No till, no dig

Or how I learned to love cardboard and leave the shovel behind

When it came time to create a vegetable garden at our new home in western Massachusetts my priority was the sun. After 25 years of battling the shade of large deciduous trees at our home outside Washington, DC, I wanted 7, 8, 9 hours of glorious, direct sunshine! 

After locating a spot about 20 yards across the field from our door, I had to figure out how to turn an area of meadow grass, bittersweet, blackberry bramble, bugleweed, hog-peanut, cinquefoil, dogbane, fleabane, and Lord knows what else into a spot that would be more welcoming to vegetables. I’ve been an avid follower of English gardener Charles Dowding for many years, and he’s one of the world’s most prominent advocates of no dig gardening. Fortunately I had recently purchased his book on the practice and it all made sense to me.

(You can buy Charles’ book here or listen to him talking to Joe Lamp’l – another must-follow for any gardener – on his Joe Gardener Show podcast here.)

We turned a portion of this field into our vegetable garden.

No dig gardening means what it says. You don’t dig, rototill or turn over the soil. You instead layer your beds with nutrient- and microbe-rich organic compost, and let the nematodes, millipedes, earthworms and millions of other life-giving organisms that live in the soil do the work for you. Believe me, over time they will. I’ve proven it to myself since we put in our garden in April 2022.

We closed in the 32- by 26-foot garden the previous fall to keep our critter friends away by adding to the post and beam fence that surrounds the inner field of our property. I mowed the grass and weeds tight to the ground and dug up any hardwood saplings. By spring we were ready to go to work. 

We first needed cardboard, and lots of it. 

There are lots of ways to get rid of unwanted grass and weeds when you’re making a new bed. You can spray chemicals, but they not only kill the plants but most every other living organism in the soil. And they poison the Earth. You can cover the area with plastic and let the sun bake the plants to death. Solarization, as this technique is known, works. But it takes weeks, if not months. And you can turn over the soil by hand or rototill. While turning over the soil will get rid of most unwanted grasses and weeds, it disturbs the microorganisms actively at work beneath the surface. The underlying principle of no dig is you feed the soil, not disturb it. Turning over the dirt also brings to the surface dormant weed seeds buried below the surface, exposing them to the light and moisture they need to come back to life.

Another way is to cover the ground with cardboard. You spread a thick layer of compost and mulch over the cardboard to create your beds and paths, and that’s it. You can plant the same day if you want. The cardboard will decompose in the months ahead providing fresh organic material to the soil. You just need to remove any tape or staples first and avoid using heavily dyed or waxed cartons.

We put out a call for cardboard on our local listserv and spent a few days driving to homes, grocery stores, even a brewery, loading up our car. The pandemic was still on and we wore our masks but as newcomers to the area we still managed to meet a lot of people and even made a few friends.

We were careful to overlay the cardboard pieces because unwanted weeds, being the survivors that they are, will find their way to the light.

We covered the garden with cardboard, being careful to lay it on thick and not leave any gaps. I had drawn out a plan to locate the beds and paths, and we used an orange landscaping spray to mark everything out. I had decided against raised beds so all that was left to do was cover the 3x9 foot beds with three or four inches of compost and the paths between them with a few inches of mulch. We had our garden. It was a little like painting by number.

It’s hard to make out the compost vs. mulch but we used different materials for the beds and the paths. The split logs helped us identify which was which.

I planted into those new beds that spring and to my delight grew some of my best lettuce and tomatoes ever. I maintain the beds by adding an inch or two of compost to them once or twice a year, and that’s about it. There have been very few weeds as well, which has practically eliminated one of gardening’s most unwelcome chores.

The garden in August 2022. We had been in Washington most of the summer and didn’t plant out all of the garden but the tomatoes, squash and bush beans did fine.

If you’ve gotten this far reading, congratulations! Here’s a little treat. It’s Charles Dowding talking about no dig. He’s a delightful guy to listen to, maybe because I spent so many years living in England! He also knows a heck of a lot about gardening.