No Dig Gardens
But for an “old-timer” such as myself, all I can say is “what goes around – come around” :-).
I am fortunate enough to have a rather large gardening book collection and many of these books go back well into the 1800’s. We have had cycles of gardens without digging for some time now.
Deep Mulch
The most famous of no dig gardens was Ruth Stout’s deep mulch system that this well-known organic gardener of the 1950’s promoted through her magazine articles.
This system puts a rather deep mulch of straw onto the garden (4-6 inches) and then all garden wastes (leaves, stems etc) are laid directly on top of this mulch.
Other authors have promoted variations of this no dig garden system but they’re all essentially deep mulching or green composting (below)
Green Compost
For green compost material from the kitchen, simply pull the mulch back and lay the kitchen waste on the ground. Then pull the mulch back over top of the waste. Worms and other soil microorganisms summarily deal with the organic material from the kitchen.
All garden waste – from leaves to rotting vegetables - was simply laid on top of the mulch and allowed to decompose. In the fall, a fresh, thin layer of straw was laid down on top of the pile to replace the straw consumed over the summer by the soil and its inhabitants. This was the first of the no dig gardens in our modern garden history.
No Dig Gardens Work
I have used this no dig garden system in my own vegetable gardening and I can tell you it works very well. There is no compost bin to maintain and no heavy lifting or wheeling barrows of compost hither and yon to the garden. You simply let it all stay in the garden. The only difficulty I ever had with this system was in a wet year when slugs came out from under the mulch in high numbers to attack almost anything green. But any mulch would have done the same thing. I did not have a pest or rodent problem that I was able to see.
I never found a problem with the family levels of kitchen waste we produced when it was buried under the mulch. It didn’t last very long with the high worm populations our soil supported.
City & Dog Issues
I suspect if you were in the city with wandering dogs, you might want to take this additional step: either use a worm compost bin to eliminate the kitchen waste before it goes onto the garden or use a blender to whiz all the organic scraps up and pour that onto the garden. Personally, I prefer the worm bin and I use that because I want worm compost for making compost tea.
All other systems are simply modern adaptations of this no dig garden system.
New Bed Construction
Making new garden beds doesn’t have to be labor intensive. The trick here is to lay down overlapping sheets of newspaper – up to 20 pages thick (although I usually stop at 3-5) and then cover the entire newspaper layer with a deep (4-6 inches) layer of mulch. The objective is to eliminate all sunlight from the soil and to provide a barrier the underlying grass and weeds can not penetrate. I usually overlap the newspaper by half a sheet and continue overlapping in different directions as I add each layer.
(Hint: if you have trouble laying the newspaper because of wind or smaller sheets, consider keeping a hose nearby to wet each layer down and keep it in place.)
The weeds under the newspaper simply expire from a lack of sunlight.
If you add lots of compost and compost tea, the soil will loosen up over a season and you can easily garden in there.
Great System For Shrubs
This is a great little system for installing shrubs once the grass and weeds are dead under the paper/mulch.
In one rather large bed (spring 2006) I laid down cardboard instead of paper because I didn’t want to garden there. I then covered it with bark mulch and the area stayed clean and weedfree. This was under some rather large lilac shrubs at my entranceway and rather than weeding under there all summer, I chose to smother out the weeds.
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