Welcome to the website of Charles Dowding!
Here you will find information about new, highly productive ways to grow vegetables, and to harvest them over longer periods, all with a different approach to handling your soil - NO DIG. I have grown wonderful vegetables without soil tillage for twenty nine years. The continual success of this approach leads me to explain it more fully for those who seek a less weedy garden and more abundant harvests.
Salad beds in summer 2011, picked weekly from July to September. They were undersown and interplanted with winter salad, see This Month October and November.
*RECENT UPDATES*: see EXPERIMENT dig/no dig for 2011 results, and This Month for advice on sowing in a cold February
same beds 30 November 2011
undug in front 
Part of my growing consists of an experiment (photos above, June 2011) where vegetables are grown side by side on two pairs of dug and undug beds. Total yields are quite similar but an outstanding feature of the experiment has been the faster early-season growth of many vegetables in the undug beds, especially spinach and onions. It is as if the dug soil is recovering until midsummer. You can find more details under the banner 'dig/no dig experiment', where the latest harvests are entered.
The dig, no dig experiment has yielded much information that helps in understanding more about soil and ways of treating it. Compost and manure on top of undisturbed soil gives brilliant results, as with the garlic below: and there are extremely few weeds, making it easy to re-sow and re-plant.
garlic harvest June 2011; few weeds among the garlic, soil clean at harvest time makes re-planting quick and simple
and this is the same bed in October: after the garlic harvest it was planted with kale, flower sprouts and dwarf french beans in early July, and oriental leaves in late August. No extra compost or manure.
My first book, Organic Gardening the Natural, No Dig Way explains some fundamentals and has much information on vegetable growing that is often overlooked, especially with respect to soil fertility and weeds, drawn out of many seasons' successes and failures.
There is a second edition (October 2010) with more detailed explanations of creating and maintaining a no dig vegetable plot. Also there are new photographs, some of them sequenced to tell stories of patches of ground that have been cleared with surface mulches, followed by the vegetables that grew there.
Producing salad leaves for sale in this part of Somerset has also led me to a keen appreciation of the qualities of different salad plants and how to achieve the best and most continuous harvests. A second book Salad Leaves For All Seasons is one result of this process, with advice for harvests on every day of the year, and the best (different) seeds to sow in each season.
In April 2011 I won an award sponsored by Blackmore Vale media, the plate at a launch of my third book, How to Grow Winter Vegetables, released in April 2011, price £14.95 from Green Books. Why bring out a book on winter growing in the spring? because that is time to sow and plant for having enough vegetables to harvest in the cold season. In my own garden I had parsnips, garlic, onions, celeriac and leeks all growing by the middle of May, brussels sprouts, flower sprouts and swedes planted in June, then kale and savoy cabbage in July and winter salads after that.
In the book I distil a lot of experience to highlight the absolute best moments for sowing and planting, sometimes at different times to those recommended elsewhere, such as kale and swede in early June, chervil and coriander in August, and I explain in detail the precise timing for sowings of salads for winter, in September mostly. The book includes hungry gap vegetables too, such as spring cabbage and broad beans, which enliven an otherwise barren spring season, when harvests are often surprisingly meagre, however nice the weather may be.
Overwintered cauliflower, 18/04/11
The book is all colour and beautifully laid out by Green Books' designers, allowing great explanations of many ideas, including no dig, which has its own chapter. The quality of soil is so, so important and I offer many tips on improving its potential, without the need for any cultivation. There are also great photos of 2010 snow and frost which came at a perfect time!
This book has been shortlisted for an award and you can vote at http://thehorticulturalchannel.info/2011/11/horticultural-channel-awards-2011-voting-form/
ready for winter, October 2010
Coming up in 2012, another book, published by Frances Lincoln in early March:
This one concentrates on fundamentals, helping you to lay the foundations for sucessful gardening with less effort, after working hard to clean and enrich soil at the beginning.
The content is based on day courses I give here, concentrating on soil, compost, sowing correctly and at the right time, salads and a top ten of vegetables.
As well as writing and gardening, I give talks around the country (see Coming Up and Courses) and run day courses here as listed under Courses.
The gardens at Lower Farm comprise three distinct blocks. Firstly the old kitchen garden, about a quarter acre in size, comprises rich soil and has now been cropping for 12 years, having been a goat paddock when I took it on. I was in a hurry to plant beans and garlic, so I dug it over and shaped up the beds in late 1997, the last time it was cultivated in any way. There is also a 14'x60' polytunnel, two hen runs and many apple trees trained along fences.
September 2011, old kitchen garden, second plantings
Secondly there is a triangular corner of the larger field above, which I took on from compacted wheat stubble in late 1999. The soil is clay and had been squashed so airless and dead that there were few weeds growing - docks and grasses mostly, which I removed before mulching with manure - and then in 2000 the vegetables barely grew in undug beds. However I persevered with simply putting compost and manure on top of the beds I had shaped up, and vegetables have grown better every year. In 2001 they were acceptable, in 2002 they were good, and from then on harvests have been excellent. Furthermore, drainage is now much faster than in the cultivated field above. In the bottom corner, where the soil was originally worst of all, is an 18'x30' polytunnel.
September 2011 Top Field, oriental leaves on left
Thirdly, in 2006 I took over another north facing, triangular patch at the bottom of the same field, which was considered too awkward for large machinery to cultivate. Apple trees were planted in January 2007, mostly eaters of many kinds, and I have been experimenting with ways of mulching the weedy pasture between them to grow vegetables. From this I can pass on some useful tips about how to clear ground of grass, weeds and of perennials such as dandelion and couch grass, all without digging.
The initial action of mulching with thick layers of cardboard, compost and manure in the first year leads to a massive boost in long term fertility and results in remarkably little weed growth. Subsequent years see much less time and compost needed, while soil continues to improve under dressings of one to two inches compost or well rotted manure.
September 2011, espalier apples, vegetables
All the garden soil is now in a state of fertile, full bodied liveliness and excellent drainage. Its annual maintenance consists of regular but minor weeding, to keep it clean at all times, and an annual spreading of one to two inches (3-5cm) well rotted compost and manure, preferably but not always in the autumn, and on all beds. Those for spring sowings of small seeds such as carrot and parsnip receive the finest compost.