No-Dig Gardening Demystified. There really is nothing to do, except letting nature take care of itself. It’s that simple.
My entire adult life, I’ve been working towards one goal: to build a self-sufficient homestead. I wanted it all from the vegetables, grains, berries, fruit, and medicinal herbs. I’ve always imagined my kitchen as this beautiful apothecary with an all-natural, homegrown remedy for EVERYTHING.
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Table of Contents
First Attempt at Gardening
Growing up, my mom was a big aesthetic flower gardener. The landscape at my childhood home was so pretty, but I HATED being made to water the flowers and to do the routine weeding. Once all of the children moved out, my mom planted some amazing raised bed vegetable gardens and started canning every year. After a couple years, she moved and has yet to start another garden.
I digress—a little. She made it look soooo easy; I bought my house with two acres and I was excited to have my own vegetables and I was planning my amazing herb garden as soon as I signed the closing paperwork. Waah waahhh. Several FAILED attempts at vegetable gardens and herbs around the property and I was 110% sure I was cursed. Plants in raised beds died. Plants in the ground died—I’m talking mint, like you normally can’t get rid of it, have to plant it in a coffee container to prevent it from taking over the entire garden. I killed an herb that is in some social circles considered to be invasive.
So, I gave up. A new boyfriend and a few years later brings us to the Pandemic SHUTDOWN of 2020. I travel for work on a weekly basis and suddenly I was grounded in Pennsylvania in February 2020. Like so many others, the boyfriend and I decided to start planning a vegetable garden in our new “free” time (he was no longer commuting up to four hours a day and I was no longer in a different city every night.
We figured out what we wanted to grow, ordered our seeds, and bought a little baby rototiller. What seemed like 10 million hours of labor later, we had finally gotten rid of the grass. And while we aged another 80 years, the plot started to look like a garden. And our muscles were so sore from hoeing and weeding and rototilling. We actually had to borrow the boyfriend’s parent’s rototiller because our baby rototiller wasn’t getting deep enough for us to plant anything.
We planted everything and none of it died, but none of it really grew. We planted three inch tomato transplants and they stayed three inches for the next four weeks. Same thing with the pepper plants. In mid-July 2020 (halfway through our growing season in western PA), the boyfriend did several soil tests and figured out we had clay soil with virtually no nutrients in it. As newbies to gardening, we had no idea how to deal with it.
We thought of getting compost in, but literally could not find it anywhere near us. Actually, we had to travel nearly an hour away to get barely broken down leaf mold. We surrounded our tomato and pepper plants with the dried leaves and crossed our fingers.
We finally got tomatoes ALL AT ONCE for like three weeks in September and October before our season ended. Our pepper plants just started to flower about 1 week before our first frost.
TLDR; we spent winter 2020-2021 PLANNING how to do our 2021 garden even better—you know actually get bell peppers.
Planning, with a lot of research, and eventually you find “No-Dig” gardening and the mention of Charles Dowding. And no shame, we stalk his YouTube channel for new videos like everyday.
We did not desire three months of tilling the garden again only to have minimally producing crops. Soooooo we started diving into No-Dig headfirst.
Mainly because it was easier than tilling and gave our soil some amazing added benefits and nutrients.
So in February 2021, we started all over again. On nice days we laid cardboard on the ground where we wanted it and in March we ordered a truckload of mushroom compost to build the garden. And another one to finish the garden. It wasn’t perfect, but we are looking forward to building upon it year after year.
AND our garden this year produced MASSIVE amounts of vegetables: potatoes, bell peppers, banana/jalapeno/flamethrower peppers, tomatoes, onions, squashes—all of it. I’m so proud of us 🙂
Benefits of No-Dig Gardening
But why No-Dig? What makes it work? What really goes into it? How does it help?
When we rototill the soil, we are releasing carbon emissions into the environment. This occurs two-fold: one the rototiller is most likely gas-powered to be strong enough to do much more than weeding in your garden, and two the carbon (and nitrogen amongst others) are released from the soil as you disrupt and bring air into the soil.
Soil is a living, breathing entity. It literally is the health of your garden. We did not fertilize at all this year, and we had produce galore; it makes me smile just thinking about it. From experience, I can say that our no-dig experiment this year provided the following results:
- More Produce
- Less Pests
- No Diseases (remember this is only a 1 year test)
- Less Maintenance through out the Season with minimal weeds compared to last year
The idea behind no-dig is that you are feeding the soil, which in-turn feeds the plants. If you feed the plants with chemical-based fertilizer to help boost growth, you end up short-term feeding your plants and long-term harming the vast eco-system beneath the surface.
That eco-system includes roots, earthworms, and mycorrhizal fungi. The earthworms and the fungi have a symbiotic relationship with the plants that aid in root growth. This year, we spent a massive amount of time laying cardboard and adding the compost to the garden, but it was nowhere near the amount of time we spent doing back-breaking labor last year and I’ll take that as a win.
Unfortunately, the initial cost of the compost was a little harder to swallow. For next year, we’re already working on creating our own compost (you can learn about and get started making your own compost too) to continue to feed our soil and therefore our plants. I’ll continue posting more as we start planning for next year’s growing season.
Yes, it’s time to plan now!! I promise to keep you updated with all the plans and help you start to plan your garden for next year. Let me know what you’re most excited to grow next year.