No-dig gardening is a non-cultivation method used by some
organic gardener
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to organic gardening and farming:
Organic farming – alternative agricultural system that relies on fertilizers of organic origin such as compost, manure, green manur ...
s. The origins of no-dig gardening are unclear, and may be based on pre-industrial or nineteenth-century farming techniques.
Masanobu Fukuoka
was a Japanese farmer and philosopher celebrated for his natural farming and re-vegetation of desertified lands. He was a proponent of no-till, herbicide and pesticide free cultivation methods from which he created a particular method of agricu ...
started his pioneering research work in this domain in 1938, and began publishing in the 1970s his Fukuokan philosophy of "
do-nothing farming" or natural farming, which is now acknowledged by some as the tap root of the
permaculture
Permaculture is an approach to land management and settlement design that adopts arrangements observed in flourishing natural ecosystems. It includes a set of design principles derived using whole-systems thinking. It applies these principle ...
movement. Two pioneers of the method in the twentieth century included F. C. King, Head Gardener at Levens Hall, South Westmorland, in the Lake District of England, who wrote the book "Is Digging Necessary?" in 1946 and a gardener from Middlecliffe in the UK, A. Guest, who in 1948 published the book "Gardening Without Digging". The work of these gardeners was supported by the
Good Gardeners Association in the UK. No-dig gardening was also promoted by Australian Esther Deans in the 1970s, and American gardener
Ruth Stout
Ruth Imogen Stout (June 14, 1884 – August 22, 1980) was an American author best known for her "No-Work" gardening books and techniques.
Early and mid-life
Ruth Imogen Stout was born June 14, 1884, in Girard, Kansas, the fifth child of Quaker ...
advocated a "permanent" garden mulching technique in ''Gardening Without Work'' and no-dig methods in the 1950s and 1960s.
This technique recognizes that micro- and macro-biotic organisms constitute a "
food web
A food web is the natural interconnection of food chains and a graphical representation of what-eats-what in an ecological community. Another name for food web is consumer-resource system. Ecologists can broadly lump all life forms into one o ...
" community in the soil, necessary for the healthy cycling of nutrients and prevention of problematic organisms and diseases. The plants transfer a portion of the carbon energy they produce to the soil, and microbes that benefit from this energy in turn convert available organic substances in the soil to the mineral components the plants need to thrive.
History
Historically the reasons for
tilling Tilling can mean:
* Tillage, an agricultural preparation of the soil.
* TILLING (molecular biology)
* Tilling is a fictional town in the Mapp and Lucia novels of E. F. Benson.
* Tilling Green, Ledshire, is a fictional village in Patricia Wentwo ...
the soil are to remove weeds, loosen and aerate the soil, and incorporate organic matter such as compost or manure into lower soil layers. In areas with thin soil and high erosion there is a strong case against digging, which argues that in the long term it can be detrimental to the
food web
A food web is the natural interconnection of food chains and a graphical representation of what-eats-what in an ecological community. Another name for food web is consumer-resource system. Ecologists can broadly lump all life forms into one o ...
in the fragile
topsoil
Topsoil is the upper layer of soil. It has the highest concentration of organic matter and microorganisms and is where most of the Earth's biological soil activity occurs.
Description
Topsoil is composed of mineral particles and organic matt ...
. While digging is an effective way of removing
perennial
A perennial plant or simply perennial is a plant that lives more than two years. The term ('' per-'' + '' -ennial'', "through the years") is often used to differentiate a plant from shorter-lived annuals and biennials. The term is also wid ...
weed roots, it also often causes seeds that can remain dormant for many decades to come to the surface and
germinate
Germination is the process by which an organism grows from a seed or spore. The term is applied to the sprouting of a seedling from a seed of an angiosperm or gymnosperm, the growth of a sporeling from a spore, such as the spores of fungi, fer ...
. The act of aerating the soil also increases the rate of decomposition and reduces
soil organic matter. Digging can also damage
soil structure
Soil structure describes the arrangement or the way of soil in the solid parts of the soil and of the pore space located between them. It is determined by how individual soil granules clump, bind together, and aggregate, resulting in the arrangem ...
, causing
compaction, and unbalance
symbiotic and
mutualist interactions among soil life. Digging tends to displace nutrients, shifting surface organic material deeper, where there is less oxygen to support the decomposition to plant-available nutrients, which then need to be otherwise replenished. Digging is practised traditionally in regions with old, deep, rich soils such as Western Europe, where digging was followed by periodic
resting of the soil, usually with an undisturbed
cover crop.
Methods
![Mandala permaculture](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/31/Mandala_permaculture.jpg)
No-dig methods allow nature to carry out cultivation operations. Organic matter such as well rotted manure, compost,
leaf mold
Leaf mold (spelled leaf mould outside of the United States) is the compost produced by decomposition of shaded deciduous shrub and tree leaves, primarily by fungal breakdown in a slower cooler manner as opposed to the bacterial degradation of lea ...
,
spent mushroom compost
Spent mushroom compost is the residual compost waste generated by the mushroom production industry.
Background
It is readily available (bagged, at nursery suppliers), and its formulation generally consists of a combination of wheat straw, drie ...
, old straw, etc., is added directly to the soil surface as a mulch at least 5-15 centimeters (2–6 in) deep, which is then incorporated by the actions of worms, insects and microbes. Worms and other soil life also assist in building up the soil's structure, their tunnels providing aeration and
drainage
Drainage is the natural or artificial removal of a surface's water and sub-surface water from an area with excess of water. The internal drainage of most agricultural soils is good enough to prevent severe waterlogging (anaerobic condition ...
