REAL WORLD GARDENER Wed. 5pm 2RRR 88.5fm Sydney,
streaming live at www.2rrr.org.au and Across Australia on the Community Radio
Network. www.realworldgardener.com
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The complete CRN
edition of RWG is available on http://www.cpod.org.au/ , just click on 2RRR to find this week’s edition. The new theme is sung by Harry Hughes from his album
Songs of the Garden. You can hear samples of the album from the website www.songsofthegarden.com
with landscape designer Louise McDaid
No dig gardening you might’ve even
heard of and wondered what it was all about.
The fact is the idea has been
around for almost 80 years!
No dig gardening is
exactly that - gardening without digging the soil – perfect for when you have
rocky soil, or soil with too many rocks to remove, or if you have an area
that’s just rock with no soil at all – the idea is you create your own soil,
mostly used for veggie growing
Instead
of buying in truckloads of soil to plant in, you can create your own with a mix
of different materials that will compost – start by collecting things like
leaves, grass clippings, scraps from the kitchen like vegies and fruit, weeds,
prunings that have been chopped up and even shredded paper – most of these are
free things you can gather or get from around the neighbourhood – you can also
use your own compost that you’ve made
No-dig gardening is a method used by
some organic gardeners.
Nobody is really sure where the idea first started
–possibly in when a Mr Masanobu Fukuoka started working on this idea in 1938,
and began publishing it in the 1970s calling it "Do Nothing Farming."
Two pioneers of the method in the twentieth
century included F. C. King, Head Gardener at Levens Hall, South Westmorland,
in the Lake District of England, who wrote the book "Is Digging
Necessary?" in 1946 and a gardener from Middlecliffe in the UK, A. Guest,
who in 1948 published the book "Gardening Without Digging".
No-dig gardening was also promoted by
Australian Esther Deans in the 1970s, and American gardener Ruth Stout
advocated a "permanent" garden mulching technique in Gardening Without
Work and no-dig methods in the 1950s and 1960s.
