This week I’m joined by Charles Dowding, one of the world’s leading advocates of no dig gardening. Charles has spent more than 40 years developing and refining the no dig method, which aims to build healthy, fertile soil without digging. He is the author and co-author of numerous books on no dig gardening, including No Dig, his definitive guide to this approach to growing.
He produces enough food to sell to local restaurants and inhabitants, to feed all his course attendees and visitors and also his own household from his plot which until recently has only been a quarter of an acre in size, proving categorically that no-dig equals maximum productivity. He is a prolific generator of media content, his YouTube channel has over 55 million views and he’s bought the no-dig technique to a worldwide audience.
Dr Ian Bedford’s Bug of the Week: Spider silk
What We Talk About
How Charles got started out in gardening
Why do we need compost for no-dig and is it essential to create our own?
No dig techniques on different types of soils
Giving the beds a year off (or not) and crop rotation
No-dig and plant pests and diseases
Why every last gardener in the UK hasn’t adopted no-dig!
About Charles Dowding
Charles Dowding is the leading proponent of no-dig gardening. Not only does he have a huge following, but his advice is born out of more than 40 years of growing, analysing, comparing, and recommending. He has been growing veg since 1981, having gardened in four different locations and grown hundreds of thousands of crops.
Charles currently gardens his modestly sized plot Homeacres, in Somerset, from which he produces enough food to sell to local restaurants and inhabitants, to feed all his course attendees and visitors and also his own household. He is a prolific generator of media content and has bought the no-dig technique to a worldwide audience.
Links
No Dig: Nurture Your Soil to Grow Better Veg with Less Effort by Charles Dowding – Dorling Kindersley, September 2022
www.charlesdowding.co.uk
Other episodes if you liked this one:
Feeding your Soil with Humanure with Joseph Jenkins
Growing Food with Stephanie Hafferty
Transcript content.
