No-dig gardening for small urban gardens

The buildup to the “No-dig” decision

I have been gradually dragged into gardening over three growing seasons. Every season I have been discovering fascinating aspects of either plant type, growth patterns or method of growing. I have read lots of resources and watched lots of inspiring videos on permaculture techniques. I got so hooked with the principles and the ethics, thus decided to make this growing season a learning curve while trying to feed our family.

I have attempted to adapt the principles of permaculture in our small urban garden as zone one “the home garden”. I started to follow Charles Dowding and his no-dig method. I have followed his YouTube channel and I was so inspired to try out his “too good to be true” method – spend less time, get almost no weeds and obtain high yield per square meter. He himself calls the time he spent in his no-dig market garden “disappointingly little” in an interview with Richard Perkins – another great no-dig and small farm advocate. I have got one of Charles and his partner’s – Stephanie Hafferty -books “No Dig Organic Home & Garden” for my birthday and sat down to scan through it all in few hours. It is one of the most practical gardening books I have come cross; it was so good.

The concept makes starting a garden on a lawn very easy with a combination of cardboards and mulch material to kill any weeds and grass without digging the ground. Then I started to see the possibilities in our garden. Luckily, the far end of our backyard was always dump. I have been trying to maintain the lawn for years without success. By this point; I was fed up with lawn, the effort, waste of energy and resources all for nothing. Time to build no-dig beds in our garden

How we “No-dig” our garden

Materials and equipment

Compost: Compost is the best choice of mulch when it comes to no dig. My choice was well rotten horse manure to begin with, for its quality and easy bulk access. You can also get it for free depending on your location. In our case, the logistic of transporting free manure was a bit difficult. But then I have read somewhere that the best investment you can make in starting a vegetable garden is importing organic matter. I saw this ad for horse manure bulk bag for a reasonable price and if five bags, delivered for free. The problem was that they only have four bags, so I added a bulk bag of sand for almost same price of the delivery charge.  It felt a good bargain at first but probably it was a daft decision when I have no plan to own 900kgs of sand.

The horse manure arrived few days after Christmas. I have no idea what the bulk bags look like or how much space it took and how I would bring it in to our walled garden. A truck arrived with the loads – the bags were massive for my imagination, but it was a relief to see that there was a crane attached. The driver dropped the bags over the fence in the garden. Such a relief, I had the bags where I want them while my boy had real-time crane action at home – it was class.

The horse manure compost was beautiful. It was dark brown and a bit sticky with bits of the bedding wood chips. It would have been bagged for more than six months by then and have composted rather well. To my surprise, it did not have any manure smell at all. As soon as the truck left, I took my small digging fork and scoop a chunk onto my hand. There it was – a big, reddish, long and impatient earthworm. All that I fantasized when I order the manure was the life in it. I imagined the rest of rich life – the bacteria and fungi added to our garden.

Cardboard: For cardboards, I have approached one of the big stores, where I got thick cardboards used for wheelchair packaging with a catch phrase “Yes you can!”. Perfect inspiration!  

Sand: I used sand to cover the walkway between the beds. This might not be ideal, but it was a great use of available resource with its own pros and cons

Equipment:  to assist with the preparation we used

• Wheelbarrow and spade: to move compost over the cardboard
• Garden rake: to spread the compost evenly over the cardboard
• Pegs and garden twine: I used thick bamboo canes as pegs to line-out the bed
• Bricks: To hold the cardboard in place against wind.

Technique

Few days after new year, my wife, two little ones and myself started to build the beds. The plan was to build three beds facing north to south, in line with the direction of our house.

We lay down the cardboards overlapping few centimeters between each. This will help to effectively cover the entire area and suppress as much weed as possible. We used bricks to keep the cardboard in place from wind and any movement with the wheelbarrow action.

Then, my strategy was to spread the compost all over the area and form the beds afterwards. I aimed to have an even coverage of with a depth of 30 cm. I admit that this was the hardest part of the process. However, it was worth the effort that I wouldn’t need to dig or weed for the coming many seasons. At the end, it took few more days and a friend’s help to finish the job.

Once the cardboard is fully covered, using the pegs and the twine, I outlined 110 cm for each bed leaving 40 cm gap between beds. Once finished, using the rake I moved some of the compost on the beds and covered the walkway with sand. However, if I had to do it again, I would have outlined the beds first and covered the walkway with wood-chip and finally the beds with compost. The beds were ready to go.  

End of season “No-dig” reflection

Despite the colder summer months, we had in Belfast, the beds were incredible. What is the most amazing about the method is how little time I spent maintaining the garden, be it weeding or watering. The grass and other weeds under the cardboard were completely suppressed. There were few weeds appearing here and there which were easy to pull out. The compost retained moisture well that the summer rain was enough to keep the vegetables happy.

No-dig gardening is the way forward for allotments and urban gardens for whoever with little time to spare but love gardening. I would also recommend it to start up market gardens as a way of improving soil fertility and soil life while intensively growing organic vegetables.

I also envisage a great potential for smallholder farmers in Africa and other parts of the world. It can be transformative in improving nutrition and livelihood with small time and space usage.