Hello again,

Today I wanted to talk about how we built our garden last year. 

I remember the first couple vegetable gardens we made we double dug them. We didn't know any better. Isn’t that why you see all of those gardening commercials for rotavators? You have to aerate the soil? You don't want compaction?

That's definitely what I was told.

But then I came across no dig gardening. The concept looks at how soil is naturally produced when humans don't get involved. Think about the forest floor, or grasslands for that matter. Vegetable material and animal droppings accumulate on the surface and break down adding to the soil’s viability. This soil is rarely disturbed en masse. Some areas may be roughed up by rooting animals and these are often the areas where weed seeds take hold. 

Ever wonder why a beautiful, freshly dug up garden gets so full of weeds so fast?

Disrupting the soil’s natural state creates the need for it to recover. In this instance, literally it re-covers itself with whatever seeds were on the surface and roots were left from perennial plants. The weed seeds sitting on the soils surface couldn't really do anything until you dug them into the ground. Now happily buried, instead of just sitting on the surface, they can really take hold and grow. 

Disrupting the soil can also damage the beneficial organisms that we spoke about earlier.  Mycorrhizae exist as very tiny, microscopic, threads beneath the soil surface. This vast network has been studied connecting entire forests and multiple species of trees and plants. Everytime we dig we disrupt all of these tiny pathways and the plants they have connected. This can reduce their ability to take in nutrients, water or other valuable elements as well as their ability to communicate about possible threats like predatory insects or diseases. 

mycorrhiza:

(pronounced mai·kuh·rai·zah)

a fungus which grows in association with the roots of a plant in a symbiotic relationship. Mycorrhizae play important roles in plant nutrition, soil biology and soil chemistry.

No dig encourages the development of these pathways instead of their destruction. In this way, even in your vegetable garden, every plant you place has a much easier time connecting to the preexisting mycorrhizae in the soil. It gives them a jump start, if you will, at getting to all of these vital components in the soil. 

It's also really, really easy to do!

So last year we built our vegetable garden directly on top of the front lawn. We used wood from the farm to rough out the beds and then laid cardboard and paper leaf bags down on top of the grass. We added leaves (the chickens loved that!) and twigs on top of the cardboard and then soil. We mulched everything on top of this with wood chips so the soils surface wasn’t exposed and to add some active mycorrhizae.

How do we know there were active mycorrhizae in the garden last year when it was just built?

When mycorrhizae reproduce they send up fruiting bodies to produce spores for more mycorrhizae. These fruiting bodies are mushrooms. And we had quite a few in the garden throughout the year, even some bird’s nest fungi which are super cool.  

Bird’s Nest Fungi:

saphrophyte 

Excellent for breaking down organic matter into rich compost. They take nutrients from the material, like wood chips, and cause decomposition of surrounding matter nearly two-fold. These nutrients then become available to nearby plants. 

So if you're interested in starting a really easy garden this year, with soil that is alive with active beneficial ingredients, maybe no dig is the route you’ll choose.  

Hope you enjoy the journey,

Beth