No dig garden1500 m² ready for spring, trial bed comparisons, winter vegetables and cover crops

I take you around my garden of 1500 m² or 1/3 acre cropped ground, for examples and ideas. The garden is quiet at this time, but we notice how the rhubarb is springing to life already.

No dig bed prep for the year ahead is straightforward. Feed soil life with a surface mulch around 2.5 cm or one inch thick, measured after it settles. And feed the soil you walk on as well, with a little woodchip on pathways.

Average bed width is 1.2 m and path width 40 cm (4ft x 16in), see my recent planning video:

My trial results from 2023 show clear benefits of leaving soil alone.
https://www.charlesdowding.co.uk/post/dig-no-dig-trial-2019-2022
Even forking depresses yield, by 20% this year; and over 10 years by 9% altogether. This is my Three Strip Trial:
https://www.charlesdowding.co.uk/post/three-strip-trial-2014-2022-no-dig-forking-different-composts

00:00 Introduction
00:22 2024 courses at Homeacres
01:12 Most beds are now harvested, but some veg still survive just, eg chard
01:25 Mulching beds with compost
02:01 Slug damage to spinach leaves
02:28 Mulching with wood chip, different grades
02:57 The small polytunnel, mulched back May before tomatoes – compost on paths with, no woodchip
03:34 Virus damage to kale, I reckon
04:05 Purple sprouting broccoli, Claret F1 variety, netted against pigeons
04:42 Rhubarb, variety Timperley Early – root taken from my mother’s garden
05:09 Woodchip, four years old and sieved
05:42 Red mustard plants with frost damage, and how to clear
06:03 Salad rocket, covered with fleece
06:12 Comparison between green and red-leaved plants in winter
06:29 Leeks with Allium leaf miner, and how to protect them
08:01 Mustard against wireworm, and rye for grain for bread
08:36 Harvested veg stored in the shed, and levels of frost resistance
10:08 The big pond, with black plastic around to kill buttercup (sorry!)
11:05 Beds empty in winter are not bare soil, they are mulched with compost, and woodchip on paths
11:30 Mustard in a bed, killed by frost, with garlic coming through
11:56 Brussels sprouts Brigitte F1
12:38 Corn salad/lamb’s lettuce
13:09 Asparagus, with mustard which will fade soon
13:24 Broad beans, killed by frost – a companion plant for garlic- were sown 22nd September
13:50 The three-strip trial – comparison of harvest totals
15:17 Winter carrots sown on 5th July, fairly late – being left in the ground, and sowing later against root fly
16:02 Winter purslane – good in mild weather and harvested 20th December
16:12 My dig/no dig trial beds and comparison harvest totals
17:37 Adam composting – thin layer of green waste and then 4 month old homemade
18:10 Large polytunnel – mulched in May with 4cm/1.5 in compost – now has two month planted winter salads, Grenoble Red, two types of endive, different mustards, salad rocket, land cress
19:55 A milder leaf – Claytonia/winter purslane – and chervil
20:26 Upcoming videos – and one with Olivier en francais

Filmed and edited 18th December by Nicola Smith at Homeacres market garden, Somerset, UK, zone 8 climate – temperate oceanic

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#wintersolstice #wintergardening #nodig #nidiggardening #growyourownfood

– Happy Solstice Day, shortest day, well, shortest day in the Northern Hemisphere. That means our days are going to get longer. Southern Hemisphere, other way around, but I hope it’s lovely down there. I’m actually going to be there soon. I’m going to Chile in 10 days time.

Going to do some courses there, in fact, and we’ll put out some videos from there. Rosalie, my daughter’s, coming. She’s going to do a bit of filming. Today we have Nicola on the camera, and she reminded me to say that we have just posted course dates for next year, 2024.