, and their excretions bind together soil crumbs. This natural biosphere maintains healthy conditions in the upper soil horizons where annual plant roots thrive. No-dig systems are said by practitioners such as
Charles Dowding
Charles Dowding is an English horticulturalist and author who has pioneered modern no dig and organic soil management since 1983.
Life and work
Dowding spent his childhood on a dairy farm in Somerset. He graduated from his degree in geography at ...
to be freer of pests and disease, possibly due to a more balanced soil population being allowed to build up in this undisturbed environment, and by encouraging the buildup of beneficial rather than harmful soil
fungi
A fungus ( : fungi or funguses) is any member of the group of eukaryotic organisms that includes microorganisms such as yeasts and molds, as well as the more familiar mushrooms. These organisms are classified as a kingdom, separately from ...
. Moisture is also retained more efficiently under mulch than on the surface of bare earth, allowing slower percolation and less leaching of nutrients.
Another no-dig method is
sheet mulching
In permaculture, sheet mulching is an agricultural no-dig gardening technique that attempts to mimic the natural soil-building process in forests. When deployed properly and in combination with other permaculture principles, it can generate health ...
wherein a garden area is covered with wetted paper or cardboard, compost and topped off with landscape mulch. This technique is also called lasagna gardening.
A no-dig system is considered easier than digging. It is a long term process, and is reliant upon having plentiful organic matter to provide mulch material. It is also helpful to remove any perennial weed roots from the area beforehand, although their hold can be weakened by applying a light-excluding surface layer such as large sheets of cardboard or several thicknesses of spread out newspaper before adding the compost mulch. The newspaper or cardboard should be thoroughly wet to help it lie flat and keep it from blowing away until the overlying material is added.
Australia
Esther Deans wrote the books ''No-Dig Gardening'' and ''Leaves of Life''. She actively travelled to teach about this gardening method, cooking and promoting raised gardens for those with special needs. She also taught about the necessity to maintain excellent water quality. Deans continued gardening until the age of 95. Around this time, Harper Collins publishers held a special honorary event for her in their Ryde offices as Esther had become Australia's most published author. As Deans grew older, she was assisted by Lucinda Bartram who helped her carry on the tradition of teaching no-dig gardening methods to others. Between the mid 1990s and 2009 Bartram, from Bondi and then Randwick, helped Deans reach the public and maintained the prolific 'no-dig' flowerbeds kept by Deans around her nursing apartment in the northern Sydney suburb of
Waitara. The women shared many years co-teaching 'no-dig' gardening techniques to school children and freely sharing their knowledge together at garden fairs until 2009.
Esther Deans inspired many famous gardeners, including
Bill Mollison
Bruce Charles "Bill" Mollison (4 May 1928 – 24 September 2016) was an Australian researcher, author, scientist, teacher and biologist. In 1981, he was awarded the Right Livelihood Award "for developing and promoting the theory and practice o ...
of the permaculture movement, although she said "it is not quite how I would do it", implying she did not allow nature to take over, but retained formality with strict garden edges and more annuals.
Gardens fashioned on Esther Deans' no dig gardening principles include Randwick Community Organic Garden (RCOG), Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
UK
Since 1982
Charles Dowding
Charles Dowding is an English horticulturalist and author who has pioneered modern no dig and organic soil management since 1983.
Life and work
Dowding spent his childhood on a dairy farm in Somerset. He graduated from his degree in geography at ...
has been practising no dig in his market gardens, on areas ranging from a quarter to seven acres. He has written eleven books on gardening organically and without digging, and gives regular talks and courses on the subject. His methods centre on using compost as a mulch, rather than unrotted organic matter which tends to accumulate slugs in the damp, British climate. He encourages gardeners to be adaptable in their approach, according to local soil, conditions and crops grown. His own speciality is salad leaves for sale to local outlets and the plants grow well in undisturbed soil.
See also
*
Aquaponics
Aquaponics is a food production system that couples aquaculture (raising aquatic animals such as fish, crayfish, snails or prawns in tanks) with hydroponics (cultivating plants in water) whereby the nutrient-rich aquaculture water is fed to hydr ...
*
Broadfork
The broadfork, also called a U-fork or grelinette, is a garden tool used to manually break up densely packed soil, including hardpan, to improve aeration and drainage. Broadforks are used as part of a no-till or reduced-till seedbed prepar ...
: A tool to aerate the soil without overturning
*
No-till farming
No-till farming (also known as zero tillage or direct drilling) is an agricultural technique for growing crops or pasture without disturbing the soil through tillage. No-till farming decreases the amount of soil erosion tillage causes in certai ...
*
Vegan organic gardening
Vegan organic (or veganic) agriculture is the organic production of food and other crops with minimal animal inputs. Vegan organic agriculture is the organic form of animal-free agriculture.
Animal-free farming methods use no animal products ...
(Veganic gardening)
References
Bibliography
* http://handle.slv.vic.gov.au/10381/135484
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*{{cite book, last=Dowding, first=Charles, year=2014, title=Veg Journal, Expert No-Dig Advice, Month by Month, publisher=Green Books, isbn=978-0-7112-3526-7
External links
Gardening Australia: Factsheet: Step-by-Step No DigNo-dig Gardening FAQ
Organic gardening
ja:不耕起栽培