“Join me on a tour of my garden, just less than five years since I started with a weedy field.
No dig means surface feeding of soil organisms, which then aerate soil and make food available to plants: see how this results in my abundance of veg, fruit and flowers, and few weeds.”
Filmed & edited by Edward Dowding August 2017.
YouTube
We showed one of Dowding’s videos about 1-2 years ago, but the progress they’ve made is so stunning that their garden deserves an update. With the incredible beauty and productivity it looks world class to me. In contrast, our garden is primarily fruit trees due to the extreme heat and dead clay soil. It would be very hard to grow primarily veggies in our situation. The key is learning to adapt to your climate and soil.
We are in the tropics too and we only have fruit trees succeeding. Our ground covers, tubers, veggies etc were outgrown by weed. The land was degraded so the weed are very stubborn. We are waiting til our trees n banana plants shade them out. Then we can plant veggies.
Trouble is, veggies need quite a bit of sun. There was a period of time when we had the right ratio of shade and sun for veggies to grow between trees. Now it’s too shady in much of the garden except for shade tolerant plants like aloe and spinach. The good thing is not very many weeds will grow in the shade. It’s becoming more and more like a dark almost scary jungle of growth. Twice a year at least we have to do serious, big time thinning in order to get adequate sun and ventilation. In the near future we’ll have to start removing less valuable trees so the more desirable trees such as mango have more sun. That’s okay. That’s how we planned it. We planted more trees than needed because we figured many would die (and they did, especially that first year).
He’s good enough to have his own gardening TV show. I like his slow, relaxing, simple explanations.