You can find them on my website, and there’s a whole list of dates. And someone asked this morning, Nicola was saying, they said, “Is it Charles in person who actually teaches the compost making course, for example?” And well, yeah, I do actually, I teach. I really like doing that,

And this video is about showing you everything that’s going on in the garden here in this dark time of year. Our climate here is very, it’s temperate oceanic. We don’t see a lot of sunshine in the winter, so today’s typical. It’s quite mild, 10 degrees, 50 Fahrenheit. And this work is typical

That we’ve been doing over the last month or so. The last tour we did was eight weeks ago, in fact, and all these beds were full, full of vegetables, and suddenly where have they all gone? Well, we’ll see in a minute, some are in the shed,

But some are surviving, just like the chard there. We’ve even spread compost between the chard, so what I’m trying to do at this time of year is to get compost on as many beds as possible where space allows, and then that feeds the soil life.

This is the essence of no dig, if you like. It’s a really simple process, leave soil alone as much as possible, minimal disturbance. You can dig out a parsnip if you need to, you often do, but then tread the soil back down and then feed the soil life

With organic matter on the surface. Normally, compost in this climate works best, because compost does not give home to too many slugs. There are many more slugs than normal this autumn, ’cause it’s been so wet, however, you can see that, you know, we’re surviving. Look at that spinach there behind me.

There are slug-eaten holes in some of the outer leaves mainly but the plants are surviving, and at this time of year, that’s not bad. Already we’ve got very, very low light levels, not much temperature, so if plants can just survive, the future is bright. The other mulch we put on is wood chip.

We’ve got different grades of wood chips, some more rotted and some less rotted, some bigger chips, some smaller chips. It’s not a uniform product, and so usually I like to let it get a bit older, ’cause I feel that then there’s some more nutrition in it. It’s turning towards being compost,

Going into the soil of the pathways, as well as the bed, so all the soil you want to think in terms of protecting with organic matter mulch and feeding the soil life. And you can see in here, as we pass the small tunnel, this has not had any mulch.

What we do in here in the polytunnels is put the compost on in May. We don’t even put any wood chip in the paths, actually, ’cause I just want it to be compost. We put a bit of green waste compost there that’s the very black one. It’s quite level, that maintains moisture,

And this is winter salads that we’re picking the outer leaves from, right the way through the winter. This tunnel had fleece over. Two weeks ago, we had some quite hard frost, or hard for us, -5 centigrade, 23 Fahrenheit, and of course, some damage to some plants, but nothing to worry about really.

I’ve got damage here, which is not frost. It’s some kind of virus, I think, getting into this kale, Cavolo Nero kale. It should be dark green, like, say, that one, but even that one is starting to look a bit pale in the middle. I’m not too sure what’s going on,

But I’m not too worried, because you can see how much we’ve harvested from these plants. They’ve given a huge amount of kale. Anything from now on is a bonus. This time last year, they were all dead actually, ’cause we had a significantly harder frost which bumped them off,

And some of these had died this time last year as well, but you can see they’re all looking good. This is purple sprouting broccoli to crop in April, all being well, a variety called Claret. And just recently, the pigeons arrived. They do usually in December, so I whipped this net on very quickly.

Prior to that, Adam had put these stakes in, which is working well. There’s pigeon damage you can see, the pecking on the leaves. And this is serving for a moment. We’re going to put a wire along the top, actually, just to support the net a bit above the broccoli plants.

And I’m very pleased with them, ’cause they are a second planting, went in after beetroot, so that bed gave a huge amount of beetroot, and now it’s got potentially a lot of broccoli for next spring. Spring, look at this. Rhubarb thinks it’s spring. That’s already shooting a bit.

That’s a variety called Timperley Early, which I’ve had for a long time. I got it originally from my mother, actually, and just took a bit of root from her garden, and I’ve shared it out for different people, and you can do that with rhubarb, it’s just amazing. At this climate, it enjoys.

It likes the, the damp, it likes rain. If you’re in a dry climate, I wouldn’t try and grow it, I don’t think. Can you guess what this is? We have here, this surprises me, it’s wood chip, but it’s now four years old, and we sieved it from a pile of much bigger chips,

Just with a very rough metal sieve, nothing fancy, and it’s slowly been decomposing even since sieving it. We use that as compost, actually. It’s probably quite a few weed seeds, but good stuff. So any kind of organic matter is compost. You know, compost doesn’t have to look perfect or be perfect.

