CHARLES DOWDING & RICHARD PERKINS TALK NO DIG

So we're here with the great Charles Dowding and it's such a pleasure to have you and Steph here at the farm. And we've got a little video today talking with Charles about some of the questions that you folks posed on yesterday's video and excited to share our perspectives because although we're both really keen on no dig gardening, we have slightly different approaches and I think it's good to address some of your questions in both of our perspectives, which is a really healthy way to go about things.

It's fascinating for me to be here actually, because as you say, we're both no dig grows but you do it so differently.

Yeah, yeah. I think we should get into it. What's your first impressions on the farm?

I'm loving the variation. I like the way you've got all different gardens in terms of the market garden, different blocks. That makes it much more interesting. And I can see that you've got some difficult soil here and you, yeah, you've got some challenges that you're coping with. You know, the crops are looking pretty well to me.

So. Yeah. Curious to hear like observations you've made in the short time you've been here thinking of soil challenges. What's your observation so far?

Thought well, I, I can see this problem you've got at the moment that, that's a, that's a really annoying one of that the paper marks that clearly wasn't. Is not very rich and yeah, it looks to me like it would have been better stacked for a year. It's easy to say with hindsight because of the way it's filling with worms now. Suggests that basically it still needed to compost more before it went on. But now that it's on the ground and you've got the consequences that obviously that's hard to cope with. Yeah. But the general lashness of growth to me looks really encouraging. It's just that sometimes because of that much problem, you're not getting the yields this year. Yeah, that's quite.

It's a shocker. So we were referring to the problem I mentioned a few videos ago with the wood based compost and then the higher fertility compost that we put in. It's quite a lot of questions. People want to know what type of compost that is recommended for growing. But we've had that issue and I think it's going to take us all year to even that out again.

And it is a huge question that one, because to grow vegetables like this and on this kind of level and to get a Worthwhile yield. You do need to bring in some compost or to be incredibly good at making your own compost and make a lot of it. One thing I'm noticing here is you've got a lot of wood, haven't you? And maybe longer term, that's a way to do, to go well, like you were using factory waste, but to make more of your own compost from wood. It just takes more time, doesn't it?

Well, long term, we're favoring the idea because we actually own a peat swamp. So we're waiting for the local community to help clear the timber that's now taking it will eventually just become forest again. And there's a move in the village to keep it as a peat swamp. Obviously in the past, people used it as animal bedding. It's antibacterial and really good bedding. And essentially the compost we buy in typically for the garden is chicken manure, cow manure and peat moss based. And so we felt like, well, we can make that. So we have been making that coming out of this tunnel and mixing it with some of the cow bedding. But it's now we're at a scale where we can actually close the loop on the compost on the farm. But we certainly weren't in the beginning. And I do advocate people buying in.

Yeah, you need to lift the fertility in the beginning.

Yeah.

And, you know, one big difference here to what I'm doing is the animals. So this tunnel's full of chickens. Was it in the winter?

Yeah. There's 800 chickens in here.

So that's not the same as if you were, say, cropping salad, which is what I've been doing.

Yeah, yeah.

I think that does give the soil less chance to. To build up and build a network of life because of how the chickens are kicking it all around again, presumably the compost that we see in here at the moment that stays in here.

This. No. So this is scraped out like we're on a subsoil compacted pad with a, you know, 15 ton bigger compacted.

You couldn't leave that in here with the chickens.

We could, but it's enough material to put on all the beds. So we kind of want to use it for that purpose. And the easiest way to take it because it's about 50cm deep, so it's going up the vents.

Stuff you'd brought in, or this is.

Stuff we've put back in, so we've cleared it. And the way. The difficulty with this tunnel specifically is that the way that we Clear it out with a front loader. The only way you can tell when you're at the bottom is when you hit that pad again. And so you basically take everything out. But then I basically, I bought all this back in in March and started sewing stuff. So you never actually build up a permanent bed system. But as I was saying yesterday, the value in our circumstance, the value of the eggs coming out of here in winter is actually worth more than the crops that we're growing in the summer. And so it's prioritized for multi use because infrastructure like this is expensive and it's got to be performing as many functions as it can.

That's an example of how some modern farming practices. It's difficult to give the best to your soul.

Yeah.

Because I do think that's not favoring the soul below. Well, you agree, Ben. We can see that. I made a little hole in here actually yesterday.

It's pretty hard, isn't it?

