Minimal Disturbance Gardening | A Pragmatic Approach for Self-Sufficiency

hello and a very warm welcome to this mini course on minimal disturbance gardening this is going to be focusing on sharing with you the introduction the context of where it comes from and the five approaches as well as the two attitudes of minimal disturbance gardening this only really has one goal it's about growing food sustainably and making that as accessible and approachable to as many gardeners as possible so they can nourish their families with really good honest food minimal disturbance gardening is a balanced and practical growing approach that equally prioritizes the production of nutritious food as well as longterm total Garden Health any soyal disturbance that is done is strategic thoughtful and it takes into account multiple points the minimal aspect of minimal disturbance gardening takes into account that depending on what stage you're at and also your context there's different variations of minimal and minimal is far more achievable than no and it's down to you to kind of think about what is minimal in your context not anyone else the fact is nobody knows your garden your situation your challenges your goals as well as you do and also people following the exact same gardening method can experience very different results gardening is not black and white it's not no dig versus double dig I think it's very much about in the gray I would definitely lean in the dark gray area leaning towards no dig but with certain challenges that I face I need to be flexible about it it's also important to remember that different soils have very different needs and a lot of people experience just putting on a layer of compost on top of their soil it just doesn't work sometimes you need to have a little bit of drastic action of incorporating that organic matter especially if you don't have access to lots of beautiful compost to mix that in in the first year so you set yourself up for long-term success so where I am my climate is very wet wet soils are very susceptible to compaction I get around 1,300 mil of rain here in this Garden annually and that is around 50% more than the nicer growing areas of the UK like Kent Herford and Somerset so that is a lot more rain that I'm having to deal with and so I sometimes just need to adjust as suits with really wet climates or even really dry Kims the best thing that you can do is add a lot of organic matter to the soil but that requires compost or it requires material that can break down into organic matter and I think one of the most important things to recognize is that minimal disturbance gardening understands that either if you're buying in compost that for the vast majority of people is really expensive or if you're making your own compost especially if you're starting out you've got a bit of a time delay where you can't always access that compost and sometimes there's going to be times where you might be really good on creating your own homemade compost and then there's a year where something doesn't happen and that's life we are gardening we're working with the elements it can't be perfect nature is imperfectly perfect and so we are going to come up against challenges for example Pest and disease issues cost issues relating to budget and challenges like maybe not having enough fertility for a grain season and so we just have to open ourselves up to being able to work around that as best as possible therefore a core factor of minimal disturbance gardening is being able to open up gardeners to a whole range of different growing techniques outside of say no dig so some examples would be trench composting or cover cropping that you kind of incorporate into the soil or even broad forking but I'll go into that in a little bit minimal disturbance gardening is also very much angled towards a journey of self-sufficiency and one of the core elements about self-sufficiency of course is cost but it's also about problem solving and being able to think outside of the box being self-sufficient means you have to be reactive and agile and experimental and curious and the only way to do that is to throw away the rule book and instead follow a set of principles that you can adapt and shape around your specific context if you're confined to too many rules what that does is it snuffs out the creativity element for me as a gardener I think this is shared with many other gardeners there are multiple considerations or multiple different goals that we have from our garden and if we're only focused on one aspect and everything has to fit around that one thing what it does is that it kind of devalues all of the other considerations and all of the other goals and he kind of get stuck whereas what really we should do if we feel stuck is see that as an opportunity to just take a bit of a step back look at the whole context and then find the best approach to to suit that trying to tick as many boxes as possible rather than the one big golden box and forgetting about everything else underneath I know that I'm always going to be very close to no dig but I'm not going to be exclusively no dig and I'm not just talking about using a fork to help with harvesting some potatoes there's there's some occasions where I do think some disruption or disturbance is necessary but disturbance is a part of nature we'll go into that in a little bit a big thing for me is that minimal disturbance gardening advocates for no guilt gardening what really shocked me in a recent um post that I did someone commented saying guilt comes with a territory of gardening and I just thought like how sad is that we we shouldn't feel guilty about growing food what I always say to people when when people get so caught up in in this versus that I just say look if you're growing your own food it is Miles better no matter what method you're using you know maybe I'm not I'm not keen on the chemical side but if you're just double digging versus no digging that is Miles better than going to a supermarket and relying on mass-produced monoculture crops that have been flown in or shipped in or whatever the fact that there's such heated arguments about how someone chooses to grow their own food is quite frankly ridiculous I will never be an advocate of double dig gardening but if that is what someone chooses to do and many people really enjoy the process of digging then I'm like you know what that is fine all power to you it is your garden is down to you to know what you enjoy doing and part of it is the enjoyment of