This is example of the frost damage, again nothing too significant, I’m not worried. We’re going to actually take these out, if I remove these, this is how we do it is twist like that, and that way, you just bring out the main roots. Leave most of the roots in there.

That will go on the compost heap. So that’s red mustard, which has done a great harvest through the autumn, and it went in the ground at the same time as the salad rocket here. Which actually, even without fleece would’ve survived, but it is a bit hardier.

And generally, green leaf plants do much better in winter months than red ones. Red leaves means, as I see it, reduces the ability to photosynthesize green leaves, like green lettuce is better in winter generally than red lettuce, in my experience. Ah, now, here we have something which I’m not too keen on,

And we’ve been having a lot of problems with allium leaf miner. Yeah, here we go. Whoa, so this would’ve been a nice leek. This example, I just want to show this to you, ’cause some of you don’t know this pest, and I didn’t big time.

I’d seen a little bit until just this year, and I put a post up on social media a couple of days ago, and rather alarming response, basically, a lot of people saying, “Well, I’ve never seen this,” and so it’s that kind of, you know, we’ve lost all these outer leaves, basically.

You’ve lost more than half your leek, but having said that, I’ve seen worse. You know, that’s still edible, but you spend a lot of time, you lose a lot of harvest, we’ve just got a lot of damage, and it’s a new pest, so then with a new pest,

You’ve got to work out how do I react to this? Is it feasible, viable to stop it? And with leaf miners, you’ve got to put covers on, something like fleece pretty much at the moment of planting. The main danger times are March to May and September to November, basically,

That you need to protect your leeks. It also eats garlic and onions a bit, but like here, we’ve got overwintering spring onions, and fortunately, from what I’ve heard, people are saying that the leaf miner, although it likes most alliums, it doesn’t eat spring onions. For me, that would be a real bonus.

Here, we have some mustard and rye, where we plant the mustard to give, I find it gives a bit of protection against the wireworm, which we do have a bit here, but not very much, thank goodness, and it mainly eats rye. This is rye for grain, for bread mostly,

And the mustard maybe helps a little bit against the wireworm. We don’t know yet for sure. It’ll be interesting to see this next spring. I’m hoping it’ll just look really lush like it did last year, so that will be rye to harvest as grains as we go into, well, next summer.

And we’re going to show you now the shed where we’ve been busy harvesting and storing, and you can see the vegetables that we’ve put in. So this is temporary storage until I sell them. Basically, this is a market garden here, and we’ll see how it goes for sales.

You can see there’s chicories for radicchio, they go in salad bags, actually, celeriac, beetroot of different types, and onions, and Chinese cabbage, a few apples. And this shed is not frost hardy. This time last year, it was freezing in the shed, and everything you see here stood some frost,

So these are not like trying to keep tomatoes in here or anything like that. Winter roots generally have some frost tolerance, but they store better often out of the rain and the wet soil and slugs and other soil pests. It’s always, deciding the best time

To get them out is when it’s still quite, well, before it gets too cold, but also before it’s, you need to wait until it’s cooled down a bit. Oh yeah, we’ve got some nice endive here. This is something I did just when we had the frost forecast,

So I took out a whole plant there. These are separate actually, you see? Going a little bit rotting around there, but we’ll go through these in a couple of days and put them in the salad bags again. The pond is shaping up to be the same as it’s always been.

This first pond that we dug, it’s not holding water. That was brim full of water two weeks ago, ’cause we’d had so much rain, and that’s how much it’s already gone down. Around the edge, we’ve put this black plastic. It looks pretty horrible at the moment, but that’s temporary,

And the idea is that will kill the mustard. So there’s a lot of mustard under here that’s been trying to grow, and basically by depriving it of light, it probably won’t kill it, but it’ll weaken it enough that there’s a lot of wildflower seeds and even some plants in there

Which should survive the winter under the plastic, and so we’ll take the plastic off late February, and maybe put it over there and use it to kill some more grass and pasture weeds, and grow squash. So this is plastic we use many times, just keep moving it around where appropriate,

And what I want to have is wildflowers there again next spring and summer. Passing the main garden here, you can see that there’s a lot of beds now empty. I’m often asked like, you know, “Do you keep your beds covered in winter?” Yeah, basically.

