've got some challenges that yeah so you're coping with you know the crops are looking pretty well to me [Music] so yeah curious to hear like observations you've made in the short time you've been here thinking of solve challenges what's what's your observation cellphone thought well I can see this problem you've got at the moment that just that's really annoying one of the paper mark that clearly wasn't it's not very rich and yeah it looks to me like it would have been better stack for a year is easy to say with hindsight yeah those are the way it's filling with wounds now suggest that basically it still needed to compost it before it went on the general lash is a growth to me looks really encouraging it's just that sometimes because of that much problems you're not getting the yields issue and yeah it's a referring to the problem I mentioned a few videos ago with the wood based compost and then the higher fertility compost that we've put in it's quite a lot of questions people want to know what type of compost that is recommended for growing but we've had that issue and it's I think it's going to take us all year to - even though round again and it is a huge question that wasn't because to grow vegetables like this and on this kind of level and to get a worthwhile yield you know do you need to bring in some compost what it'd be incredibly good at making your own compost I make a lot of it one thing I'm noticing here so you've got a lot of wood I mean longer-term that's the way to go well like we here using factory ways but to make more of your own compost from yeah well it just takes more time doesn't it we're a long time with favoring the idea because we actually own a peat swamp so we're waiting for the the local community to have clear the timber that's now taking it will eventually just become forest again and they there's a move in the village to keep it as a peat swamp obviously in the past people used it as animal bedding it's anti bacterial and really good felling and essentially the compost we buy in typically for the garden is chicken manure and peat moss based and so we felt like well we can make that so we have been making that coming out of this tunnel and mixing it with some of the cow bedding but it's an hour scale where we can actually close the loop on the compost on the farm but we certainly weren't in the beginning and I do advocate people buying in you need to list the fertility in the beginning yeah and yeah yeah one big difference here to what I'm doing is the animals so this tunnels full of chickens yeah the years eight hundred chickens in here so that's not the same as if you were say cropping salad which is what I can do yeah yeah I think that does give the soil less chance to to build up and build as a network of of life because of how the chickens are kicking it all around akin yeah but you make a compost that we see in here at the move that that stays in here this nose so this is scraped out like we're on the subsoil compacted pad with a you know 15 ton big it comes with the chickens we could but it's enough material to put on all the beds so we kind of want to use it for that purpose and the easiest way to take it because it's about 50 centimeters deep so it's going up looking at the top you've brought in or this is stuff we've put back in so we've cleared it and the way the difficulty with this tunnel specifically is that the way that we clear it out with the front loader the only way you can tell when you're at the bottom is when you hit that pad again and so you basically take everything out and then I've basically I've bought all this back in in March then started sewing stuff on that so you never actually build up a permanent bed system but as I was saying yesterday the the value in our circumstance the value of the eggs coming out of here and winter is actually worth more than the crops that were growing in the summer and so it's is prioritized for multi-use because infrastructure like this is expensive and it's got to be performing there's many functions as a K that's an example of how some modern farming practices it's difficult to give the best to your soul yeah because I do think that's not favoring the soul but look what you the creepatin weaver we can see that I've made a little hole in here actually yesterday it's pretty hard isn't it yeah you can see that even in the path the roots are going into the surface mulch but they didn't seem to be really good no no very much no I think it would be like one option could be to only skim off you know three-quarters of what's here from the winter because it's blocking up the vents on the sides it's really quite high like you couldn't walk in the door very easily so it's we have to take some amount out and the aim has been to then put that on the rest of the beds to avoid having to buy compost in which feels like a winner long term you do not have to buy in commerce yeah I'm not sure I'll see your spacings are closer than mine yeah we're doing tricky it's clearly working for you we did tomorrow's 22 centimeters yeah oh yeah yeah 22 sorry I was thinking that's a little AC yeah it's just there for a minute well how would you do tomorrow's are you doing in determinants no I guess I don't do such wide rows actually mm-hmm allow for the whiteness of the rogue probably it's not that much difference but they're really close in the road yeah they're looking really well yeah they're really good we had a little bit of end rot last year but we corrected that with some homemade preps and they look really great and the under cropping with salads and Fuzzle is clearly working well but you have got a nice bit of light coming through the base and we prune quite high in here so soon as we'll put up to the first flower probably next week and then once the fruit Lissette will prune it up to waste time so we do get a lot of light through some of the questions that have come up are about compost and soil analysis and soil life and that's obviously a really important topic and the fundamental topic of any market and the question that came through a few times was what saw the compost should I start with