Does no-dig growing really work? How To Manage Your Soil!

hello everyone and welcome back to mossy bottom on this somewhat overcast June day with rain forecast for much of the next week the irish summer has finally arrived this video is all about this stuff soil that most wonderful of mediums without which life as we know it would not exist in particular though this video is all about no dig gardening the pros and the cons which is the part people don't usually tell you about and no dig gardening for anyone who doesn't know is the technique of using compost or well rotted manure to cover soil usually with a layer of cardboard or something similar underneath to keep weeds down and then planting directly into the compost essentially mimicking what happens in in a forest environment in which leaf litter from the trees would cover the surface of the soil being slowly broken down by fungi earthworms and bacteria so the idea is to eliminate the need for back-breaking digging while still maintaining a rich fertile topsoil for growing your plants in usually vegetables and as I'm sure many of you know by now I grow most of my own food here at mossy bottom and this is my fifth growing season doing so my total vegetable plot is just under an acre so a pretty big area for growing in and I grow just about everything from potatoes and peas to sweet corn and sunflowers and everything else in between all from seed you name it if it grows in this part of the world at least then there's a good chance that I've either grown it or try to grow it except for garlic which I can't abide I no world unleash the hate and one question which I'm asked quite frequently in fact is whether or not I use a no dig system usually with reference to a veg growing legend here on YouTube who is a well-known advocate of the no dig approach so here's a list of the questions we're going to tackle in this video firstly why adopt a nodig approach what are the main advantages secondly what was my experience of growing vegetables using a no dig system what worked what didn't work and what do I do now then what are the different types of soil and how does soil type influence no dig growing we're going to talk about texture structure compaction and weeds and not all weeds are made equal by the way then what are the optimum soil conditions for vegetables to grow well in what should you be aiming for and finally what are the different options for maintaining soil and more importantly what works and what doesn't work in specific conditions we're going to talk about digging how often how deep rotavator x' and i do actually have one which i'm going to demonstrate what are they good and bad for mulching which is a very popular technique at the moment and green manures so let's jump right in there with question one why adopt a no dig approach in the first place well the most obvious advantage is that it saves you the effort of digging as I already mentioned and if you've got a big vegetable plot like me or an allotment and or just they're not so strong back which is the problem many of us have they're not having to dig every year can be a real game-changer in terms of what you can accomplish secondly by adopting a no dig system you're not disturbing the soil ecosystem and yes there really is an entire ecosystem down there in the soil soil isn't nearly as chaotic has a lot of people think it is for instance 80% of microbes live in only the top 5 centimeters of soil so it's really quite organized thirdly by planting into compost or well rotted manure you're giving your plants direct access to that most fertile top layer of soil which effectively is giving them a bit of a head start in life finally exposing soil to the elements by digging can if it's done badly which generally is in commercial agriculture I'm afraid to say cause a whole raft of different issues increased moisture loss in dry conditions flooding in wet conditions as well as things like nitrogen leaching which is where nitrogen which is added in the form of fertilizers by farmers is washed away in in floods into waterways because the soil has no ability to hold on to it if it's bare and exposed in general you should never have bare soil in a garden or on a farm and across the know dig system it largely avoids that problem entirely it sounds amazing doesn't it so let me tell you about what happened in that first year in which I adopted an entirely no dig system for my vegetable plot so behind me you can see my potato ridges which are doing really well this year and you can probably hear some quacking and honking in the background - that would be my ducks and pigs but the area of land which I use for vegetable growing it's never been cultivated before I moved here and I've been told that by a neighbor in his 60s who was born there by so I think he'd probably would know it was used to store peat for the farmstead that used to be here and possibly keep a horse or two during the warmer months but certainly for at least the last 40 years it's just been left to the weeds so when I first arrived it was a mixture of nettle hogweed lots of creeping Buttercup which is a fairly uniquely Irish species any one in Ireland all know all about it I'm sure things like foxglove thistle and of course grass very very very long grass in many places up to my shoulders and the first thing I did of course upon arriving here and surveying my new land was to