"When the facts change, I change my mind" John Maynard Keynes
One of the great disappointments over the past ten years or so has been as a result of the polarisation of viewpoints. Being in the centre appears to be a sometimes lonely place surrounded on each side by to views that insist that they are "right". Pour social media onto the sparks and we have tremendous heat, but little light. So, it is with some trepidation and perhaps with my tongue in the corner of my mouth when asked is my allotment dig or no dig, I replied, both My great buddy Frank King, a fellow allotmenteer delighted me with a brilliant surprise sign for plot 106. With two of my leitmotifs cat and butterfly and a barrow filled with produce it has the legend "Life is a garden dig it". A great pun on both the physical work and the feeling that it emotes The no dig gardening movement is not very old. A Japanese farmer Masanobu Fukuoka combined that work with philosophy to create "Natural Gardening" that he promoted in a 1975 book "The One-Straw Revolution". He also called it do nothing farming. It still meant work but of the non mechanical kind that boosted soil fertility. You placed organic composts onto the soil and nature via worms fungi and other soil born creatures produce optimum growing conditions. The cycle continued by cropping and then more composting. Charles Dowding is a smaller holder, writer and gardener who has been using no dig personally and commercially for forty years with great success. He has a brilliant YouTube channel and clearly has both belief and evidence for his success and is a great advocate for the method On taking over 106 I planned to try both dig and no dig areas to see which suited best" That is my medium to long term plan, year 3 onwards. Classically with no dig you place either cardboard or carpet on the ground and place the compost on top once begin to grow. That was impossible on take over due to overgrowth, huge briars, perennial weeds and the like. Frank rotovated about a third of the area and I used that for first year cropping. Over the next year I double dug the whole plot. That was the beginning and the ending of digging the whole plot. From then on it was two areas about the same size, you guessed it, one dig the other not. The no dig was lavished with a rich diet on top of stable manure, bought and home made compost and straw. This year will be the first full cropping for that area. The other half was split into two areas one benefitting from green manuring and it will be for beans and peas and then winter greens and the other single dug incorporating compost and manure that is for maincrop potatoes and the then green manuring September until March. Rotation planning is a challenge under this set up but with some innovation achievable but even with this I am stretching the rules. I am not adopting the traditional three year system. Instead all vegetables excepting potatoes will be grown in blocks or as some call it "square foot gardening"
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AuthorI launched this website on 16th August 2020 to bring together my thoughts on gardening,, its importance for health and wellbeing and two projects running concurrently, a renovation of my own garden on the West Sussex coast at Lancing and a nearby allotment. But also to learn from other gardeners about the inspirations for their plots, about their gardening projects and enjoyment of beautiful plants and gardens Archives
February 2024
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