Welcome to the website of Charles Dowding!
Here you will find some new 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 vegetables without soil tillage for two and a half decades. 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.
My first book, "Organic Gardening the Natural, No Dig Way" explains some fundamentals and has much information on vegetable growing that is often overlooked. This is because I have more experience of growing than most other writers and at the same time, in my passion to experiment and find better methods, I have tested the limits more!
MY GARDENS ARE OPEN SUNDAY 15th AUGUST 2-4.30pm. Thankyou to everyone who came and contributed so generously to Send A Cow, we raised £240.
My work of 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.
In between days in the garden, I write many articles, give talks, and run day courses here.
The gardens at Lower Farm comprise three distinct blocks. Firstly the old kitchen garden, about a half 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 at that time, 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, a hen run and many apple trees trained along fences.
June 2009, bottom garden
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 dug or pulled out - 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 crops have improved every year. In 2001 they were acceptable, in 2002 they were good, and from then on growth has 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.
July 2009, top field
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. The initial action of mulching with thick layers of compost and manure in the first year leads to a massive boost in long term fertility and sees remarkably little weed growth. There is, again, an interesting comparison with the sticky, poorly drained soil of the parent field above.
July 2009, orchard
All the garden soil is now in a state of fertile, full bodied liveliness and excellent drainage. Its annual maintenance consists of regular but extremely minor weeding, to keep it clean at all times, and an annual spreading of about two inches (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.