buy an old scythe with a good sharpening stone and set to work levelling the weeds to carve out my first vegetable area and having cleared a patch and read several books on permaculture which expound the many virtues of no dig gardening I should say as well I'd spent a year volunteering on farms in Canada so I kinda knew what I was doing already I then went to my local supermarket and acquired two massive bales of scrap cardboard which they charged me for I should say rather cheekily each of which must have weighed close to a ton driving them back on my um my roof rack was it was neither fun nor I suspect legal but having got them here just about I then spread them spread the cardboard over the area that I wanted to grow vegetables in until it was completely covered no gaps whatsoever finally I made an arrangement with my local horse riding stables to collect mountains of well rotted manure and did about I think seven or eight trips back and forth in my trusty Honda Jazz filling up a ton bag with with rotted manure in the boot because I had no trailer at the time driving it back and then spreading it copiously over the cardboard in the end I think it was about three inches or 10 centimeters thick the layer of manure and believe me the cardboard when you're collecting alone took one heck of a lot of time to do and as well as costing a fair whack in petrol I would say I then left the soil for several months while cultivating seedlings in modular trays before planting out directly into the well rotted manure and it really was well rotted at that point I didn't go for the fresh stuff I was quite specific in my requirements when I called up that riding stable along with a little store-bought compost which I added to each plant root ball to give them a bit of a boost the best possible start I could so what happened next you're asking well there were two major problems with that system when I applied it here firstly the roots of just about every plant grew outwards rather than downwards which made them very vulnerable to falling over especially as this is quite a windy spot surrounded by fields a lot of the crops I grew in that first year ended up on their sides and yes I did puncture holes through the cardboard in case you're wondering to try and encourage them to root down to give them a bit of a helping hand but with all that nutrient-rich crumbly manure surrounding them and beneath them compacted heavy clay soil knotted with weeds and roots and those young vegetable plants really did take a lot of convincing the second major problem was the weeds beneath that cardboard layer all of which were really well-established perennials like metal and hogweed with interlinking root systems that spread all the way under this under the soil going down probably a metre in some places and what happened is they began breaking up through the cardboard layer and not just where there were tiny gaps here and there or around the plants but absolutely everywhere as soon as the cardboard got a bit wet and started to soften up the perennial weeds started to come up through it after a year the entire plot had been reclaimed by the very same weeds which I covered with cardboard and we're talking thick cardboard here the stuff that you know the corrugated box type not the thin stuff so I couldn't have really done any more the bottom line my yield in that first growing season was probably about 30% on the same area of land compared to what it is now so significantly less so let's get back to the soil because in understanding it we can explain just about everything that went wrong the soil type in the area that I live is called AG lay which basically means it's predominantly made up of clay rather than sand or silt and clay soils are associated with high fertility they retain nutrients really well so you don't have to add that much fertilizer which is great but poor structure they're usually compacted and hard for roots to penetrate and you can see the area behind me which has been sort of loosely Dugger he still has these huge chunks of really compacted soil unfortunately what that means is that young plants such as my vegetables in that first year with tender newly formed roots have absolutely no chance of penetrating that heavy compacted soil unless its first dug and conversely old well-established perennial weeds develop huge inter woven root systems allowing them to survive for years even when completely covered with cardboard or tarp and deprived of light and incidentally I've covered areas here with tarp for a whole year right through the winter and summer and the next year the same weeds still grow up again it's not new seeds germinating it's the same perennial weeds the roots are just so Hardy they survive years on end so what if you live in an area with a sandy soil like this yes we are in a polytunnel right now my newly constructed tunnel which is going to feature its very own video coming out soon back to the soil if you have a sandy soil like this then you're gonna have the opposite problem to the soil that's out there which is predominantly clay you're gonna have great structure it's very crumbly it's very friable easy for the roots to penetrate but you're gonna have poor fertility cuz it doesn't hold on to the nutrients you're more likely with a sandy soil to have annual or ephemeral weeds with weaker root systems that are easier to pull out that goes