No Dig, Straw Mulch & Roe Deer

Good weather albeit still pretty cold for the time of year has kept me away from the laptop and very busy out in the garden. With warmer temperatures expected overnight after the weekend, this has been my last chance to get everything ready for the grand plantation. I love this time of the year and can't wait for that first fresh tomato!

At the latest count I have well over two hundred plants to go out in the next ten days or so - tomatoes, peppers, aubergines, chillies, melons, squashes & pumpkins, climbing and dwarf haricots, courgettes, tomatillos, okra and corn, not to mention the usual non-weather dependant beetroot, lettuce and turnip bonanza! 

I try to practice a No Dig method of vegetable gardening as much as possible, but thanks to the ever-present and busy mole I only achieve a kind of No Dig Hybrid. No Dig is literally that: gone is the traditional double digging each winter where the entire plot is dug over and organic matter incorporated into trenches. Instead, I lay my organic matter - in my case almost always homemade compost - on the surface and then top off with another layer of either grass clippings or straw, depending what I have available. The worms will pull the compost into the ground where the nutrients and moisture it provides can be accessed by the plant's roots while the very activity of the worms keeps the soil light and aerated, and full of life. Treading on the ground to dig may put the organic matter in the right place but it may also compact the soil and make life more difficult for the soil fauna.

The theory is that when sowing or planting the top layer of mulch can be pulled back to reveal the soil beneath, and then replaced back around the plants. There is almost no need to weed because the soil is not left exposed for weed seeds to fall onto and the seeds already in the soil cannot germinate because the mulch excludes the light. I am struggling with this last bit, because of course when I sow seeds - especially small ones like rocket or carrot - they need the light, so I still end up with weeds just where my new seedlings are coming through. I clearly need to work on this! 

The second advantage is that the heavy mulch keeps the moisture in the soil by reducing evaporation, increasingly important in these times of climate change and erratic rainfall. The mulch also protects the soil from the direct impact of rain storms, reducing soil erosion and damage.

But as  say, mine is a hybrid. Whilst I know that digging out the mole runs is fairly futile because the animal will always dig more, I just cannot bring myself to put plants into a space where there is already a tunnel. 

I garden on a gentle slope and the last thing I want is my liquid feed simply draining away! Not immediately, anyway. So part of the clearance of an old crop or planting of a new crop does result in a bit of forking over the land, watching the soil level drop a few centimetres as the tunnels are filled in. But I don't stand on the ground and it is no more than a light lifting and shaking action than anything more aggressive.

The biggest change I've seen so far this spring, having switched from a grass clippings top mulch to a more robust straw one, is a decrease in the number of slugs and slug attacks and an increase in the number of slow worms on the plot. It is too early to say if this is anything more than a coincidence but it will be interesting to see if the pattern continues.

Also on the list to do this week is sow a load more cauliflowers as we've been constantly visited by roe deer over the last few days who are making short work of much of the garden. More on that soon.