You might look at these beds and think that’s bare soil, but it’s actually, it’s all mulched with either compost or wood chip, and until recently, most of it is growing something during the growing season, but in the winter, not much growth, so plants are dying off.

Like here, this mustard was sown on 30 September, actually, and garlic planted at the same time on the same day, compost then put on top, and the mustard was up here. Now you can see how it’s mostly killed by frost, and the garlic’s coming through. So that’s an example of, like, cropping

As much as you can in the growing season, and then the winter is quite a dormant time, or here, what we have is kind of the seasonal growth. So you know, this is not new growth of winter, but it’s a plant. They’re amazing plants, these Brussels,

How they do their growing in the summer and autumn, and then you can harvest them in the winter. Actually, where I’d reckon to harvest, like this week we’ll be up to about there ’cause you can see then as we get above there, getting smaller. These could still grow some more

As we go into February if it stays mild, but there’s a lot to harvest there now, which is what I want for Christmas, ’cause everybody in Britain eats Brussels sprouts at Christmas time, and it’s kind of crazy how the orders, that I can’t grow enough, actually. I’d love to grow more,

But they’re not very profitable to grow. Yeah, this is a nice plant for winter. That’s corn salad, lamb’s lettuce, and you just, we cut them, so this is not a leaf picking one, just cut them near the soil, and they’re only tiny. The flavour is slightly buttery and nutty.

That’s one of my favourite winter salads, actually, but again, you don’t get much, so you need quite a big area to grow a worthwhile amount. This mustard, you can see hasn’t been killed by frost, interestingly, and there’s not much of it. This is asparagus, so actually what I did was

I just scattered a few mustard seeds, and they fell down through the asparagus leaves back in October, and we’re going to put a bit of compost on there. So that’s asparagus we’ll harvest next April and June, May and June. And here’s an example of if you sow your broad beans

Too early, if you did, there’s a lot of bad information out there telling you to do things like that. This is frost damage on broad bean, for example, which is great, ’cause that’s my whole idea. Having said that, some of the plants look quite healthy,

But the idea is the broad beans die, and then the garlic, again, it’s an intersow companion plant, if you like, plant with garlic. Now we’re coming to the three strip trial, and this is fascinating, ’cause at this time of year, we’re just taking the last harvest and I’ve got results.

So what we’ve got is three strips side by side, and each one is two metres wide, nine metres long, and this one is, we call strip three, has a mulch every year of cow manure, and the harvest this year from this strip, two metres wide, 143 kilogrammes of trimmed harvest.

Strip two, different compost, that’s the only difference. These are both no dig. This one has actually green waste and mushroom compost. Harvest this year, 126, quite a bit lower than the 143. So 126, and then we come to same compost in strip one,

And what we do in this one is put a fork in the ground once a year, lever to loosen the soil, and that’s given 106 kilos. So forking has depressed the yield by 20 kilos compared to that strip, 126, 106. So throw your fork away, you don’t need it.

You don’t need to loosen and aerate soil. I still see it advised. I mean, the only time I’d do it, there is a time, would be, say the builders have been driving all over a plot of wet ground and smashing it down, and then some mechanical reloosening, reopening of the soil,

But in normal gardening world, you don’t need to. And I mean, look at this for example. So these are carrots which Adam sowed, actually, on the 5th of July, so quite late. That’s why they’re not enormous but actually I’m really happy with that as a winter carrot.

We’re going to leave these in the ground. I don’t normally do that, but I thought I’d try. You know, if it got really cold, you could push a bit of soil around them, because carrots of themselves can take a bit of freezing, just not too much. Carrot root fly can be an issue.

We had a mesh over there, but the later sowing seems to have helped that a bit, so I’m thinking even next year to sow carrots as late as mid July, that was the 5th of July. Everyday counts in July, so maybe 10th would be actually more sensible.