back to what I was saying about not all weeds being equal so if you did do what I did with the no dig system there's a good chance it would probably work which is why no dig gardening systems and not a one-size-fits-all solution you have to understand the growing environment and particularly your soil to know what technique is going to work for you so that brings me nicely onto the question of what soil conditions do young plants like vegetable seedlings need to do really well and this is specifically soil conditions firstly they need good structure there's a reason the compost that you buy from garden centers is crumbly like sand and not compacted like clay plants take up both oxygen and moisture water exclusively through their roots which is why there's no point in watering the leaves or the stems only the roots so the soil they grow in has to be a good medium for both if it's compacted it's no good especially for young plants with weak roots number two they need nutrients or fertility NPK you may have heard of nitrogen phosphorus and potassium they're the main nutrients although there are a whole raft of other ones too and if you have a heavy clay soil like mine you don't need to worry too much about nutrients for the first few years because it holds on to the nutrients so well but the best source of nutrients is of course organic matter and organic matter it not only adds fertility to the soil but it also improves the structure so it's a win-win whether you have clay or sandy soil or something in between thirdly they need the right pH to take up the nutrients but that's a whole other subject worthy of its own video so I'm not going to cover it now so the obvious question now is what did I do in year two and more importantly what do I do now to maintain the soil for vegetable growing well in my second growing season here back in 2017 I decided for the first time to dig it's what my grandfather taught me as a young boy when growing carrots and he always had a bumper crop so I figured there must be something to it I used a digging fork like this hopefully you can see it now a long handle makes digging so much easier by the way don't use those short handled forks for digging it's much harder I dug about 25 centimeters deep and I then pulled out by hand all those huge perennial roots dug in my organic matter in the form of well rotted manure this time sourced from my very generous neighbor down the road and of course from my own compost heap and turn the soil back over again covering up the manure and the difference in productivity in that second season was astonishing my vegetable roots screwed down not out like they had the previous year giving me much stronger larger plants which were able to cope with the winds that we get outside and the weeds which grew in the soil were all from seeds that are blown in so they were much easier to remove using a hoe rather than the perennial weeds which had been there and we're really well established and really had to be dug out to be gotten rid of and that's the approach which I still follow when first cultivating a wild area the only difference now is that I put these two beauties on there first and they do 90% of the digging and weed removal for me sadly they don't like nettle roots as I mentioned in my Pig video but I suppose nobody's perfect so once an area has been cultivated and grown in like this this is an old vegetable plot from last year I then plant a green manure like this and green manure is just a cover crop which protects the soil either from drying out and becoming compacted or from flooding and leaching nutrients now this is clover you can see behind me in the old vegetable beds and I planted it all over this section it's mixed in with grass and some other weeds and a bit of kale that's overgrown the amazing thing about clover is that it also fixes nitrogen back into the soil has a relationship with the type of bacteria that takes nitrogen from the atmosphere and adds it back into the soil so it's also functioning as a fertilizer and the other thing I also do is I heavily mulch my vegetable areas over the winter and then cover them with a membrane and that just allows the worms to integrate the compost for me giving me lovely crumbly soil every spring when I take the membrane off and that usually means that the following year I don't need to dig per se I just need to loosen and loosening soil is a heck of a lot easier than turning it believe me all you're doing is am stir king of forking and breaking it up a bit to allow oxygen and moisture in so the roots can penetrate a bit more easily so it's really just that first year that initial conversion from compacted soil with overgrown perennial weeds which requires either digging or a couple of good pigs or a combination of the two more likely particularly if like me you have a heavy clay soil after that first year you can certainly maintain soil condition with minimal digging using a no dig approach especially if you apply mulching and using green manures to maintain the soil like I do of course it does somewhat depend on what you're growing for instance if you want to grow potatoes like the ones behind me without digging then you're going to need one heck of a lot of compost or well rotted manure to cover them with and there are definitely plenty of videos on YouTube of people successfully growing spuds with a no dig system but what they