Yeah. You can see that even in the path the roots are going into the surface mulch. But they didn't seem to be really going into soil below very much.

No, I think it would be like one option could be to only skim off, you know, three quarters of what's here from the winter because it's blocking up the vents on the sides. It's really quite high. Like you couldn't walk in the door very easily. So we have to take some amount out and the aim has been to then put that on the rest of the beds to avoid having to buy compost in, which feels like a winner long term to not have to buy in compost.

I'm noticing also your spacings are closer than mine, which is really intriguing. It's clearly working for you.

You do a Tomatometer 22 centimeters.

Oh, are they 22?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah, yeah, 22. Sorry. I was thinking that's salad spacing. I'm taking inches there for a minute.

How would you do, Tomas? Are you doing indeterminates?

No, I guess I. I don't do such wide rows actually. Allowing for the wideness of the road, probably it's not that much different, but they just look really close in the road. Yeah, but they're looking really well, aren't they?

Yeah, they're really good. We had a little bit of end rot last year, but we could corrected that with some homemade preps and they look really great.

And the undercropping with salads and basil is clearly working well. But you have got a nice bit.

Of light up getting through to the Base and we prune quite high in here. So as soon as we'll prune up to the first flower, probably next week, and then once the fruit is set, we'll prune it up to waist height. So we do get a lot of light through. Some of the questions that have come up are about compost and soil analysis and soil life, and that's obviously a really important topic and the fundamentals topic of any market gardener, and the question that came through a few times was what sort of compost should I start with?

You mean as the very first application, year one? Well, I actually don't like to be too prescriptive on that because the main consideration is actually what you can get hold of. Compost is bulky stuff and I don't see any value in spending a lot of money ordering compost from hundreds of miles away or whatever it might be, you know, just because it's the right one. And it's not that easy to judge the value of compost without seeing it. I don't think as well, and I'm mistrustful of like, MPK analyses of compost. It's not. I don't see compost as a fertilizer. And actually the most valuable part of compost is the microbes. Yeah, exactly. The biology. So, you know, and people don't tend to measure that or you don't really get a handle on that. One thing I would advise, you know, some of the cheaper composts, like the. In the uk, we can buy green waste compost and mushroom compost, for example. Both of them, though, when they're delivered, they're still fresh. If you put a thermometer in 60 centigrade. Oh, no, that's not really still in.

Its process of composting. It's raw still.

Yeah, exactly. And so my advice is to buy it before you need it. If you can, you know, think ahead six months and then create a secondary compost.

Yeah, I mean, or windrows and leave it to mature like that, or.

Yeah, yeah. What I do is I'm not buying a huge amount, but just I get a lorry load and it just sits where they drop it, basically, and the temperature gradually goes down and it turns into much nicer compost within three or four months. But it's that little bit of planning ahead and I'd rather say that than be too prescriptive about what's great to use. I mean, animal manure is fantastic and we know they've got more nutrients, it's the best. But now there's you know, recently, this big scare about Aminopyralid, the weed killer, that.

Horse manure particularly, and something you've been raising awareness about.

Yeah. But I've also heard of it being in cowmanure in Ireland on a whole allotment site, and they used a load and a lot of people lost potatoes and beans and tomatoes. It's really serious, actually, and a lot of prominent gardeners in the UK have suffered.

You've had problems with crops?

I've had only one problem where I brought in some horse manure and last summer, when it's really dry and I used the horse manure as my kind of green ingredient in my compost heap. And, yeah, unbeknownst to me, it had some of this stuff in. And I'd advise anyone now, because it's suddenly become apparent it's in a lot of things to do, this biossay where you get a bit of the compost, hopefully, before you get hold of it, and sow some peas and beans and you'll know within maybe three, four weeks you'll see the curling leaves. If it had it, if the growth is healthy, go for it.

And there's information, more information about this on your channel, and that's in the links below. And it's. It's an important issue. But I have a slightly different perspective there, where I would certainly starting out. Like, I think one of the biggest mistakes people make with no Dig is not putting a thick enough blanket initially. I've seen many people fertilize their lawns by putting too little organic matter down and just growing weeds to grow vegetables. Yeah, like not putting enough to blanket.

Out weeds initially, but not using cardboard either.

Some maybe, some maybe not.

Because I definitely recommend, you know, if it's any thick mass of weeds, to make it thick cardboard, not just thin cardboard, but thick. Or if it's thin cardboard, two layers, that initial phase. Yeah, but I'm with you in terms of the. The first. Yeah, the first few months are critical.

