The Ridgedale No-Dig method

Welcome back to another video, folks. This year it is 20 years since I built my first no dig beds. Things have evolved since then. And I want to tell you more about the Ridgedale method of no dig market gardening. I actually came into farming through organic crop production and horticulture. I went to agriculture school at 18 after realizing at the age of 15 that I wanted to live from the land. And I didn't quite know how that looked at the time, but it evolved into this pathway that I've created for myself and my family. Now I actually started making no dig beds in more like a lasagne methodology, maybe, accredited widely to people like Ruth Stout. And I actually got to give credit to Charles dowding in the UK because I first came across his work 20 years ago now, and he was working with deep compost as the mulch and the pathways and just walking down the pathways in between. The way that we've evolved, that and especially here at Ridgedale, is the addition of wood chip pathways and the integration with the other enterprises on the farm to be able to create all our own compost needs. The farm, we're using all the same tools and planning techniques that all the great market gardeners use today. But this addition of wood chips has come about for a few reasons I want to tell you about. Now. The land that I'm standing on right now that we call the Old North Beds was actually waterlogged every year with standing water a few inches deep all over. It's heavy clay here, and it's where the neighbors used to park their forest machineries. Really heavy machinery that really compacted that. So I actually started using wood chip as a way to keep the floor clean. And the benefit of no dig with compost as the bed material and wood chip as the pathway is that everything's clean. You can walk around even on a rainy day. I'm walking around in crocks and my feet are dry. My feet are clean and the crops are clean. And that saves us a lot of unnecessary washing of crops. And not only that, a natural corollary of this practice is that it soaks up so much moisture. And the compost and the wood chip retain that moisture long into dry spells that we use a lot less water. Another big reason for the wood chip pathways is to avoid weeding. I've been to so many market gardens that practice tillage that spend a large proportion of their time actually weeding pathways, and for me, that just makes no sense at all. And so this is a method of just totally eliminating weeds from the pathways, absorbing Water releasing it into the drier periods of the year. And also it looks incredibly beautiful. And that actually has a natural marketing effect. If our market garden, which is actually the first thing you see when you come onto the farm, is this well cared for, with this much attention to detail, then obviously all our products are brought up in the same way. And they are. It's just a beautiful thing. It's a psychologically important thing too. No one wants to work in a scrappy, messy market garden. Interestingly enough, I've seen Charles start to use wood chip pathways in more recent years and many of the popular YouTubers using this method. I've seen thousands of market gardeners now taking on this approach, which I think we're entitled to call the ridgeddale approach to no dig market gardening. It's such an efficient way to run a market garden. We spend virtually no time weeding and the gardens are always functional and beautiful. And there's other benefits too. By laying material on the surface and using woody material in the pathways that breaks down and is incorporated into the beds in future years, we're actually shifting the ecosystem into a higher succession. And that's partly why we don't get many weeds. One way that we are eliminating weeds is we're smothering them out. But the other part of that is we're tricking succession. That constant dynamic movement forward and progression in nutrient cycling and species complexes that we see in nature, the pattern and sequence of change in natural ecosystems around us. And so most of the annual pioneer weeds just aren't stimulated to germinate and grow because it's not their time to wake up and do their earth repair work. For me, having been brought up in the traditional organic ways of production and leaving ag school feeling like there must be better ways to do this, and the feeling that ag school, you know, hadn't evolved in decades. You know, most of the current modern market gardening that's tillage based is kind of the same model that it's been for at least four or five decades. When I came across this method, I've basically never gone back, and I don't think I would ever grow veg in a tillage based system again. There's too many downsides. So what are those downsides of tillage? Well, when you till the soil, you oxidize some of the carbon, it flies off into the atmosphere as CO2. You also kill off mycorrhizal fungi. It's one of the first things that are destroyed by tillage. And it's obviously bad for all soil microorganisms. Another thing is you wake up all the weed seeds and you also wake up nearly all plant pathogens which are highly aerobic, they need oxidized soil. When we use a board fork in the beginning of making our no dig beds, we're not, I don't class that as digging because we're not turning dead soil on top of living soil and we're not breaking up the soil structure. We're just letting a little bit of gas exchange and breaking up compaction. We don't use the Broadfork much at all anymore. After about three years. And most of my students who have gone off and set up no dig market guns have said the same. After three years on any saw, you don't really need that anymore. Plus, what's even nicer about this wood chip pathway is model is that we're