what do you mean is the very first application yeah yeah one well I actually don't like to be too prescriptive on that because the main consideration is actually what you can get hold of a compost is bulky stuff and I don't see any value in spending a lot of money ordering compost from hundreds of miles away or whatever it might be you know just because it's the right one and it's it's not that easy to judge the value of compost without seeing it other thing as well I'm mistrustful of like NPK analyses of compost it's not I don't see composters and fertilizer and and actually the most valuable part of compost is the microbes in life yeah exactly they're biology so you know and people don't tend to measure that or you don't really get a handle on that one thing I would advise it you know some of the cheaper compost slightly we're in in the UK we can buy green waste compost and mushroom compost for example both of them know when they're delivered they're still fresh and if you put a thermometer in 60 centigrade that's not really still in this process of composting it's raw still yeah exactly and and so my advice is to buy it before you need it if you can you know think I heard six months and then create necessary compost yeah I mean all windows and leave it to mature like that or yeah yeah what I do is I'm not buying a huge amount but just I get the lorry loading it just sits where they drop it basically and and it the temperature gradually goes down and it turns it to much nicer compost yeah within three or four months and but it's a little bit of planning ahead yeah and I'd rather say that would be too prescriptive about what great to use I mean animal you he's fantastic we've got more nutrients it's the best but now there's a you know recently this big scare about I mean a peril it the weed killer that horse manure particularly and something um raising awareness about yeah I but I've also heard of it being in Cambodia in Ireland on a whole allotment site and they used a load and a lot of people who lost potatoes and beans and tomatoes it's really serious actually and a lot of prominent gardeners in the UK have suffered you've had problems with I've had only one problem where I brought in some horse manure and last summer when it's really dry and I used the horse manure as my kind of green ingredient in my compost heap and yeah unbeknown to me it had some of this stuffing and an otherwise anyone know because it suddenly become apparent I said a lot of things to do this by oh I say where you get a bit of a composter hopefully before you get hold of it yeah so some peas and beans and and you'll know within maybe three four weeks you'll see the curling leaves if it had it if their growth is healthy go for it and there's information more information about this on your Channel and that's in the links below and it's an important issue but I have a slightly different perspective there where I would certainly starting out like I think one of the biggest mistakes people make with no dig is not putting a thick enough blanket initially I've seen many people fertilize their lawns by putting too little organic matter down and just to grow vegetables yeah like not putting enough to blanket out we do but not using cardboard either some maybe so maybe not because I definitely recommend you know if any thick mass of weeds I'm to making them out thick cardboard not just a thin cardboard or thick or if I sink up with two layers that initial phase yeah but I'm with you in terms of the first year the first few months are critical but I've got this like my perspective you know people are concerned about the cost of compost and putting you know such a deep layer initially like it's really important to clarify we're not usually putting on much in the subsequent years every year and so that cost is an initial investment but it's worth pointing out you know spending a few thousand euros in our context on compost to grow tens of thousands of viewers of veg is one of the lowest running costs of any of the enterprise's you'll find on our farm for example our boilers are layers these are enterprises that they're much more profitable with less time input but 50% of that revenue is feed costs so the Market Garden running costs are one of the lowest for any enterprise its compost which we might put a few thousand euros into if we're buying it in not making it ourselves and a thousand euros on seeds and then a little bit of electric for chilling and fuel for sales which is split amongst all the enterprises yes so it's a really low running cost if you're producing veg for sale and the main attribute the main cost is time yeah and you save so much time by having a using more compost in the beginning and having a very healthy fertile source basically for means that for all the time you put in you know you're getting more out so it's it is as richest as you say so massive investment will not matter of itself but it's it's just massively worthwhile investment as well yeah it's a lot of work first time and it's it is an initial investment but it's relatively low cost thing and it saves you time with weeding it saves you learn water it saves you heartache when you you know if your crops aren't doing well so it's really worth the investment but I also would recommend that people use animal-based manures because it's you know fundamental patent systems on their fertility cycles are driven by animals and animal manure has been used to grow vegetables for thousands of years it's very very effective and it creates a diversity of life that I don't think you find without animal manures so my recommendation is usually cow based because cows are even more inefficient as animals and most others horses are actually quite efficient relatively compared to a cows big walking compost machine is putting out you know 30 kilos added back and their beard it's relatively easy to usually get large amounts of cow manure and I think it's for me cow manure is preferable to horse manure although our east and west beds you all have seen in in old videos oh oh only horse manure and they've been some of the best beds because they