garden why should you feel guilty about you know digging or fing over soil if you actually really enjoy doing that and it all comes from Context it all comes from understanding that there's positives and negatives behind every approach but we need to really stop gatekeeping and that's why I've try to do as much as possible with minimal disturbance gardening because minimal disturbance gardening has that goal of minimal disturbance but allowing it to be flexible with how that is perceived so there's no chance for this to be taken into an ideology or for like Dogma to come out of it and that's what I've tried to do with minimal disturbance gardening is with the the principles it's not a set of rules it's a set of principles but they principles that kind of like a nice guideline to aim for and so no matter what happens or no matter what you do you never need to feel guilty about it and I was I was shocked by how many people have resonated with that message what's also really important to recognize is that minimal disturbance gardening and most of the conversations around gardening are very much centered around the growing of annuals because if you're growing a perennial like this lemon Vina you know I dig a hole stick it in and it just stays there and that's fine but what we have to understand is that annuals in nature we almost always only find annuals in nature in areas of disturbed ground there have been comments saying that nature doesn't dig itself up which is why Badgers roost in trees and moles AR ruminant animals but what does happen is say a tree falls over you've got that bare ground nature doesn't like be ground be ground is an invitation for erosion and so what happens is all of the annals quickly grow and they protect the ground and the reason why they grow is because when you've had disturbance it kills off a lot of the microbes especially the the bacteria and also some of the fungi and that releases a lot of plant available nutrients and anals are very hungry because of their fast growth and so that's what helps them create that environment for them to grow really quickly and protect the soil and then it goes into a process of succession where it turns from annuals into B annuals and then you get a short live perennials and then if completely left it's probably just going to turn back into a forest when we're talking about annual growing we don't need to worry about forests we don't need fungally dominated soils there's this massive obsession with creating a fungally dominated soil in an annual Garden again I do understand some of the benefits and I I've seen amazing results from not dig Gardens but I've also seen some really subpar results and so using the idea of permaculture which is looking at different patterns in nature and using those patterns to help Design Systems to me it makes complete sense and it's totally acceptable to encourage a little bit of disturb an because you are creating that naturally bacterially dominated soil which is what annuals thrive in and it's really as simple as that one of the benefits of no dig is if you don't disturb the soil you don't get that flush of weeds but that is to me telling me something that flush of weeds happens because suddenly there's a load more plant available nutrients there's disturbance it's an environment where annuals want to grow and so then ask myself a question is that maybe the best time to sew annuals annual crops and then fight the weeds and maybe you're okay fighting weeds maybe you don't want to fight weeds and again that is your choice there is no rules there's just your choice and you do what you do best and that's all I'm wishing for is that gardening just becomes this thing where everyone has fun everyone can do what they want to do and I really was not expecting to have to talk about things like this but after I did the uh the D of no di video and seeing how many people resonated with it you know it's got a 98.9% like ratio um and it's been like the second most commented on video just go have a look at the comments I realize okay fine I don't really feel like I need to talk about this but at the same time I feel that there is a great need to talk about it um and kind of just bring the fun back into gardening you know and I think one thing I could definitely do better is share more of the failures because when you're looking at YouTube videos on how to grow something it's always going to like show you it in its prime and this is how you do it and sometimes it doesn't always work out that way so that's a little pledge from from my side just to show that you know it isn't always perfect nature is perfectly imperfect and so if a garden is imperfect I don't know that's fine interestingly there have been some comments saying that I've been overthinking things but they've been coming from sources that feel highly threatened by any slight challenge towards their ideology and I I don't have time for that I'll repeat myself again all I'm trying to do is make gardening as accessible and as approachable to as many people as possible so they can grow food and help the environment I'm going to be sharing the principles now these aren't rules these are kind of goals or targets to aim for and if you do a little bit of everything or a at least understand the importance of it it will help with your decision- making and help uh create a little bit more balance this is very much been designed using different parts of permaculture particularly the the three ethics of permaculture of people care Earth care and fair share and so I'm hoping that the fair share side of this is creating free content like it but also the the people care comes under the Equal priority of grown nutritious food and the Earth care is is whilst ensuring Garden Health not just soil Centric but everything above ground as well entire ecos system Garden Health which I'll be covering very soon there is to be absolutely no gatekeeping about minimal disturbance gardening I think it's impossible because of keeping all the principles kind of nice and free and flowing uh it's the same with permaculture and the principles are just a curation of different thoughts Concepts techniques methods approaches that of cherry pick that I think all fit nicely together can all work with one another um and hopefully nice and easy to follow the first principle is to assess before action when you're undertaking Garden tasks and you come to a point where some disturbance might be required you look at all of the options on the table and you choose