tend not to mention is the mountain of manure or straw or some other medium which they seem to have on tap somehow and that they're using as an alternative to that soil and getting that to the plot where you want to grow the potatoes can be more work it certainly would be more work for me than just digging a little trench especially if you maintain your soil in good condition finally what about one of these this is called a soil rotavator or tiller depending on which part of the world you live in and in organic circles they're very much maligned for two reasons first of all they supposedly killer --the worms and secondly they only turn the surface layer of the soil and create compaction layer underneath so I only use this thing my rotavator in areas which I'm growing crops which need very very fine soil like carrots which I'm growing over here in this area along with lots of weeds right now even after digging if you've got a heavy clay soil like mine then it's gonna look something like this this is in Doug with a fork and believe it or not a lot of plants veggies will grow well in this lots of over ground leafy vegetables like brassicas will do fantastically well carrots alas and other root crops will not so for those you need to turn the soil into something like this which is a very fine crumbly soil easily done if you've got a sandy soil but if you don't or your soil is very compacted you do need to use one of these or at least it's the easiest way to do it as for the two major charges motivators do kill some earthworms but contrary to popular belief they certainly don't annihilate every worm in the soil and the reason for that is that the blades just don't spin quickly enough they operate in a really low gear turning relatively slowly with very high torque so that they can get through the hard soil so most worms if you observe they just get moved around rather than chopped up it's a bit of a myth I think that your rotavator acts like a a circular saw just dicing everything up in the soil it just doesn't do that you're also probably breeding millions of new worms in your compost heap every year and which then get added back into the soil in an organic system like this so overall you aren't gonna wipe out your earthworm population by using a rotavator at least if you use it sensibly as for creating a compaction layer yes if used year after year on the same patch they probably will create a kind of basin of hard soil which the blades skid off only turning the soil above that the solution of course stick a fork in and loosen the compacted soil you don't need to turn it necessarily just aerate it and fracture fish-smell and fracture that layer and don't rotor bait every year it sounds obvious but you'd be surprised how many people do it there's absolutely no need to use a rotavator on the same patch of soil year after year especially if you protect that soil over the winter with mulch and green manures and practice good crop rotation you shouldn't be growing carrots on the same patch year after year it's just asking for problems like carrot fly anyway motivating or tilling something that should be done occasionally for specific crops not relied on as an alternative to good soil management so finally how do I feel after five seasons here growing veggies at mossy bottom about no dig as a system of growing well I love the permaculture concept I'm gonna make loads more videos about permaculture it's a big part of what I do here and the idea of replicating a forest I think is just genius it's brilliant I think generally speaking nature's got it right and if we can understand and imitate that within growing systems then that's just really smart and too often agriculture and crop growing depends on brute strength usually in the form of oil rather than intelligent design that particularly commercial farming something which I hope is going to change as techniques like no dig and permaculture become more widely known and accepted in terms of gardening though I think no dig definitely has a part to play if it's used alongside digging as a way of maintaining a healthy soil medium it's not in my experience the right thing to do in year one unless the area of soil that you're using it on has recently been cultivated or maybe if it's a very sandy soil so that's just about it for this video hopefully you didn't find the subject matter as dry as the soil babam we've had the sunniest spring on record here in Ireland so exposed soil and I've still got a bit of it myself and it's certainly paying a price it's time for me to get out there and do some more planting thanks as always for your support and feedback there'll be another video coming very soon and so look out for that until the next time from me and from masu is out there somewhere probably terrorizing my new ducklings by her now you a rustic boy good boy boss dig come on do all my work for me good boy good boy if you don't have pigs then a dog works pretty well too

Channel: Mossy Bottom

Views: 89,785

Keywords: no-dig, no dig, no dig growing, no-dig growing, does no dig work, does no dig growing work, soil management, manage soil, soil science, caring for soil, no dig pros and cons, permaculture, permaculture no dig, homesteading no dig, self-sufficiency, sustainable growing, growing vegetables

Id: iN68i9vGfxE

Length: 25min 24sec (1524 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 19 2020