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No dig gardens
"Maryc" wrote in message ... George.com Wrote: Has anyone experimented with, made use of, no dig gardening? I'm interested in your experiences and opinions, how you got started, successes or failures etc. My definition of no dig involves: minimal tillage of the soil, short of scratching the surface to sow seed or harvest root vegetables leaving spent plants in place to degrade in the garden, add nutrients to the soil or self seed using surface mulches to suppress weeds and add nutrients that slowly leach in to the soil using green mulches like legumes or clover to add nitrogen to the soil crop rotation to protect the integrity of the soil, for instance following leafy plants with root crops etc Thanks in advance for your contribution rob I got the Lasagna Gradening book. So we tried it. Here in Arkansas however we have this grass that takes over everything. We tried puting the composted wood chips free from our city on top but the grass just grew all through it. So this winter we have put black plastic over the whole garden hoping to smother it out. I will have to let you know when it is closer to spring, whether it helped or not. shit, that post has resurfaced after a while. My raised/no dig gardens have been in 2 seasons now. They got filled with a combination of everything from soil and compost to horse poop, old hay, coffee grounds and grass clippings. Worms mixed everything together nicely. The beds, of which there are 5, have been planted with a good variety of crops and minimal digging, some initial earthing up of potatos before using straw and a small drill to put seedlings or seeds in. Mulching has occurred across 1/2 the garden over peas and tomatos though still haven't quite figured about mulching around smaller stuff like carrots, lettuces and the like. With the lettuces mind I planted them tightly so they formed a living mulch. Crop resiudes have been left on the garden to rot apart from potatos and tomatos. I have had early blight in the tomatos (crap season for them so far, few I know are getting them ripened outdoors) and some potato issue I haven't identified. I am looking at the Ps & Ts to see how they go and what might be afflicting them. As they can be temporamental my intention at this point is to dry and burn the crop residue and re-apply as ash later on. Whether the residue is ok to leave on the garden may depend what I find through the rest of the season. If I want to be careful all will be removed, dried and burnt. I am still uming and arring about cover crops over winter. I have come up with several refeences that say garlic and mustard are good ways to naturally fumigate/sterilise soil so I am thinking of following tomatoes with garlic in winter and maybe putting mustard across other beds, maybe the potatos. If it works ok I may rotate tomatos around with garlic to follow. I reckon a root crop should be ok to follow a fruit. Not too worried about green mulches as I have several piles of horse and chicken poop aging away, that'll suffice for next springs nutrients. Maybe just leave the straw in place and mustard/garlic over winter. I am coming to the conclusion of rotating tomatos and potatos every season, 4 growing spaces, tomatos followed by a year of somethign else, followed by potatos, followed by a year of something else and then back to tomatos. Every 4th year maybe garlic following on from the tomatos. Not sure whether I really need to rotate other things yet, time will tell. rob |
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