the one which makes best sense in terms of as most beneficial and can tick as many boxes as you feasibly can for example example if you found that a couple of your raised beds are quite compacted at the start of the gro season obviously like a nice long-term thing to do would just be much that with a bunch of compost but it's the start of the groin season and so you kind of take a step back and the next phase of minimality would be either adding something like soil microbes through jadam microbial solution or maybe you don't have time for that or it's not warm enough to make that so then the next line of minimality is to use a broadw to remediate that reduce that compaction and you can get straight into planting and sewing and Away you go one of the best examples is that there are usually different stages of minimal depending on the stage of creating a garden if you're just starting out a garden like we did for the Wi-Fi Garden here in our in our growing project what we actually did was we topped off all of the turf and we got compost and M and we forked it into the top 10 15 cm and planted straight into it and we had absolutely amazing results I didn't have loads of cardboards and also I didn't have as much compost as I wanted to to create a nice kind of deep mulch of like maybe 3 4 Ines on top to plant into I only had enough of maybe one to two inches so I thought actually let's just incorporate that and plant into it and we had absolutely fantastic results out of the gate yes it was more effort but I really enjoyed that effort I kind of like a bit of physical work um and it might have taken more time but in certain situations you might have more time than budget and so that was one example of kind of causing minimal disturbance that is now turned into a majoritively a no dig setup where occasionally in the future we might broad Fork it if there is compaction but apart from that I see no other reason why we'd need to go in and make drastic changes another example is you might have an allotment or you might be setting up a garden and you want to open up a space at a time so you could start making your own compost that you could access in like a few months time or you could do something like trench composting where you get that first raised bed or you get your first inground bed you dig a trench you pack it with loads of veg scraps cover it back over and then you plant on top that all breaks down and incorporates and then as you harvest things or you might want to lightly Fork it to turn it in at the end of the season you've added a huge amount of fertility of organic mat of carbon into that soil and then moving forward you can treat it like a no dig setup now with more established beds minimal disturbance will probably return back to Broad forking if the soil is really compacted and you're really struggling to either get your hand into the soil or rain is not actually going into the soil it's just it's just washing off it all puddling on the surface you don't want that so what you could do is look at mulching for like a a more long-term solution you could look at Broad forking and then mulching you could look at just adding a load of compost and covering it there's multiple different factors you may find that you don't quite have enough compost as you want most of the beds are mulched but for example in a poly tunnel you'll be growing really really hungry crops like cucumbers and tomatoes and so what you do instead around 2 months before transplant saying is that you just dig a hole where you're going to be planting out a tomato and you put in loads of Ved scraps and other types of amendments cover it over put a stick to Mark and then a couple of months later you plant a tomato plant on top instead of having to buy in compost and that is also a really great method if you're growing things like winter squash outside you don't have to mulch the whole bed with compost that could be you know muled with something else like seaweed or you could do light layers of chop and drop if you suffer from slug damage you don't want too thick of a organic material mulch but where you do plant that plant you bury in a lot of fertility in that one specific spot or location two things that I did at the start of this season in the old Garden was that I didn't quite have as much compost as I wanted so when I planted potatoes I got loads of like Nettles and Duck and all sorts of things that I put at the bottom of the hole added just a little bit of rock dust and planted the potatoes on there harvested them got absolutely amazing results and another example was deciding to use a broad Fork on some of the beds the second principle is ecosystem emphasis it's seeing your garden as a as a whole like entire ecosystem that relates to everything that's around the outside borders but you want it to kind of be a home for wildlife not just a holiday destination and so instead of like some gardening methods only focus on soil health I'm thinking about all total Garden health I want to have as many microbes above ground and below ground I want as many arthopods I want as many different variants of wildlife to create a very thriving ecosystem this is because like in nature where you have diversity and you have lots of things going on it is much better at maintaining resilience and also it's important to remember that whilst soil feed plants plants also feed the soil it's a symbiotic relationship and also I want to do my bit for local insect populations and so the way of focusing on ecosystem emphasis is by creating habitats for pollinators and other beneficial insects above ground and the other thing is to use various different microbes or microbial amendments like JMS or lab from Korean natural farming that can be used either on the soil or like lab it can be used on Plants so you you encourage total Garden microbial Health a really important factor is that if you do have some pest in your garden in most cases it's actually a really good thing because if there were no pests whatsoever then there is no reason for the Predators to be there and so that's why I don't like to just obliterate things with chemicals I like to make sure that there's a nice balance there's a nice balance where I feel like I will have the insects that my Army of beneficial insects to help me wherever possible in some cases I do need to step in and I might want to remove some affected plants but it's just thinking about the whole garden Health not just about the soil now focusing just on the soil Health element that