No Digging Gardening Growing Your Garden without Digging
For centuries, this has been the lot of human beings, working the fields. Digging the ground before hand in order to prepare it for a new crop.
Some people are going to wonder about this topic. What is this idea about no digging. As far as they know, any gardening without any digging is like having breakfast eggs without salt-and-pepper and toast with or without butter.
Traditionally speaking, everybody knows that the land has to be dug and the ground aerated well, so that the seeds can get an opportunity to grow. But here is a gardener talking about no digging gardening? Well, that seems interesting!
In fact, no digging gardening has been in Vogue for centuries, especially when people kept looking for shortcuts when they did not have to pick up their spades and their hose, and do the digging in the garden, especially when the weather was cold and blustery.
This book is going to give you plenty of information on how people have managed to grow their gardens without any sort of digging.
If you are thinking of becoming a gardener, but just hate the thought of picking up a spade and digging into the ground because it is such a tiresome and tiring exercise, here is some information about traditional non-gardening methods, which you might find interesting. In fact, this information is for all those people who have not heard that there is a controversy going on between people who advocate lots of digging and those people like I who really could not be bothered to dig, but still manage to have tolerable harvests!
No Digging Gardening
So much digging to do before one can plant something…
Now we are going to talk about the amount of compost needed, which we will need to nourish the soil, we are not going to do any sort of digging at all. First of all, the compost has to be very well rotted. After that, it has to be placed on the surface of the ground not only to cover the seeds, but also to smother all the growing weeds.
Well, under such circumstances, we need about 200 tons of fine compost per acre as compared with about 30 – 40 tons required per acre for a man who has dug up his land. Naturally, most of us are going to find it very difficult indeed to get such large amounts of compost or to make this much compost for our own gardens from the vegetable refuse that is available readily to us.
That is why we may find it necessary to buy straw or other natural items, to augment the supplies or we will have to spend lots of afternoons raking in the leaves in the garden, or requesting the leaves from other nearby gardeners in order to make all that compost. Nevertheless, 200 tons is an extremely large quantity. Even if our garden is very small, we will need about 1 ton of compost. Gadzooks, we say.
Quite a hefty pile of manure, this can be used as compost
Naturally, as we know, it is quite difficult to obtain enough compost needed for methods, which utilize digging. So consider how impossible it is going to become when vast quantities are needed under no digging plans.
Initial preparation of a bed is being done with breaking up the soil to which compost has already been added with a rake.
Sedge Peat and No Digging
You may wonder why so many horticultural experts believe in sedge peat as a good alternative, in preference to any other peat? The answer is that sedge peat usually contains more than 200 pounds of you recognized plan t fibers immediately available, as compared with only 45 pounds in the case of ordinary sphagnum peats. Also, when you put in sedge peat on the ground, you are going to get 70% of additional humus available, whereas with sphagnum peat, you are going to get only about 15 – 20%.
Sedge peats have been a range of 5.5 pH value, whereas with other sphagnum peats the pH can be as low as 3.8. That is why sedge peat is the ideal medium for using as a top dressing when growing crops under the no digging scheme.
The problem which faces a no digger is always in the making of sufficiently large quantities of compost. There is never enough sufficient vegetable waste in the garden to produce the fine type of well rotted compost which you need to put on the to the surface of the ground as the top dressing to the depth of at least 1 inch.
Improving Your Soil Structure
Rich, fertile soil is what every gardener aspires to have
Each experienced gardener knows that the placing of fine organic material on the surface of the ground is going to give plenty of encouragement to the earthworms. They are going to get really busy putting the surface material into the soil. Thus, they are working up and down continuously providing the natural perfect almost vertical channels it on which the moisture can percolate and the soil can get aerated.
In fact, if you dig in the soil, you are going to see really happy earthworms, who are active, of a good bright color, of a healthy look, and they are also going to breed extensively. Therefore, you are going to find a really good earthworm population, increasing in your garden.
Sawdust and No Digging
When you are trying to make up the bulk of the organic material, which has to be used, in your no digging soil, sawdust is an option which can be easily available. There are large quantities of sawdust available all over the world, especially in places where woodwork is the norm of the day. However, here is one point to note – sawdust is not a good option, when you are using the no digging method for gardening.
That is because sawdust has lots of crude cellulose in concentrated form than any other crop, including green manure crops. Any botanist is going to tell you, that plants do not need this extra cellulose because it is going into the soil as nitrogen. This will keep on robbing it as soon as it is mixed into the soil by the worms or by any other external natural method like air, sun, and water.
On the other hand, sedge peat is going to cost you more, even though it is entirely weed free and disease-free. The trouble with sawdust is that if it comes from diseased wood, it is going to contain a serious disease like Armillaria mellea. So even if you think that the sawdust has been completely rotted, and it looks like dark peat, there is always going to be the disease bearing fungus in that particular wood. Many agricultural research colleges out there are looking for the best way in which they can use sawdust economically, and properly, as well as beneficially, without any disease or side effects.
This book has given you plenty of information, on how you can get plenty of crops without any digging. This also gives you information on how proper mulching can help give you good crops. So, for all those people who want to know why mulching and cultivation are practiced primarily for weed control, you are going to get more benefits. There are plenty of misconceptions regarding the beneficial effects of cultivation of crop plants.
Cultivation is the sowing, planting, improving, attending to the needs of, and finally harvesting of your crops.
However, down the centuries, it has been proven to mankind that cultivation is necessary for destruction of weeds, thereby conserving nutrients and moisture and eliminating the competition for light and air in your growing plants.
Also, cultivation is going to conserve the moisture by the formation and maintenance of a soil mulch.
Cultivation means increased aeration and therefore more nitrification and also benefiting and aiding other chemical changes in the soil.
It also helps in raising the temperature of the soil through the increase in nitrification as well as increases the retention and absorption of heat.
One of the important factors of successful cultivation is turning the ground over through digging. However, this book is teaching you how you can increase the yield of croplands, without digging. The formation and maintenance of a proper soil mulch by cultivation is going to be an important factor to help increase your crop yield.
So now that you have got more information on how you can get rid of the weeds or keep them under control, do that in your little garden, Live Long and Prosper!
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