But I've got this, like, my perspective, you know, people are concerned about the cost of compost and putting, you know, such a deep layer initially. Like, it's really important to clarify, we're not usually putting on much in the subsequent years, not every year. And so that cost is an initial investment. But it's worth pointing out, you know, spending a few thousand euros in our context on compost to grow tens of thousands of euros of Vegas is one of the lowest running costs of any of the enterprises you'll find on our farm. For example, Our boilers, our layers, these are enterprises that they're much more profitable with less time input. But 50% of that revenue is feed costs. So the market garden running costs are one of the lowest for any enterprise. It's compost, which we might put a few thousand euros into if we're buying it in, not making it ourselves. And a thousand euros on seeds and then a little bit of electric for chilling and fuel for sales, which is split amongst all the enterprises. So it's a really low running cost if you're producing veg for sale.

And the main, the main cost is time. And you save so much time by having, using more compost in the beginning and having a very healthy, fertile soil, which basically means that for all the time you put in, you're getting more out. So it is as rich as you say, massive investment? Well, not massive of itself, but it's just massively worthwhile investment.

Yeah, it's a lot of work first time and it is an initial investment, but it's relatively a low cost thing and it saves you time with weeding, it saves you water, it saves you heartache when you, you know, if your crops aren't doing well. So it's really worth the investment. But I also would recommend that people use animal based manures because it's, you know, a fundamental pattern for me is all ecosystems on earth, their fertility cycles are driven by animals and animal manure has been used to grow vegetables for thousands of years. It's very, very effective and it creates a diversity of life that I don't think you find without animal manures. So my recommendation is usually cow based because cows are even more inefficient as animals than most others. Horses are actually quite efficient relatively compared to a cow. It's a big walking compost machine that's putting out you 30 kilos at its back end every year. It's relatively easy to usually get large amounts of cow manure and I think it's. For me, cow manure is preferable to horse manure. Although our east and west beds you'll have seen in old videos are only horse manure. And they've been some of the best beds because they were not dug before they were turned into no dig beds. So that's something that people wanted to know from you. Charles and I know we might have a different perspective on that is do you need to do any kind of prep on compacted land like board forking or tilling in some way to deal with compaction?

I think the big issue in that question is what does one mean by compaction? What I notice is that that word gets massively overused. And often when people are talking or worrying about their soil being compacted, it's just hard, it's just firm. You know, firm soil is good. I'm always saying, you know, I walk on my beds, not deliberately, but if I need to walk on them, I'm not. It's not a problem because my beds are firm. So just to be clear on that, I mean, how then do you know if your soil is actually compacted? Compaction means severely damaged, usually by machinery, heavy weight in very wet conditions. And if you dig a hole and you want to know is it actually compacted? You will see unusual colors like gray and orange and light blue. And you will also get smell like a swan swamp and sulfurous. That's anaerobic, that's compaction. But if you don't see that, if you just see, you know, if it's still difficult to get a spade or fork and say, and it feels really firm, but that, that's not compacted, you know, that can be just naturally dense. Perhaps you've just got a naturally dense soil. You know, heavy soil is great for growing vegetables, by the way. You know, clay is great for no dig and you don't need to dig it first. But that's where the extra layer of compost initially is really valuable because you are feeding soil life and that's what it. All these organic mulches are doing. You're feeding the soil life and then. And that enables them to be more busy and to breed and to open up your soil more. And they will do it in a much more durable and satisfying and effective way for your plants than you can do with a spadle fork. So I would say be very. Yeah, I'm not a great fan of certainly not long term broad forking obviously, and I think you aren't either.

But.

But don't rush into it. Do a bit of homework first.

