No-Dig Garden Beds

Throw "waste" on ground, then eat food.

Lucie told me we need a boatload of zucchinis and cucumbers this season. We planted our usual couple beds but I was told this wouldn’t cut it. I scoured the garden for more space. Every last nook was inhabited by plants or awaiting seedlings. I poked my head over the wall of brush and coppiced willows to a patch of weedy meadow just outside our domain. A black bird landed among the grass and sang a little song. I took this as a sign.

Up to the brewery for cardboard boxes. I nod to Jarda, the bartender, in his buttoned black vest and crisp white sleeves. He gives me that sly smile of his and continues his conversation with a guy who thinks he’s on the Tour de France, decked out in his cycling attire. I load up the wheelbarrow with cardboard boxes, roll down to the meadow, strip off the tape and lie the boxes on the ground, overlapping the edges. This keeps the weeds from creeping through.

The chickens greet me at their gate and eagerly peck out sprouted grain and worms as I throw the compost into the wheel barrow. This compost if made from food and garden scraps, hay, straw, manure, cut grass, wood-chips, and sawdust. It’s worked on every day of the year by the chickens, who, with a little help from us, produce the greasy black earth that powers our whole little enterprise. I few trips to the meadow and back and there it is. A near instant garden bed with weeks head-start on any weeds.

There are about 28,593 variations of no-dig beds. Version 934 is to the left in the picture above. The bed runs atop a natural dip in the landscape, perhaps where the stream used to flow. I backed my truck up to it with a load of horse manure from Max, a saddle maker who lives in an old quarry in a village just outside Prague. The manure filled the dip, and then I wheeled in compost from the chickens.

In this case, the straw and horse manure mix act as both a weed suppressing layer as well as a source of fertility and water retention. Every drop of water that falls in the trench will be held onto and pulled through the the roots of the plants and given into the plants’ fruits.

You could pound the ground with a plow or hoe to mix the compost in the soil. Or you could just let the worms do it for you.

No-dig gardening is a method of growing food that uses what is considered “waste” to grow more food. If I were to let these beds go, the result would be a patch of very fertile soil.

I used to spend days as a kid raking leaves, putting them into bags and then dragging them down our driveway for a truck to come and haul them away. They hauled away the fertility mined by our trees and the carbon their leaves sucked out of the air. They threw it in a landfill of brought it to a composting center that then made bags of garden soil that we then bought in plastic bags.

Now I give landscapers eggs to drop small mountains of leaves at the farm. If we let it sit a year, it creates the loose crumbling soil of a forest floor. Just put those brown paper bags, or better yet, a bicycle box on the ground, rake a pile of leaves on top in the fall, maybe add some grass and food scraps and come late spring, you’ve got yourself a garden. Repeat several years and you’ll have more zucchinis (or potatoes, cucumbers or tomatoes) than you know what to do with.