No dig garden construction - workshop

hi I'm Bob Jones the key to growing healthy vegetables is to start with fertile organic soil we find an easy way to do that is using a technique called no dig gardening Mike Rushton and I have been doing gardening workshops teaching this technique for the past year in Nelson New Zealand it actually becomes a long terms of there are many good reasons why we should grow our own food first safety if you grow your own food in your own soil that soil should be free of any toxins like herbicides and pesticides second taste and nutrition food that's picked fresh definitely has better taste and higher nutritional value and there's nothing that's fresher than something that's picked and eaten out of your own backyard a third reason is you're going to have less expense if you have less shopping and go to the store less you're going to spend less on food and petrol or gas we're here in the garden of Jenny trout this noded garden was put in place just six weeks ago and she's already eating produce from this garden no dig gardening is a very simple method of laying down layers of organic material carbon material nitrogen material on top of existing ground it can be lawn it can be weeds using the techniques that you'll see in the following video it's very easy to build the materials are very very cheap and easily available it retains an awful lot of moisture and has all the nutrients which plants need to be able to grow healthily so now I'm going to turn this over to Mike who will demonstrate how this no deep technique works we've got a bed laid out here appropriate size to be able to reach across length doesn't really matter it's orientated east-west to get full maximum use of the Sun and we have just forked over just to break the very basis of the and that we're starting with we're going to be putting over a cardboard mat then we're going to be putting on various layers of carbon material Browns and straw and topsoil and things like that so let's get to it it won't take long when we're layering the carb or down it's important to have all of the cella tape or tape stripped off it and take out any staples or anything like that the cardboard needs to be thoroughly soaked before it's laid down and when it is laid down its laid down over lapping itself and we need several layers this is so that the weeds underneath don't regrow and penetrate through sometimes when you take cardboard boxes they'll be too big to manage so they can be cut up into anything from sort of like 700 down manageable sizes it's important to wet the cardboard before you do put it down on the ground beneficial to wet the ground as well we want this to all be moist if you try wetting the cardboard when you've got it down in place because we've overlapped it it will just run off like water off a roof or something like that so it is important okay basically this is the first layer we've got a brown layer on the bottom so this is a bit of a nitrogenous layer green it's just weed clippings and we want to spread this layer out covering the cardboard completely to a depth of anything between 5 and 10 centimetres I want to try and make sure it's level and if there's no sort of lumps if you go aerobic or compost ops Bob here is actually sort of like continually watering this again this is to make sure that the whole of the know dig bed stays a bit like a a moist sponge you don't really want any dry bits in there we can put anything into a no dig garden and this is just basic food scraps from the Braemar eco village kitchen and with these we really want to make sure that they're in the center of the bed we don't want to attract rodents or have things burrowing into the bed to get to these so we just lay these down spread them out in the center of the bed we've also got a small bucket full of worms just to start off the process of getting the worms to invest there our bed it will burrow to the bottom of the container because they've been out in the Sun for a few hours worms will migrate into the bed but if you have got any that you can start that process off with it gives you a flying start this is just basically a layer of topsoil top spreading over here you want to make sure that each layer that we put on covers the previous layer well maybe Wow sänger is now watering the soil rail that we've actually put down and notice we've covered the whole of the previous layer the next layer we're going to put on is a layer of hay it's got quite a few weed seeds in it and so we're putting it in towards the bottom so that those weed seeds don't come straight up through and it'll need to be fluffed up nice and light so it'll look what I was up with this layer on we're just watering this down again just to make sure it's all nice and damp so we've got our layer of hay down it's been nicely moistened now we're going to put a layer of green grass clippings over the top this is from the same paddock so you can see the differences between the types of materials you can get from the warm sauce it's awesome we've now put a green layer of grass clippings on there we don't want this layer to be too thick if we put it on too thick it'll start to compost itself it'll get hot or it'll get anaerobic and start to smell either way won't be good for the plants we're now going to put a layer of sort of white top soil and compost mix on top of this we can add anything to our node dig garden I've got here some crushed river rock which is interesting stuff basically the basis of all soil is the weathering of rocks so we can actually add in rock dust to start with that'll give us another helping hand this could be dust and gravel anything ground-up chips and old cement powder whatever you like just don't add too much of it it's important that we try and keep the bed when we're building if keep the sides as vertical as possible we want the rain that falls on the bed to stay on the bed not to actually just run straight off so we're looking for more of a chocolate bar shape rather than a pyramid clay soils can be very hard to work with but they're very very rich in minerals and nutrients we can add those to our know dig garden the same way as we did the river rock as well we've just finished that in another layer of compost and so we've augmented it with river rock dust and we put some clay on there which is all mineral rich now we're going to go for another layer of dried organic material this is just grass clippings which have been allowed to dry out in the Sun for up I start to order that yes please looking good like as I've said before you can add anything to your no dude garden these are just dried leaves that we've collected from around Braemar eco village so we're now just about ready to put our final top layer of soil and compost on top of this and then we'll just top it off with straw we could call it legends of the fall okay we just put our final layer of compost on and we're just about to put a final layer of straw on the top and then we'll be planting directly into this bed and it's important to mention that we've used the materials we've got available so we did have compost available you can use anything to create these layers providing you used brown layers leaves green layers things like grass clippings and things like that we're pretty much done though all that is left now is to actually start planting in our bed that's it we're done myself Sandra Bob and Lynn have created this probably in about 30 minutes we had all the materials available we marked out our spot we put down car borders soaked car borders weed map we put alternating layers of green and brown material and then we finally topped off with the straw and we planted directly in it this was a bed to plant directly into if we were doing on bed that was created in autumn for use in spring next year then we would have added a lot more green material and made it a lot bigger so it was almost like a compost heap but this is it 30 minutes and you've got your garden if you want to offer workshops in your area we have provided a whole packet of information on our website for about any of those of you who are interested we're really hoping that you will use this technique and go out into your backyards and experiment with this concept and spread the word pass it on to others we think this can provide a huge good for yourself in the world thank you and happy gardening

Channel: undefined

Views: 643,797

Rating: 4.8214221 out of 5

Keywords: Lasagne, layer, mulch, no dig, garden, permaculture

Id: kXcC0rVhkF0

Length: 11min 51sec (711 seconds)

Published: Sat May 07 2011