Ditch That Spade!

Easy ways to have few weeds with the ‘no-dig’ method

Consider the time you spent weeding this year. In contrast, imagine your garden with only a few small weeds, so that your time there is mostly planting and picking. With no dig, it’s possible, and here’s how.

Instead of burying weeds in soil, you can clear ground quickly and thoroughly by surface mulching. Autumn is a great time to begin:

_Mulches deprive weeds of light, with the result that their roots wither and eventually die, from lack of nourishment.

_Mulches of organic matter increase soil fungi at the surface, and these discourage germination of pioneer (new) weed seeds such as chickweed.

Disturbance means a need to recover

As well as the massive saving of time, a wonderful advantage of mulching over spadework is how undisturbed soil grows fewer new weeds thereafter. In the 1980s I used to wonder why my seven acre market garden grew so few weeds, when my fellow organic growers were so inundated.

At the time I was mulching paths with straw, which caused a high population of small grey slugs, and I rationalised the absence of weeds by imagining that they were being eaten by slugs, even though my crops were not. Now I have pieced together lots more evidence, including work by Professor Elaine Ingham in the USA, and the answer to whether weeds are colonising or not lies in the two words ‘disturb’ and ‘recover’.

The evidence shows how when soil is disturbed by digging, tilling, even forking, it needs to recover. And it recovers literally, with weeds, whose growth helps soil to restore the fungi and other living organisms that were broken and damaged by cultivation.

Chickweed follows the rotovator