Yeah. And do a comparative trial for yourself. And that's something I've really valued from Charles Work is testing these ideas out in your own experience to develop your own knowing so you know for yourself how to proceed and manage correctly. And it obviously depends on how the land has been used. If you have, you know, lawn that's been kept trimmed short, just the act of trimming roots short, trimming the aerial part of a plant short means roots can't express themselves. So if I go up into my pasture on the same soil type that's allowed to express itself up to my shoulders, I have a very different soil profile in the same soil type because life is happening in that soil. And where life is happening, things happen in the soil that you don't need to necessarily come along and do a mechanical kickstart because biology is doing that for you. So that's our focus really in the market garden, is focusing on microbes and soil and letting plants express their physiology fully. And I've used a board fork here. I have to say, the beds that we didn't do anything, we just put, we put horse manure straight on the land, like composted horse manure. Those beds have been the least weedy of all. They are on a sandy soil, whereas we're on a more clayey soil over here. But we tilled these beds in a conscious way, deciding that this has been driven over. It was a cut that had been driven over by very heavy forestry machines and things like that. And we have a penetrometer, a tool for measuring compaction, because above 300 pounds per square inch pressure of compaction, plants can't actually physically root through that. So there are tools for measuring true compaction rates and then you can respond accordingly. Now I've used a boardfork mainly to, I relayed it like a human powered keyline plow so I could improve my pasture just by grazing properly. But I think I can do it a little bit faster with that mechanical kickstart. And likewise putting material on the ground, encouraging soil biology worms to take that material down the ground. And having living plants as long as possible and roots decomposing in the ground as long as possible, we can do that without any mechanical means. I felt we can speed that process up with board forks. But, but we took the broad fork out with the course participants here and after a couple of years of doing that, there's no significant benefit. It just drops in the ground. So then we just stop doing it because it's obviously unnecessary. So I think you can go either way and you don't need to do anything at all.

I'm doing this ongoing long term trial at Home Acres where I've got one strip that I fork every year, like broad forking, and the strip next to it is no dig. And both have the same compost, same plants. And for five years now consistently the, the forked strip is yielding about 5% less.

Yeah.

And I think that if you do consistent forking, you, you are breaking up the, for example, fungal networks. Probably. Yeah. You know, I haven't got a microscope, but it's just from watching how plants grow. So it's strictly a one off. If you have got this problem like heavy machinery that we've been talking about, don't carry on regularly.

I'm really into not being absolute, but I would always be conscious why I'm doing something. So I might till once knowing that I'm covering it up and I'm never doing that again. So that's very different to how most market gardeners typically till, which creates a lot of the problems of the market gardener. It creates weeds, it wakes up plant pathogens and it burns off carbon into the atmosphere. So most gardeners are making their own problems. And there's been.

You're not doing any tilting here, are you?

No.

You're just putting down. Yeah, exactly. And that's all you need to do. You don't need to have any of these tilthas, I don't think. I mean there might be situations where it's needed, but in general, no.

And it's breaking down. I think the hardest bit is breaking down the conditioning in our heads. Like everyone has been taught from horticulture school to books and just you have.

To dig and 2 million other things as well. Yeah. But mostly you don't have to.

What do you think of these caterpillar tunnels?

Well, they're clearly working very well and I mean I haven't seen how you put them up or anything but they look quite straightforward.

They're really quick to put up.

Yeah. So you move them around.

In fact you can move them. It takes about two hours for two people to do a 40 meter tunnel like this. So really quick and relatively, really cheap than a permanent tunnel. But I think for anyone in cool cold climate they're a game changer to have.

Very easy to lift the sides.

Yeah.

And no headed doors at the end as well. You've just got that end stays closed, doesn't it?

Basically, yeah. Some people build doors and things like you have to manually vent it obviously, but it's for cheap up rhythm, you know, ready to go thing. It's pretty.

If you had rabbits though, presumably they'd come in under the side, would they?

Yeah, I would be fencing the perimeters then. We don't have rabbits here.

Okay.

South of Sweden they have them. We have deer and bears instead. So then someone else had a question about really sandy soil. And for me putting organic matter on the ground is, you know, carbon is the sponge that holds moisture. So one particle, humus holds four particles of water. There's no better way to hold water in your landscape. But they're saying that compost doesn't seem to be helping them. What do you think about that?

That does not sound right to me. I mean I totally agree with what you say. I really don't understand that one. Because sandy soil itself is much harder to grow compared to any plants in really than heavy soils like clay and silt. So organic matter is. Yeah. Gonna hold moisture, gonna hold nutrients. It may be it's something to do with the compost they're using. We don't know, do we?

Could be something to do with your compost. It's. It's really important to consider types of compost. I actually have been. I agree with Charles totally. You've got to work with what you can get. And that's ended up with this wood based compost that we can get because it's extremely cheap, like by a factor of six to eight times cheaper than the high fertility compost that we're putting on or making in our tunnels. But it. I've always avoided municipal compost because it can often be very varied in its quality.