were not dug before they were turned into no dig beds so that's something that people wanted to know from you Charles and I know we might have a different perspective on that is do you need to do any kind of prep on compacted land like for walking or tilling in some way to deal with compaction I think the big issue in that question is what does one mean by compaction what I noticed is that that word gets massively overused and often when people are talking or worrying about their soul being compacted it's just hard it's just firm yeah firm solid is good I'm always saying you know I walk on my bed it's not deliberately but if I need to walk on them I'm not it's not a problem because my beds are firm so it's just to be clear on that I mean how then do you know if your soil is actually compacted compaction means severely damaged usually by machinery heavy weight in very wet conditions and if you dig a hole and you want to know is it actually compacted you will see unusual colors like grey and orange and light blue and you will also get smelled like a swamp and sulfurous that's an aerobic that's compaction but if you don't see that if you just see you know if it's still difficult to get a spade or fork inside and it feels really firm but that that's not compacted you know that could be just naturally dense perhaps you just got a naturally dense soil you know heavy soil is great for growing vegetables by the way you know clay is great for no dig and you don't need to get first but that's where the extra layer of compost initially is really valuable because you are feeding so life and that's what it all these organic mulches are doing you're feeding the soul - in and that enables them to be more busy and to breed and to open up your soil more and they will do it in a much more durable than satisfying an an effective way for your plants then you can do with a spade or fork so I would say be very yeah I'm not a great fan of certainly not long term broad 14 obviously I think you aren't I'm a bit don't don't rush into it do a bit of homework yeah yet and do a comparative trial for yourself and that's something I've really valued from Charles's work is they testing these ideas out in your own experience to develop your own knowing so you know for yourself how to proceed in manage correctly and it obviously depends on how the land has been used if you have you know lawn that's been kept trimmed short just the act of trimming roots short I mean trimming the aerial part of a plant short means roots can't express themselves so if I go up into my pasture on the same soil type that's allowed to express itself up to my shoulders I have a very different soil profile in the same soil type because life is happening in that soil and where life is happening things happen in the soil that you don't need to necessarily come along and do a mechanical kick-start because biology is doing that for you so that's a focus really in the market gun is is focusing on microbes and soil and letting plants express their physiology fully and I've used a board fork here I have to say the bed's that we didn't do anything we just put we put horse manure straight on the land like composted horse manure those beds have been the least weedy of all they are on the sandy soil whereas were on a more clay soil over here but we tilled these beds in a conscious way deciding that this has been driven over it was a cut field that had been driven over but you know very heavy forestry machines and things like that and we have a pen automata at all for measuring compaction because above 300 pounds per square inch pressure of compare action plants can't actually physically root through them so there are tools for measuring true compaction rates and then you can respond accordingly now I've used the board fork mainly to I've laid it like a human-powered keyline plow so I could improve my pasture just by grazing properly but I think I can do it a little bit faster with that mechanical kickstart and likewise putting material on the ground encouraging soil biology worms to take that material down the ground and having living plants as long as possible and roots decomposing in the ground as long as possible we can do that without any mechanical means I felt we can speed that process up with boardwalks but we've took the board fork out with the course participants here and after a couple of years of doing that there's no significant benefit that it just fruit drops in the ground so then we just stopped doing it because it's obviously unnecessary so I think you can go either way and you don't need to do well I'm doing this this ongoing long term trial at homemakers were Blancas one strip that I fought every year yeah like broad walking and the strip next to it is no dig and both have the same compost same plants and for five years now consistently the the forked strip is yielding about five percent less yeah and I think that if you do consistent walking you you are breaking up the for example fungal networks probably yeah you know I haven't got a microscope but it's just from watching how plants grow so it's strictly a one-off if you have got this problem like heavy machinery that we're talking about yeah don't carry on I'm really into not being absolute like but I would always be conscious why I'm doing something so I might tell once knowing that I'm covering it up and I'm never doing that again so that's very different to how most market gardeners are typically till which creates a lot of the problems of the market gardening it creates weeds it wakes up plant pathogens and it burns off carbon into the atmosphere so most gardeners are making their own problems and there's you're not doing any tilting here right no you're just putting down yeah exactly and that's all you need to do you don't need to have any of these toughness I don't think I mean there might be situations where it's needed but in general no and it's breaking down I think the hardest bid is breaking down the conditioning in our heads like everyone has been taught from horticulture school to books and just you have to dig and two billion other things as well yeah