is adding carbon into the soil like mulching that breaks down adding compost incorporating cover crops carbon is the building block of kind of Life as We Know It And so adding that into the soil and building that carbon content through organic matter is very beneficial the third principle of minimal disturbance gardening is responsible resourcing and this takes into a few accounts the first is to wherever possible if you have access to local sustainable resources that you can use it could be things like food waste from a restaurant or you might have access to seaweed after a stormy day on the beach you can pick up some seaweed or perhaps there's a local bike shop where you can get loads of big bits of cardbo boxes it's encouraged for you to use those materials another example of responsible resourcing is very much an economic one not everyone has a budget to be able to just go out and buy organic seeds in fact a lot of the seeds I I seow aren't certified organic even though I am growing them in a very organic way and so being responsible economically in tune with your household is a really important thing to do and I don't think it's spoken enough about in the gardening world and again it's a source of of guilt where people feel like oh no I've I've brought seeds that aren't organic or I've bought F1 seeds or something again you're growing food that that is like the that's the most important thing all these other things are like not the most important thing it comes back round to only you knowing your garden and your goals and your challenges the best one challenge that I have in this area is access to bulk compost if I want a proper bulk compost supplier it's at least over an hour away and transport cost alone will be about 200 pounds I can get bulk compost in dumpy bags but again it's just everyone's situation is different and I think it's so important that we account for that one of my favorite ideas about responsible resourcing is swapping and baring and exchanging with people in your area for example seeds or plants or cuttings and I really think that there there could be so many more ways where gardeners can create more seed swaps more plant swaps more just informal things where we can all help one another share excess share Surplus share cool things as well as sharing advice such as potential local resources that you can get Savvy with and use in your garden the fourth principle is dynamic crop polyculture so this is using a wide variety of different planting techniques when practically possible to encourage good diversity and polyculture to create a more productive and resilient Garden so these techniques include things like succession planting Gap planting intercropping companion planting and also not putting all of your eggs in one basket so that means splitting your staples into more than one location maybe it could be two or three in different corners of the garden so that there's less chance of a pest or disease just obliterating the entire crop the dynamic part means that there's always new things going in and other things coming out and it avoids the idea of ever needing crop rotation because again crop rotation doesn't exist in nature it's effective especially on a larger scale but in a garden you just don't need to worry about it instead I use things like succession planting so whenever I harvest a crop I try and grow something new in its place as soon as possible so behind me I've got winter cabbages and what was growing before the winter cabbages with my onions and I'd planted some pack Choy in between and also some spring onions and so there's always just different things growing together what this Dynamic polyculture allows is that it prevents a buildup of pest and diseases especially in the soil and it also helps address particular potential nutrient imbalances and diversity is resilience in nature so we can apply that to our Gardens Gap plugging is a very easy method of creating a polyculture that's why where if you start harvesting stuff or a gap emerges in one of your race beds you just put in a different crop and let that grow and it's a very nice way of doing it another example is Corner planting like planting something that attracts beneficial insects like Nerium or borage or kandula on a corner of a raised bed allow it to kind of like flow over and it just helps create that nice diversity what's really important is striking a balance between good polyculture but also pretty easy management because remember we are trying to grow food as well and so it's down to you to realize just how much of a complex polyculture you want to do for me the majority of my focus is on succession planting Gap plugging and then growing a few nice borders for attracting pollinators around the area and in some cases I'll allow certain plants to run to flower like some fennel I'll leave some fennel behind because those are loved by hoverflies and Lace wings and also one thing I have noticed is that if a garden is pretty packed with plants I very very rarely see any kind of pest or disease concern there might be something slight and Tiny but it's it's very much focused in one specific area and so I haven't got any rooted evidence for this but it is a pattern that I continually see especially when I visit other Gardens that are nice and packed in with lots of things growing so I find that interesting and also going back to my permaculture Roots is very much looking at pattern recognition or observing patterns and then thinking oh what's going on here and and looking a little bit underneath under the surface so to speak the fifth principle is continuous soil cover so wherever possible there shouldn't be bare soil again this is just a Target sometimes there will be a bit of bare soil for a bit of time and that's okay but utilizing methods such as succession planting or cover crops or mulching with compost or even putting something over like cardboard to reduce erosion and reduce exposure to the elements of bare ground over winter these are all different ways that we can easily protect the soil wherever possible try and look at how you can cover soil where it's going to add fertility I.E adding compost or mulches or even cover crops or green manures but sometimes as I just mentioned it's okay to use something that isn't really going to break down or provide much fertility like cardboard because you don't have to worry about weeds and then the following spring you just remove it and you can plant right into it for me in this climate especially the wet