Plan bumper harvests the no-dig way using Charles Dowding’s monthly crop calendar. Follow simple steps to:
• find success with more than 35 vegetables and herbs from tomatoes to basil, carrots to coriander;
• start a no-dig veg plot on virgin or dug ground, improve the soil and become an expert mulcher and weeder;
• learn key dates for sowing, staking, harvesting and storing using time-saving monthly checklists;
• make a raised bed, tackle slugs and snails, and produce the sweetest-smelling compost;
• understand the techniques for intercropping, companion planting, seed viability and crop succession.
NO-DIG is a long-established way to grow healthy, organic crops while preserving the soil’s integrity: Charles Dowding is the UK’s leading expert.
Charles Dowding grew up on a dairy farm in Somerset. After graduating from Cambridge he worked for a hotel in the Inner Hebrides before starting to grow organic vegetables commercially on the family farm in the early 1980s. In 1990 he left behind what was by then a large market garden to live in France and Zambia. Returning to Somerset in the mid 1990s, he established a bed and breakfast and vegetable growing business at Lower Farm in Shepton Montague, Somerset. There, Charles's salad bags were the main output from his two-acre garden of permanent raised beds and fruit trees. Charles runs vegetable-growing courses and lectures and writes books on his unique growing techniques. Since 2012 Charles has begun a new garden at Shepton Mallet in Somerset which he has designed using no-dig principles.