Yeah. Well if you are buying that though, municipal compost make sure it's sieved to maximum of 15,1 5 millimeters so that the sieve it's been through is very small. That will take out large lumps of wood and plastic. And also like I say, buy it.

Before you need it, let it mature and you can also inoculate it with life filled compost that you can make yourselves. We've put videos of how to do those kind of things and make foliar teas if there is any deficiencies in nutrients. But you want to invest in compost if that's the mainstay of your production technique. It pays off dividends over many years.

I'm really noticing actually the difference in climate here and how you've got a lot more covers on than I would have at this time of year. For example.

Yeah, covers should be coming off and to be honest, we're using some row covers in place of insect net because we've got really holy inset nets and we haven't replaced them in time. But there is a few weeks where we take all covers off and then it's back to autumn again. So it's different climate. But there was a question there that came up around soil analysis. And I know what I think about this, but it'd be good to hear your perspective. Like do you do soil analysis and do you look at correcting deficiencies in conventional lab tests?

Okay, I'm a bit suspicious of soil analyses, I've never seen one. Well, I've only had very few done, ever. And they've never really informed me, I felt, of anything that I didn't know already, because my preferred way of doing it is by looking at plants.

Plants indicating what's going on in the soil.

Yeah, because what a soil test can't do, in my opinion, is tell you actually how much of the goodness is available in an interlocking way. I think they don't really relate to how plants feed, which is very complex system of fungal networks. For example, soil tests can't measure how fast and well those are working to make the nutrients that they may be picking up or may not available to plants as they need them. And as they need them is also a key phrase. You know, you can measure total availability or total quantity of nutrients in a test, but not necessarily available at different times of the year. So it needs understanding in the context of the whole biology, which most soil tests can't measure. In fact, I did get a biology test done once and again, it was disappointing because, well, at least I thought it was odd. They measured fungi and bacteria and they had a kind of sliding scale. I was getting fantastic crops in this ground where the test was being done, and the result came through that my fungal levels were dangerously low. Caution.

Yeah, I mean, a lot of market gardeners would say it's foolish to not have soil tests, but to be honest, we've never had soil tests. I'm more interested in know that I'm.

Really pleased here, actually.

Yeah, I'm more interested in the quality of the compost I'm putting on, because, like, if your soil is too acidic, too alkaline, it's carbon that buffers that, and it's life that, as Charles said, that unlocks fertility. So a standalone, compartmentalized, reductionist soil test tells you basic things that don't relate to crops and how they grow. And it's totally true. It's the biology that unlocks nutrition. If you've got topsoil, then you've got plenty of nutrition and you probably lack life. So how do you create life? Well, you cover the soil and keep it covered. Nature doesn't do bare soil. You have living plants photosynthesizing as fast as they can as long as possible. In a year, you leave roots decomposing in the ground and you protect that skin, just like you have a skin that protects you from getting sick. That's exactly what the land needs to do. And so by focusing on that element, you can start to Bypass any major issues that would be brought up in soil testing and then observe your plants.

Pick up on two points there. One is, we were at this conference with Elaine Ingham, Professor Elaine Ingham, who coined the whole phrase soil food web. And she made this kind of amazing statement. She said she doesn't know any soil in the world that doesn't have enough nutrients already. It's just about making them available. And the other one was interesting what you said about basil not having bare soil. Misunderstandings about that. It doesn't mean literally, you've got to have plants growing all the time because the compost itself or any organic matter is the COVID So it doesn't literally mean, you know, in the winter, it's just not feasible to have plants growing. They don't grow in the winter. So it's fine to have just your compost, organic matter mulch, that's your cover.