And we’re coming now to another trial. I’ll just mention in passing the winter purslane, that’s a really nice, if it’s mild weather. If it’s really cold, frosty, it gets brown leaves and not so good. And the dig, no dig trial, so these are two more trial beds.

This one I dug, I dig every year, and it was nearly three weeks ago now I dug it, and put the compost in this one, same amount of compost on top, and then just 10 days ago, we planted, transplanted broad beans and peas. I mean, it’s looking like spring, it’s ridiculous,

’cause we’ve had a milder than normal December so far. Yeah, the idea with these plants, by the way, is we’ll harvest bean and pea shoots in late February, March, then they’ll come out, cut them out, ground level, cut them off to the compost heap, and then plant

For the spring, like carrots, beetroot, and so on. But the harvest this year, 102 kilos from the no dig bed, 86 from the dig bed, so quite a difference. And over 10, that was year 11, actually, the year 11 totals are 12% different between dig and no dig.

So for all that extra work, 12% less, and that’s the same amount of compost. But that’s the important bit, and for me, that’s a really helpful way of explaining why no dig is brilliant, because you don’t need more compost for no dig. You just need the same amount, but you’ll get more food,

’cause I’m not using any fertilisers here. This is all just compost, and look what’s going on right here. Adam is doing a double composting. This was chicory which finished recently, and because we’re getting a bit low on the homemade compost now, I’m using a bit of green waste compost,

So I’ll use a bit of bought in as well. And on top is the homemade, and that compost is only four months old, in fact. And the total depth will be a bit more than an inch at the moment. It’ll settle to about an inch,

Which is when I measure it, to give an idea. Like in here, for example, we put in May, just once a year but in May, we put four centimetres, about an inch and a half. We put a bit more in here. You can see how I’ve risen up a bit coming in.

But this is year 12 nearly of this polytunnel being here. And these winter salads, they went in two months ago from sowing three months ago. So we put them in as plug plants, and I’ve not watered in here for three weeks, so you see the surface is looking dry,

And that’s how you want it to be in the winter, because I think we overwatered a bit in November, actually, and the weather was so humid and damp, and the slugs, it’s just unbelievable. Having said that, you can see there’s very little actual slug damage. Sorry, there is to the leaves.

What I mean is we haven’t lost any plants, or hardly any, so, you know, it could be a lot worse. And we’re picking the outer leaves, so the way we harvest is taking these leaves off here, and what we’re noticing quite often is you’ll see a little bit of slug damage.

Actually, that one’s not too bad, but at the bottom of the plant, yeah, like that, it’s just that little bit of brown, and what you can do is just take that off, ’cause these are going in salad bags, so they need to look pretty nice. And we’ve got Grenoble Red lettuce,

We’ve got two types of endive, the broad-leaved endive there right on the end, and then here is the Frisee leaf endive, a variety called Wallonne from Belgium. Different types of mustard, there’s Green Streaks and Red Dragon, and then there’s salad rocket, and then there’s Red Lace or Red Streaks mustard.

All those are pretty pungent flavour. Even more pungent, probably the strongest flavour of all is that land cress, related to watercress, really strong, so that’s why I haven’t got much diluted. And the much, one of the mildest flavours is the Claytonia winter purslane,

And you can see how much bigger it is in here from being sown at a similar time compared to outside. And likewise for the chervil up there, that’s a fantastic winter flavour, so we put a little bit of that in all the salad bags through the winter.

We’ll be picking in here quite a bit through the winter months, but I’m looking to have a break in January, mostly depends how on the temperature, but we’re going to do a big pick in here in about three days time for Christmas, and then we’ll also have a short break in video making.

Having said that, we’ve got one or two nice ones in reserve. Do keep an eye out for, we’re going back to Four Acre Farm, which is Kate Forrester, who’s doing amazing things down there, a new no dig market garden, so there’s a video about that coming up. And what else have we got?

Something else in the pipeline. There’ll be quite a few coming from Chile, so do watch out for that. Do subscribe if you’re not already, and I’ll look forward to seeing you in 2024.