No-dig garden beautiful thing

Dr Compost, aka Ben Elms, is putting more in now, so he can get more out later.

I love the latest buzz words, the latest fad. However, I often question whether there are any really new ideas; including in gardening. I’m a big fan of "no-dig" gardening, which has had many different approaches and many different names over the years. One of the first books on this great soil-building technique came out in the 1970s: Esther Dean’s classic book No-Dig Gardening & Leaves of Life. Everything in this book is still relevant today.

"Regenerative agriculture" is a relatively new take on a similar concept. It is about regenerating or improving the land, the soil, as we farm or garden. Imagine your backyard getting richer and more productive every year. It’s the opposite of needing to apply more fertilisers, pesticides and fungicides every year.

It asks us to look at our patch as a whole. Our gardens are a sum of all their areas. Flower gardens are no different to vege gardens. In fact, they have advantages over vege gardens; flower gardens and native gardens are our ecosystems, homes and attractants for beneficial insects, birds and reptiles.

So let’s encourage these areas to be lush and alive. These are our life banks. This is our way to promote health and wellbeing. Gardens aren’t meant to be sterile and stylised, sprayed and manicured to within an inch of their lives and yours. If we were to do one thing today for our vege gardens’ regeneration, it would be adding compost. Compost is the soil’s elixir, full of minerals, organic matter and teeming with biology;  bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes and worms.

One of the most effective times to add compost is in the autumn.  First give a sprinkling of lime and a rock mineral product that has a broad spectrum of minerals. If you’re living near the ocean, you could just throw on seaweed. Give the bed a generous covering of compost then use a garden fork to ease the soil down deep.  Literally put the fork down as deep as it will go, then pull back about 45 degrees, and then do the next section. We’re trying to aerate the soil while maintaining soil structure. Then mulch and leave for winter.

I do the same in the spring minus the lime and rock minerals.  I love that some of the compost falls down the cracks as you aerate the soil, yet we’re still mimicking nature by applying the compost on the surface.I finally spent the big bucks on  a broad fork last year. The tines are twice the length of my garden fork. A garden fork will do the job just fine, as mine did for many years, but what’s not to love about a new gardening tool. The results start to speak for themselves. Soil structure develops, worm populations multiply and the crops themselves ... well, did I mention last season’s monster onions? Other regenerative ideas to try:

A comfrey root.

Nitrogen fixing

Plant nitrogen-fixing shrubs and trees in your landscape to encourage soil fertility. Alders, kowhai, acacias, elaeagnus and tagasaste, or tree lucerne, will do the trick.

Green manure crops

Green manure crops increase biological activity in the soil when a bed is dormant, and they increase organic-matter levels when turned in. Use lupins and you’re raising nitrogen levels as well. Or try  mustard, marigolds or phacelia.

Comfrey

I just can’t get enough comfrey. Plant it under fruit trees and damp low spots to catch nutrient run-off. Chop and use as a regular mulch around vegie crops.

Compost

When making your compost add a few handfuls of lime and rock minerals to your heap. Compost is the ultimate trucker of fertiliser and minerals to our plants.

Chop and drop

Weeds and flowers can come up anywhere. Rather than trucking them away, use them as mulch around your seedlings. Chop them and drop them where they grow. Rather then getting annoyed at my booming thistle population in the vege garden, they’ve become a mulching resource  around other plants. They break down, feeding valuable nutrients to the plants.

 

Workshops

To find out how to make your own compost, come along to a free Dr Compost workshop run by Ben Elms. The Dr Compost home-composting project is funded by the Queenstown Lakes District Council and delivered by Wanaka Wastebusters to reduce organic waste going to landfill.

Easy ways to compost workshop:  traditional ‘‘cold’’ composting, Bokashi buckets and worm farms. Feed your soil by harnessing the power of fermentation, bacteria and worms. Find a method to suit you, no smell, no fuss.

Wanaka workshop: Wednesday, 6-8pm at St John rooms, 4 Link Way.

Queenstown workshop: Thursday, 6-8pm at Shotover Garden Centre, 150 Ladies Mile-Frankton Highway (SH6).