But that doesn't mean to disregard that and not pay attention. I would also look at plants and respond, now, this year is the first major errors we've had in our garden, which is just based on not layering out our compost and trying to save a bit of time, as we detailed in another video. And we have to correct that now by doing extra work. And it will be next year till that's fully back to normal. But we're watching plants and looking for signs of deficiencies and responding accordingly. We're not being ignorant to the fact, but it's a lot. Too much emphasis is put on reductionist, compartmentalized ideas like soil nutrient availability is totally dependent on life, ph, water, all of these factors that are making it too complex to measure in simplistic terms. One thing I didn't mention is something I would do and do here with such a large amount of organic matter being put on the ground to the tune of, you know, we put 60 tons of material down on 1500 square meters of beds this year. That's a lot of material. Now, two things I want to bring up about that. One is that people are concerned with runoff from leachate or, you know, nitrates running off, etc. There have been many scientific studies, studies you can look up Singing Frogs farm in California, Big no dig farm, beautiful farm there. They've had the FDA coming to close them down because of perceived nitrate runoff. And they actually had the cleanest runoff of any farm in the valley there. Big agricultural valley. And all the nitrogen was there, but locked up in the body of microorganisms as plant available food in a healthy, living deep topsoil as it should be. So we have to ask questions. It's of kind, kind of like what we're doing up on the fields with birds. We're running more animals over the same space than you are technically meant to, but. And that's due to nitrate runoff. But we're not doing conventional ag. We're building very healthy, vibrant plants in our pasture that can take that extra nutrient as a resource rather than it become a pollution problem. And so that's important in this context that we're protecting soil and that allows that extra nutrition to be a resource, not a pollution.

Yeah, I think there is a big misunderstanding about that. And compost is not fertilizer, you have to say. I have to keep saying that because everyone, not everyone, a lot of people have been conditioned to think in those terms of composters adding nutrients. And it's all the other things we've been saying.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. One thing I would do sometimes, I don't know what you think about this is I would put, I like to add a slow release calcium source. So we have a lot of oyster shells that we must feed to our laying flock to keep their shells healthy. But one concern with too much organic matter is you can bind up certain nutrients like the cation exchange capacity of organic matter is very high. But you can have problems if you don't have enough calcium. And so I like to add, every couple of years I'll add maybe a kilo of oyster shell to each of these beds, which is about seven and a half square meters. I don't know if you do that in any way.

No, I've never done that actually. But I'm interested to find out more.

Well, we've been putting on really high fertility compost. So that's something I've done as a measure. I don't have enough experience to say precisely the amounts or how it would be without it, but it's something I've done preemptively from the beginning. And I know other growers do similar.

I mean your figure there, you've quoted 60 tons on 1500 square meters. You're not doing that every year.

No, no. So this was a big five year overhaul to redo the pathways because the paths had basically decomposed.

And are you including the wood chip in that or just the compass?

No, that's wood chip also. But that's not so heavy.

Yeah, no, showing that.

But we're putting, this year we put about 10cm on each of these beds again, So a lot of material. But we would Only do that maybe every five years, because I reckon I'm.

Putting annually about 12 tons on a thousand square meters, and I would say that's not huge at all. And I'd say that's a very sustainable amount for the intensity of cropping and.

The produce coming out. And it's what most market growers are putting in. They're just tilling it in.

Yeah. And it's a very traditional approach to use that much. I think that we went through a phase after World War II of people using more chemical fertilisers. Just forgetting, actually, about how to feed the soil. Yeah.

So, last couple of questions we've got time for. We've got a busy day again, last day of the training, which I'm super excited for, and we're going to have a big barbecue at the lake to enjoy this summer weather. But people wanted to know about water use. What's your thoughts on water use in the garden? How much water do you use?

Well, I'm not using that much. Our annual rainfall is 750, 800 millimeters. That's similar to him, just over 30 inches. And I only water plants when they're close to harvest. So actually that, in terms of salad beds, that means I water them quite a lot because we're harvesting from them very regularly. But something like broad beans or peas, for example, I'd wait until they're flowering, for example. I don't have any irrigation system. I'm doing it all by hand. And that's more economical with water, for sure, because I'm not watering my pathways deliberately anyway. And we're concentrating the water precisely where it's needed. And hand watering, I feel, is not a waste of time at all because you're always observing things.

That lovely phrase, your inspection duty has it.

Yeah, totally. There's no manure like the farmer's foot, so it's an opportunity to be there and see what needs doing. You can also do things like pull out a few weeds or side shoot the tomatoes while you're watering them, those kinds of things. So, yeah, I'm a great fan of hand watering, but not too often and doing a reasonable amount, like my polytunnels. In normal British summer weather, I water twice a week, not like every day.

Yeah, that's great. I usually tell people, like, what I'm looking for here is about 4cm a week as an average across crops.

And, yeah, I don't even measure it.

Yeah, well, we get a lot of.

Like, you've got more people working here than haven't you?