climate the soil is most susceptible to damage and compaction over the winter months and that's the most likely time that there's not going to be anything growing on the surface and so that's when I usually take the most precautionary action my goal is always going to be adding around an inch uh 2 to 3 cm of compost on each bed but there are some occasions or some years where I have skipped that for a year and I've still had really good results I don't want to skip that for many years because growing food is a process of extracting nutrients whatever you harvest to eat is nutrients that you're taking out of the system and so you got to think about how to at least eventually get those nutrients back into the system but all I want to say is that was there is like that Target to aim for of adding compost as a layer on the surface every single year don't worry if you skip a year there's other ways of working around that so if I don't have as much compost as I want it kind of comes back round if I'm wanting to cover the soil especially over winter comes back around to that kind of assess before action for anything that I do in the garden look at all of the options that are out there and choose which one that I think makes the most amount of sense and part of what I want is for the principles to all kind of form a bit of a interconnected web where they can all help and support one another one aspect I'm particularly excited about with the idea of continuous cover and minimal disturbance gardening is utilizing a greater array of cover crops and green manures in the and setup especially over winter so I can have living roots in the soil feeding the soil life that then I could potentially at the start of spring especially if I'm still developing beds and they're only one or two years old I can cut them and mix them in and then transplant semi-mature seedlings into and uh and then away they go in a a nice bacterially dominated soil that has had far less disturbance than say digging in a lot of compost the other benefit of course is covered soil does help reduce weed pressures if you've got a cover crop growing then it's far less likely for weed to take over and if you've got a physical barrier like cardboard then weeds aren't going to be growing there those are the five principles which we're going to recap soon very soon but there's two kind of attitudes or or mindsets that I think um are also beneficial that work hand inand with minimal disturbance gardening the first one is be observant because if you're being observant you're watching what's happening observation it harvests information and with information and experience that brings knowledge if you are new to gardening there are probably going to be times where you might make the wrong decision if you're looking back in hindsight but all you're going to be doing is building up your knowledge so you get to a stage where most of the decision making that you make is very intuitive it's just a skill it's just a practice it's not something that you just get straight away but it's something thing that builds on top of each other as time progresses so be observant always like just have a little look look look at what's going on in your garden look from different angles but also observe things that kind of stand out to you that make you think hm and it leads on to the second attitude of just be curious because that is my biggest driver in the garden I'm I'm curious about trying different techniques about trying different varieties about trying to grow different flavors and if you align your gardening with your curiosity it's going to be a lot more kind of fun and satisfying because you've got another reason or another goal behind your growing that will help keep you on track so to recap I've come up with a an easy acronym to remember which is to recap the two stands for the two different attitudes are is for responsible resourcing e is for ecosystem emphasis C is for continuous soil cover a is for assess before action and P stands for polyculture in the form of dynamic crop poly culture I have a few thoughts for you moving forward from here so like if you're starting out and if you're a new Gardener pick one or two of the principles that might Stand Out most to you or excite you the most it's the same that I say if someone's new to permaculture it's there might be one particular principle that I don't know you just you just hear it and you think that's interesting well follow that interest follow that Curiosity and then you can start to you'll see naturally how everything else starts to incorporate and and work together as a team it's it's very much teamwork uh gardening and and permaculture the other element is that because this is annual focused one of the pro probably the most important thing is compost production so I always have a priority on always trying to as an Optimum have access to compost but to understand that sometimes can't always do that but I love to use different growing techniques where I can make compost but also have other benefits at the same time like a hot bed and you might be in a rural area and there might be a local organic farm or a natural Farm where you can get access to to well broken down animal manure be it cow or horse manure that you can also use in your garden that you can use instead of worrying about trying to create loads of compost it's kind of been reactive to what is there available to you in your location and tailoring your garden and and your goals around that a really good habit is to just question things try not to always just fall into the Trap of following the crowd the final thing for me to say is that it's just about having good honest gardening that is very practical logical reasonable um and a lot of fun that's very much the theory of min minimal disturbance gardening covered and over the coming months we'll be sharing a lot of different practical videos related around it in my upcoming book The self-sufficiency Garden that's available to pre-order I've included information about minimal disturbance gardening approaches there as well as tips and recommendations if you've just got a blank slate how to start to convert that into a very productive Garden that could average you around 100 portions of food per square meter so uh yeah check it out out and I'll see you again soon

Channel: Huw Richards

Views: 105,056

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Id: 4yV_fbdeN4c

Length: 34min 28sec (2068 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 15 2023