Here’s a cool explainer video on how to start a garden without having to turn the soil.
It’s called no-dig gardening, and it basically means that you leave the soil alone and let it do its thing instead of weeding and tilling it. You build layers — kind of like lasagna — of organic matter that decompose and feed the soil below.
That allows the soil to develop “fungal filaments,” which is how plants get food. When you cu
“It’s a really brilliant system,” commercial organic farmer Charles Dowding says in the video. “Man could not improve on that. Nature’s got all the answers if we only know how to look or how to help her do it better.”
The practice was linked to natural farming proponent Fukuoka Masanobu. It’s been developed over the years by others, according to gardening site Treehugger:
All would champion the idea that soil quality will dramatically improve if left undisturbed by cultivating, tilling, plowing, digging etc. They believed that soil was enriched with top layers of mulch decomposing to develop the appropriate communities of worms and micro-organisms that enhance food growth. Their ideas have since been embraced even in broad acre agriculture under the guise of no-till farming.
Treehugger’s guide in the above link also lays out some steps to starting a no-dig garden.