Yeah, and we have a big irrigation system and yield is very like certain crops, yield is totally proportional to watering. So things like our squash that we're growing out in the caterpillar tunnels, they need double the water of everything else. And it's worth putting time into experimenting with that. Like a squash plant that's watered inadequately might give you 5, 6 squash, whereas the same plant watered well might give you three or four times that amount. So water becomes important. But one thing I've made clear with the training participants is like, you've got got to have, if you're doing a larger area where you need irrigation, set that up before you start. You do not want to hit a hot, dry, long period without a water system if you need it. Now, Charles, you're working on the smaller area than you're used to, so the irrigation is less critical there. But as soon as you're up on, you know, many thousands of square meters, you need to know you've got enough water for all eventualities. Like the drought last year, it was, you know, it hit us and we planned pretty well for things. It was an extreme circumstance. And then the last question people wanted to put forward was how much area of beds do you reckon one person can feasibly manage in a farming work week, which, you know, 55 hours, 60 hours max, that would be a farmer's work week, not doing sales and things like that. So just the actual production.

That's a bit one sided though, I would say as a question, because why would you not include sales in that?

I think that question, that was the question. But I think that question might have come from the perspective of like a couple. So one of them is selling.

But does selling include picking or just going off to sell it, do you think?

I don't know, it wasn't specific.

Well, because what I would say, there's two things we spend a lot of time picking. You know, picking actual growing of the produce doesn't take long. So in the winter you can set your beds up with no dig. It means that you haven't got to do much weeding in the summer, you know, if you're tilling, that's always a huge job. So that's a massive time saver and you can concentrate on the growing. And we do spend very little of our time, disappointingly little, I always think, actually doing planting or sowing or whatever it might be. And most, at least half the time, I reckon over the year we're spending.

Is picking, I think 60% is picking and host harvest like washing, packing, bunching, etc.

Yeah. And so then if, well, if we include that in the, the equation, what I'm finding at the moment is on, on a thousand square meters I reckon I'm putting probably 25, 30 hours a week into my thousand square meters. You could roughly double up that maybe to. For a 55 hour week.

That's pretty similar to what we have here. Like one, one well trained professional person that's got a jump up, go get them attitude can manage this setup which is 1500 square meters of beds plus the tunnels.

Tunnels, you double up and more.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's a really good person. And they're working fast for those long hours and not necessarily dealing with sales. Now our sales is complicated because we're selling everything all at the same time in rico and that's chicken and pork and beef and eggs. And so our sales time is split between five enterprises and we have a very neat sales model which is we've talked about in other videos. So that's, you know, sales and marketing is half the job of the farmer and harvest and post harvest is half the job in the garden. So do bear that in mind. It sounds similar sort of thing like 1500 square meters is plenty. And it's my advice is that you go as small as you can to manage it intensively.

Yeah.

Don't just add more beds because you need more money. Double down on your spacings and planning so that you get beds full all of the time throughout the year. It's a real big problem I've seen is people say right now I've had a kid and now I need some more money so I'll just make more beds. But that's usually alarm bells go off for me.

Yeah, totally. And you've got to build your enterprise up. And you couldn't go in. I wouldn't. If you haven't done this before, I wouldn't recommend going in with 2,000 square meters. Even a thousand is a lot because as Richard says you, you need to manage it all the time and make sure your cropping is tight. So succession planning and also things like interplanting. Do you do that here?

Not a lot occasionally. But we're usually crop in, crop out, next one in.

Right? Yeah, exactly. Have your plants ready.

How small can you go? That's the question.

And it depends what you're actually growing and selling. So if it's high value salad crops, for example, even less than 1,000 square meters could be viable.

Great. That's all we've got time for folks, it's been such a pleasure to have you here. And there's some great folks on the farm. We've got our internship coming on for the next weeks. Now we're going back into whole farm planning. So it's a little bit jumbled around. And there's been some really nice days here focused on no Dig market. Gunny, it's been a pleasure to have you. Thanks so much for coming in the middle of your season to come out here.

It's a pleasure too, actually. Thanks.

Yeah, it's always a hard time to travel.

Sweden is beautiful and if you feel.

That coming here for a few weeks in summer. But yeah, it's been great to have you. And we're gonna have a time to chat with Steph on a separate video that we'll put out, so that's gonna be nice too. Pleasure to have you here and thanks so much for your views and comments and shares. And we'll put a link to Charles's and Steph's channel below. And most of you follow them already anyway, but if you don't, then there's a wealth of, you know, decades of information and experience that Charles has been put out for no Dig growing specifically, and many books that he's written that you find online, too. Thanks so much, folks. See you in the next video.