but most you don't have to what do you think if you use caterpillar tunnels well they're clearly working very well and I mean I haven't seen how you put them up or anything but they look quite straightforward really yeah so you move them around in fact you can move them it takes about two minutes for two people to do a 40 meter tunnel like this so really quick and and relatively really cheap than a permanent or not but I think for anyone in cool cold climate their game-changer to have easy to lift the sides yeah no doors at the end as well you've just got that end stays closed on there but yeah some people build doors and things like you have a manually vent it obviously but it's cheap up with and you know maybe the girl thing they come in under the side with them yeah I would be fencing the perimeter and we don't have relative Sweden they haven't we have deer and bears instead yes so then someone else had a question about really sandy salt and for me putting organic matter on the ground is you know carbon is the sponge that holds moisture so one particle hummus holds four particles water there's no better way to hold water in your landscape but they're saying that compost doesn't seem to be helping them what do you think about that that does not sound right to me I mean like totally agree with what you say I really don't understand that one because sandy Solo itself is much harder to grow any plants in really than heavy soils like clay and silk so organic matter is yeah gonna hold moisture gonna hold nutrients it may be that something does a composting yeah could be something to do with your compost it's it's really important to consider types of compost I actually have been i I agree with Charles totally you've got to work with what you can get and that's ended up with this wood based compost that we can get because it's extremely cheap like by a factor of six to eight times cheaper than the high fertility compost that worth putting on or making in tunnels but it I've always avoided municipal compost cause it can often be very varied in its quality yeah well if you are buying that the municipal compost make sure it's saved to them mmm maximum of 15 1 5 millimeters so the civic meter is very small that will take out large lumps of wooden plastic and also like I say buy it before you need it yeah sure and you can also inoculate it with life-filled compost then you can make yourself so we've put videos of how to do those kind of things and make folio teas if there is any deficiencies in nutrient but you you want to invest in compost if that's the mainstay of your production technique it pays off dividends over many years I'm really noticing actually the difference in climate here and yeah you've got a lot more covers on than I would have done years for example yeah covers should be coming off and to be honest we're using some row covers in place of insect net because we've got really holy insert Nets and replacing the time but there is a few weeks where we take all covers off and then it's back to autumn again but there's a question there that came up around soil analysis and I I know what I think about this but they'll be good to hear your perspective like do you do soil analysis and do you look at correcting deficiencies in in conventional lab tests okay I'm a bit suspicious of soil analysis I've never seen one will have any have very few done ever and they've never really informed me I felt of anything that I didn't know already because I my preferred way of doing it is by looking at plants yeah and that's indicating what's going on in the soil yeah because what a soil test can't do in my opinion is tell you actually how much of the goodness is available in an interlocking way you know it's not I think they don't really relate to how plants feed which is a very complex system of fungal Network for example and soil tests can't measure how fast and well those are working to make the nutrients that they may be picking up or may not available to plants as they need them and as Wayne Elam is also key phrase you know you can measure total availability or total quantity of nutrients in a test but not necessarily available at different times of the year so it needs understanding in the context of the whole biology which most softest cotton measure and if I did get a biology test on once yeah and disappointing because well at least I thought it was odd they measured fungi and bacteria and they had a kind of sliding scale I was getting fantastic crops in this ground weather test was being done and the result came through that the my fungal levels were dangerously low I mean a lot of market gardeners would say it's foolish to not have soil test but to be honest we've never had soul tests and more interested in leather oh really yeah I'm more interested in the quality of the compost I'm putting on because like if your soil is too acidic too alkaline it's carbonate buffers there and it's life that as Charles said that unlocks fertility so a standalone compartmentalised reduction your soil test tells you basic things that don't relate to crops and how they grow and it's totally true it's the biology that unlocks the nutrition if you've got top soil then you've got plenty of nutrition and you've probably lacked life so how do you create life well you cover the soil and keep it covered nature doesn't do a bear so you have living plants photosynthesizing as fast as they can as long as possible in a year you leave roots decomposing in the ground and you protect that skin just like you have a skin that protects you from getting sick that's exactly what the land needs to leave and so by focusing on that element you can start to bypass any major issues that would be brought up in soil testing for an interview plan pick up on two point seven one is we were at this conference with Elaine Ingham professor as I knew him who coined the whole phrase offers when and and she made this kind of amazing statement she said she doesn't know any soil in the world that doesn't have enough nutrients already yep it's just about making a variable yes and the other one was interesting what you said