Our No Dig Garden For Winter

Today’s post is all about a no dig garden. Yes, I know, I know. I am the person who absolutely detests gardening. I have little to zero interest in getting my hands dirty, though I will admit to pulling the odd weed to help out and being good at supervising planting. This is why a no dig garden is a perfect thing for the lazy gardener. Read on to find out why we chose this method of vegetable gardening and how we’ve made it even easier to harvest our winter vegetables.

Why Choose a No Dig Garden?

No Dig gardens are, basically, composting gardens that you create without the need for digging in the soil and turning it over. A No Dig garden relies on layers of carbon materials and nitrogen materials. High nitrogen materials, such as manure and blood and bone, break down high carbon materials like straw and newspaper in the presence of good moisture to become compost. Essentially, in a No Dig bed, the material is what ends up both feeding the plant and what the plant is growing in. This means once you have your garden established it is easier to maintain. If you are building a No Dig garden from scratch, you do it as with any composting system, but the way we did it was the Charles Dowding method. We imported good quality compost from the garden centre so we could start planting straight away.

What is a No Dig Garden?

There are a number of reasons why we chose a no dig garden for our winter vegetables.

• Firstly, the method eliminates most weeds. And if there’s one thing that grows in abundance here at the farm it’s the biggest weeds you’ve ever seen! I hate weeding (as stated) so this method had me at ‘hello’ for that fact alone.
• Next, you can garden without the need for extra chemical fertilisers. Because you are adding compost to grow in, you do not need to add chemicals to the soil. Over time you will, of course, need to nourish the soil with some extra compost or a dose of organic fertiliser but we try to live as chemical-free as we can. So the less we have to add to the soil the better.
• It’s fast. If you use the method outlined below, you can have your garden up and running very quickly, depending on the size. Our four beds were set up over the course of two afternoons.
• Creating a No Dig garden using the method below is less labour intensive, leaving us more time for other things. Once the garden is set up, there is little weed maintenance. Hopefully, the need for extra watering will also be minimal. It rains a lot here.

How We Constructed Our Garden

This is actually the second iteration of a No Dig garden in our yard. We have a large expanse of grass in the back yard. It looks pretty but it’s only ever used as the dog toilet. We wanted to utilise this spot more productively, so a veggie garden seemed the way to go. There is a lot of sun in the area and the soil was good.

Over Spring and Summer last year, we laid out our garden like the one in the video. We had a lot of problems with pests having the beds on the ground. The rabbits and snails ate the garden out within a day. It was like their all you can eat buffet. We didn’t want to spray the bugs or kill the rabbits so we came up with a modified No Dig idea. We tested one bed out over late summer and found it solved our pest problem, made harvesting easier and stopped the rabbits in their tracks!

The answer? Recycled water tank garden beds.

To make this version of the No Dig garden, we first cleared the beds where we grew our summer crops. Gavin flattened the land and then rolled the old water tanks into place. The tanks had been cut into thirds using an angle grinder. We had previously used them for wood storage but decided to give them yet another life. Gavin drilled a number of drainage holes in the bottom part of the tank. The other part of the tank had no top or bottom and required no drain holes.

We placed the tanks in position. Then we backfilled them about a third full with the soil we’d removed from the garden, weeds and all. Layers of cardboard were placed over the top to kill the weeds. This was watered down to begin the composting process. We ordered in a truckload of compost and filled the tanks to about two thirds full. Over time the compost will break down further. We will top it up with compost from the pile we are making further down the garden. This will eliminate the need to buy. It is also the perfect use of our kitchen scraps and garden waste. Once we planted out the beds we cover them with netting held in place by pegs. As the plants grow, we place an obelisk in the centre of the bed and throw the net over this to raise the height.

This type of bed suits us well. We don’t have to kneel to harvest. It requires only minimal weeding around the paths as they have a layer of mulch to suppress weeds. It keeps out pests and looks pretty when we look out the window! We’ve also built raised timber beds further down our kitchen garden and filled them using the No Dig method. The rocket and beans have never looked better.