The no dig method has taken on a life of its own, almost a religion. It's probably a mistake for most people though. "One dig" is almost always going to be superior, given soil that has never been used for gardening before. Trying to start a no dig garden in some heavily compacted, organic-poor, heavy clay soil is going to lead to extreme disappointment.
I thought that was always the case. Dig as required to get your soil to the correct type for what you want to grow, then let it be and don't dig.
Digging to turn the soil seems like an old adage that has been passed down through generations, but modern scientific studies are now showing it provides very little to no benefit for yields.
Man, I wish I had access to heavily compacted, organic-poor, heavy-clay soil. It's the 80% rock that makes even basic tasks a day-long chore.
A friend of mine retired from the military and moved to my neck of the woods in the Ozarks. Having lived in Eastern North Carolina for most of his 20 years in, he had gotten used to sandy soil with nary a rock. Prior to that, he was in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, and I don't think he dug many holes there.
After closing on their new house he asked me for a shovel, for which to install a mailbox. Of course I'd help my friend out. "Sure, buddy!" I said. "Here's a shovel, post-hole digger, pickax and a rock-bar. That should get the job done." After I explained to him that yes, you need a 20 pound pointy chunk of steel to dig any sizable hole around here, he still didn't quite believe me. However, once he got the mailbox planted, he adjusted his beliefs accordingly.
On the rare occasion that I have to dig a hole somewhere with actual dirt, I always find myself amazed at how easy it is. Those times help me understand scenes in TV or movies that include someone digging a hole. Those scenes don't ever depict someone deciding to move whatever it is they're putting in the ground because they hit a massive stone at 8 inches into a 24 inch hole, and there ain't any getting through it. The scenes don't depict the Herculean effort required to just plant a tree. Those shows don't show the absolutely back-breaking labor it takes to be a landscaper around here. And before I had the chance to do the same kind of work in actual soil, those scenes just didn't make sense.
Our house sits on a small basalt volcanic plug and the solid dark rock lurks not very far under our garden - 100m north of us and its sandstone, 100m south and it is limestone.
Digging a hole of any depth would probably require explosives!
I'd save a fortune on concrete and rebar if I had high quality bedrock so close.
Hard pass. Karst limestone is bad enough.
The soil in my backyard has very few rocks but the clay is so hard and dense it may as well be a brick wall.
When it's wet, but not saturated - like 1-2 days after a rain - you can decompact the soil with a strong metal broadfork and leave the soil in large block aggregates. This keeps the soil structure and maintains some fungal web connections. Add nutrients, wood chips, stick and sand below aggregates and in cracks. Cover with compost and plant clover to cover.
This is amazing info thank you.
What is the purpose of planting clover?
Clover is a nitrogen fixing plant - used to be that you’d plant clover for a year in between other crops to make your soil fertile again.
(It’s the bacteria in the roots that do the actual nitrogen chemistry.)
Really good advice above. But if you want to cheat a bit, I used https://www.thompson-morgan.com/p/vitax-clay-breaker--25-kg-... on my heavy clay garden and it helped a lot, in combination with extra organic material etc.
Clover fixes nitrogen and roots help stabilize the voids in the soil. They sell seed mixes called "ground cover mix" that includes other plants and will help keep the soil from recompacting when it rains and keeps weeds at bay.
Are you sure it is just clay? Sandy clay packs even tighter than just clay: https://www.uaex.uada.edu/farm-ranch/crops-commercial-hortic...
"If you mix sand into clay, the clay particles will fill in all the open spaces between the sand particles and often the clay will act as a ‘glue’ sticking all particles together, ultimately resulting in a more dense soil."
"Trying to start a no dig garden in some heavily compacted, organic-poor, heavy clay soil is going to lead to extreme disappointment".
For sure. In Dowdings method you put a quite thick layer of compost on top of the existing soil. You then top up the compost every year.
Oh yeah, just top up the compost every year. Where are you getting that compost from? Wood chips you say? You'd have to denude ten acres of forest to make enough compost to Dowding one acre of field.
He's a soil vampire, sucking in fertility from somewhere else to feed his own garden.
In my parents' farm the compost comes from cleaning up the forest around it (trim branches, vegetation, dying trees, etc) mixed with the chicken and goat manure plus whatever else gets mixed in there (food leftovers, ashes, coffee grounds, etc). Of course it's at a small-ish scale (less than 1 hectare) but my parents definitely don't denude 4 hectares to do so.
Well...we are hn so we use a website
https://getchipdrop.com/
Tree surgeons/arborists are always trying to get rid of chips
An acre? Charles Dowding is a market Gardner, not a farmer, but he has done it on a scale of a few acres.
His compost is a mixture of
1) homemade. When you are trying to expand a plot growing stuff to compost can help. Grass clippings, waste from the garden etc. This is a minor source of very good compost.
2) woodchip, see above
3) green waste. This is other people's garden waste, normally composted poorly by a local authority. You want it some time before you use it so it can compost more fully
4) farmyard/ horse manure
5) spent mushroom compost. Actually I never saw him use this, but it is very common.
One farmer I saw said the secret of no till is 'other peoples carbon', you are correct. But some people have carbon to get rid of.
Raised planters can help too
We call that New Jersey here!
The dirt in my part of Virginia is almost suitable for pottery straight out of the ground. Just need to filter out the feldspar, quartz, and gold first.
I go to my mom’s old farm and marvel at the thought of them having grown anything in that hard red ground.
> Trying to start a no dig garden in some heavily compacted, organic-poor, heavy clay soil is going to lead to extreme disappointment.
If you start with Charles Dowdings 6 inches of compost on top, that is not necessarily true. The soil comes to life as worms go mad pulling that compost down into the soil.
It actually works rather well. Year 1 can be very good. Year 2 even better.
The real disappointment in Year 1 is the amount of weeds that find 6 inches of compost no barrier at all! With digging you can get a lot of perennial weed roots out, and hoe off the annuals. With no dig you have to pull them.
I'm not a idealogue, so actually suggest glyphosate before compost...but people don't normally like that suggestion.