about Bess or not having bear saw misunderstandings about that it doesn't literally you gonna have plants growing all the time because the compost itself is any organic matter yet is the color so it doesn't literally mean you know in the winter it's just not feasible to have plants growing you know they don't grow in the winter says find I hope you just your compost organic matter man that's your cover but that doesn't mean to disregard that and not pay attention I would also look at plants and respond now this is the first major errors we've had in our garden which is just based on not layering out our compost and trying to save a bit of time as we detailed in another video and we have to correct that now by doing extra work and it will be next year - that's fully back to normal but we're watching plants and looking for signs of deficiencies and responding accordingly we're not being ignorant to the fact but it's a lot too much emphasis is put on reductionist compartmentalized ideas like soil nutrient availability is totally dependent on life pH water all of these factors that are making it too complex to measure in simplistic terms now one thing I didn't mention is something I would do and do here with such a large amount of organic matter being put on the ground to the tune of you know we put 60 tons of material down on 1,500 square meters of beds this year that's a lot of material now two things I want to bring up about that one is that people are concerned with runoff from leachate or you know nitrates running off etc there have been many scientific studies you can look up singing frogs farm in California big no big fun beautiful farm there they've had the FDA coming to close them down because of perceived nitrate runoff and they actually had to clean this runoff of any farm in the in the valley they're big agricultural Valley and all the nitrogen was there but locked up in the body of microorganisms as plant-available food in a healthy living deep tops all as it should be so we have to ask questions it's kind of like what we're doing up on the fields with our Birds we're running more animals over the same space than you are technically meant to but and that's due to nitrate runoff but we're not doing conventional AG we're building very healthy vibrant plants in our passive that can take that extra nutrient as a reason rather than it become a pollution problem and so that's important in this context that we're protecting soil and that allows that extra nutrition to be a resource and other pollution yeah I think there is a big misunderstanding about that and and compost is not fertilizing you have to say I have to keep saying that because though everyone not everyone a lot of people have been conditioned to think in those terms of composters adding nutrients and it's all the other things we've been saying yeah yeah one thing I would do sometimes I don't know what you think about this is I would put I like to add a slow release calcium source so we will we have a lot of oyster shells that we must feed to our laying flock to keep their shells healthy but one concern were too much organic matter is you can bind up certain nutrients like the cation exchange capacity of organic matter is very high but you can have problems if you don't have enough calcium and so I like to add every couple of years I'll add maybe a kilo of oyster shell to each of these beds which is about seven and a half square meters I don't know if you do that on anyway no I mean I've never done that actually but I'm interested well we've been putting on really high fatality compost so that's something I've done there's a measure I don't have enough experience to say precisely the amounts or or how it would be without it but it's something I've done preemptively from the beginning hmm and I know other growers do similar and I mean you'll figure that you purchase 60 tons and 50 hundred square meters you're not doing that every year no no this was a big five year overhaul to redo the pathways because the parts are basically decomposed under you including the what you've been asked or just accomplished no that's wood chip also but that's not so heavy yeah not showing that but we're putting this year we put about 10 centimeters on each of these beds again so a lot of material but we would only do that maybe every five years cuz I reckon I'm putting it annually about 12 tons on a thousand square metres say yeah yeah and I would I would say that's not huge at all and I know that's a very sustainable amount for the intensity of cropping and the Dodgers coming out it's what most market growers are putting in they're just telling it yeah and it's a very traditional approach to use that much I think that we were rephrase after World War two people using more chemical fertilizing just forgetting us think about how to feed the soil yeah so last couple of questions we've got time for we got a busy day again last day of the training I'm super excited for and we're gonna have a big barbecue at the lake to enjoy this summer weather but people wanted to know about Woody's what's your thoughts on water use in the garden how much water do you use well I'm not using that much of our annual rainfall is 750 800 millimeters that's just over 30 inches and I only water plants when they're close to harvest so that actually that in terms of salad beds that means I'm water them quite a lot because we're harvesting from them very regularly but something like brought beans or peas for example I'd wait until they're flowering for example I don't have any irrigation system and that's more economical with water for sure because I'm not watering my pathways and deliberately anyway and we're concentrating the water precisely where it's needed and hand watering I feel it's not a waste of time at all because you're always observing things yeah that lovely years yeah or inspection totally there's no manure like the farmers foot so it's an opportunity to to be there and see what he's doing you can also do things like pull out a few weeds or side chute little odd as well the autumn those kinds of things so yeah I'm a great fan of hand