Tending our plot

Our plot has already been built, so for the benefit of those of you who know nothing about no dig I'll explain the process.

First of all you have to measure your plot. Put down stakes where you want the borders to be. Ours is about 4 metres x 2 metres, at a guess.

We practice crop rotation so make sure you have 4 quadrants. One for leafy vegies, one for root crops, one for legumes and the other for sweet corn type stuff (forgot what it is called). Briefly crop rotation helps the soil to replenish itself, as some crops are harder on it than others. Some crops love acid, others alkaline. So by rotating your crops every few years you make sure no part of the soil is overly burdened. You replace nutrients in each plot.

Then you dig your trenches around the outside of the plot. You lay down a border in the trenches, in our case we used recycled roof tiles. We got these for free from someone who was doing up their place and going to throw these perfectly good tiles out.

On both sides of the tiles we lay down newspaper (about 1 cm thick). This keeps the weeds out of the plot.

Once the border is built we lay down a thick layer of paper on the plot. Then we put down pellets.

Then the magic begins. We pile on a very thick layer of straw (make sure it is not from racehorses as they use a lot of chemicals). We get ours for free from the police horses. This straw will settle in a few days, so make sure you keep topping it up for a few weeks. We've been topping up our straw for about three weeks.

Then, when you're ready to plant put down some clumps of soil and plant your seeds. (Don't cover the entire surface with soil, just the bits where you are going to plant seeds. Eventually the straw will compost down to good rich soil anyway.) We've been nurturing some seeds at home because we can't get to the garden every day (it is several suburbs away from where we live) and you need to water your seeds every day when you first plant them.

This is the essence of no dig gardening. The yields are supposedly fantastic, and already in the community part of our garden we are seeing so many crops. All sorts of things like pumpkins, watermelon, tomatoes, zucchini. Can't wait to plant our first autumn crops.