watering but not too often and and doing a reasonable amount like I Polly tell us in normal British summer weather I water twice a week not like every day yeah that's great I usually tell people like what I'm looking for here is about four centimeters a week as an average across crops and I don't even measure it yeah we had a lot of like you've got more people working here that yeah we have a big irrigation system and and yield is very like certain crops yield is totally proportional to watering so things like a squash that were growing out in the caterpillar tunnels they need double the water of everything else and and it's worth putting time into experimenting with that like a squash plant you know let's water it in adequately you might give you five six squash where it's the same plant watered well might give you three or four times that amount so it's water becomes important but one thing I've made clear with the training participants it's like you've got to have if you're doing a larger everywhere you need irrigation set that up before you start you do not want to hit a hot dry s'long period without a water system if you need it now Charles you are working on the smaller area yeah so the irrigation is less critical there but as soon as you are up on you know many thousands of square meters you need to know you've got enough water for all eventualities like the drought last year it was you know it hit us and we planned pretty well for things it was an extreme circumstance but and then the last question people wanted to put forward was how much area of beds do I can one person can feasibly manage in a farming workweek which you know 55 hours 60 hours max that would be a farmer's workweek not doing sales and things like that so just the actual production that's I would say as a question because why would you not include sales in that I give me that question Nikki that was the question but I think that question might have come from the perspective of like a couple so one of them is selling picking or just going off to sell it do you think I don't know it wasn't well because what I would say there's two things we spend a lot of time picking you know picking actual growing the produce doesn't take long so in the winter you can set your birds up with no dig it means that you haven't got to do much weeding in the summer you know if you're telling that's always a huge job so that's a massive time saver and you can concentrate on the growing and we do spend very little of our time disappointing little I was actually doing planting or sowing whatever it might be and most at least half the time I reckon over the year we're spending is picking I think 60% is picking and the host harvest like washing packing bunching exception yeah and so then if well if we include that in the equation square meters I reckon I'm 25 30 into my thousand square meters you could roughly double up at maybe two for a 5500 week pretty similar to what we have here like one one well-trained professional person that's got the jump up go-get-'em attitude can manage this setup which is 1,500 square meters of bed plus the tunnels working fast for those long hours and not necessarily dealing with sales now our sales is complicated because we're selling everything all at the same time in Rico and that's chicken and pork and beef and eggs and so our sales time is split between five and the prizes and we have a very neat sales model which is we've talked about in other videos so that's you know sales and marketing is half the job of the farmer and harvest and post-harvest is half the job in the garden so to bear that in mind it sounds similar sort of thing like 1,500 square meters is plenty and it's my advice is that you go as small as you can to manage it intensively yeah don't just add more beds because you need more money double down on your spacings and planning so that you get beds full all of the time throughout the year it's a real big problem I've seen as people say alright now I've had a kid and now I need some more money so I'll just make more beds but that's usually alarm bells go off for me yeah totally and and you've got to build your enterprise up and you couldn't go in I wouldn't but if you haven't done this before recommend going in with 2,000 meters even a thousand there's a lot because as Richard says you you need to manage it all the time and make sure yeah your cropping is tight so succession planning and also things like inter planting occasionally but we're usually cropping crop out next one in right have your plans ready how small can you go that's the question you're actually growing a something yeah so if it's high-value salad crops for example you know even less than size and square meters it could be viable great that's all we got time for folks it's been such pleasure to have you here and there's some great folks on the farm we've got internship coming on for the next weeks now we're going back into whole farm planning so it's a little bit jumbled around and there's been some really nice days here focused on no big market gun it's been a pleasure to have you thanks so much to come in in the middle of your season to come out here well it's a pleasure to see thanks yeah it's always a hard time to travel its sweetness beautiful and if you feel like coming here for a few weeks in yeah it's been great to have you and we're gonna have a time to chat with Steph on a separate video that we'll put out so that's gonna be nice too pleasure to have you here and thanks so much for your views and comments and shares and we'll put a link to Charles's and Steph's channel below and most of you follow them already anyway but if you don't then there's a wealth of you know decades of information and experience that Charles has put out for nodig growing specifically and many books that he's written it you find online too thanks so much folks you in the next review [Music]

Channel: Richard Perkins

Views: 119,083

Rating: 4.9342432 out of 5

Keywords: nodig, marketgardening, ridgedale, soil biology

Id: gyNE_AJeny8

Length: 38min 5sec (2285 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 28 2019