putting down woody material that really feeds mycorrhizal fungi. And because we're not disturbing the soil, we see a proliferation of fungi around our market gardens. And those fungi are nutrient pathways and water pathways that are helping spread nutrients around in a way that just cannot exist in a tillage based system. So there's all these downsides to tillage and then there aren't really any downsides to working with no dig or no till practice. Especially if you've got a mixed farm where you can start to create all of the compost needs you have on the farm. Everything works beautifully. So the hens have come out onto pasture and over the winter, typically they are on a deep litter system and we choose to use peat moss. Now a lot of people have different ideas about peat moss and we use peat moss because it's one of the best animal beddings. It's very, very absorbent and it makes incredible compost, which is why nearly all commercial composts are based on it. Now it's true that there are big industrial production techniques for harvesting peat that are really unsustainable. And it's a massive amount of carbon that can be volatile up in the air. That's true. Compared to what is the question now we have a peat swamp as part of our farm down in the village towards the lake where we go for buck barbecues. And we aren't able to harvest our own yet because it's been allowed to reforest around the edge so you can't get a vehicle close. That means efficient harvesting. But there are plans actually this year for the community to fund the cutting and clearing of that to keep it as a peat swamp. I imagine we're the only people in the village that actually still want to harvest and use it. But that would be very sustainable. Our patch is 150 meters long, maybe 10, 15 meters wide. That would last us for generations. Now you've got to think compared to what? Because the alternatives for animal bedding would be straw, which is grown on soil, degrading agriculture using fossil fuels and debt based infrastructure, you know, not put back into that land. And so we can buy it as a resource that's leaking out of someone else's farm. Is that better? I don't know. But you've got to really think these things through. It's always more complex a picture than we like to think. I'm totally fine with using peat moss because it's such good bedding. It's got a natural antiseptic property, so absorbent. And the compost we get is incredible. One of the common complaints I hear about no Dig is you have to use so much compost. Well, that's not true. We actually don't use any more than any of the well known market gardeners. We just put it on top and we don't till in the beginning we put large amounts. We'll use a one time load of 10-15 cm to eradicate some of the most tenacious weeds that you find in pastures, horsetail, buttercups, docks, things like that. But then each subsequent year we're putting down 3-5cm and we're producing all of that on the farm in this tunnel. So now the birds have gone out, we've prepped the beds, we can take out the old bedding and put it in windrows, compost it down for next year and use that material onto our veg beds. And in the early days when we bought compost in, it was peat moss with cow manure and boiler manure, an organic source. But from industrial productions we have cows on deep litter in the winter and we have layers on deep lidder in the winter. So it makes so much sense. And that's why I'm so much a fan of mixed farming, because we can start to somewhat close nutrient cycles, energy cycles in a way that you can't if you're just doing a single enterprise. So not only is no Dig saving us huge amounts of time, labor and water, it also grows really healthy bountiful crops. We're not growing vegetables, we're farming microbes. Same for beef, same for apples. If we put our attention onto soil care, plants express health and vigor and they aren't attacked by insects, who typically predate on weak, sappy plants. Now we have inbred vegetables to the point where you have to work pretty hard generally to keep a vegetable alive. It's nothing like its wild counterpart. Iceberg lettuce was a poisonous wayside plant 2,000 years ago in the Roman times. And that's the case with many of our vegetables. They are so inbred and they're pretty unnutritious compared to what our ancestors evolved to eat. So if we're going to grow those things, we may as well do it in best soil we can, so that those plants can extract rich, dense nutrients and express those into their leaves and fruits, etc. That they pass on some of that nutrition to us. And one of the beautiful things about no Dig production is that we virtually get no pests and diseases. We've had rough spots on beet leaves, which isn't even a problem, and we've seen leather jackets coming in the last couple of years and wire worms, but that's no big deal. And there's things that we can deal with with very shallow compost cultivation to smash them up. And then the majority of things we're dealing with are flea beetles and cabbage butterflies, which are common all over Sweden. And we just use insect nets as a physical barrier. And that's pretty much as far as we go with pest and disease management. Having said that, one problem we do have is with voles that are coming in from the forest, massively heavy rodent year. And we've had problems that I've talked about with trees, etc. So we're trying to keep them under check. So this space produces about €40,000 of eggs during the winter, and then it produces up to a thousand tomato plants in the summer. Multiple use infrastructure, making the most out of expensive infrastructure like tunnels. The tunnel is the only place we don't use wood chips, and that's because we are constantly turning it around from animal production to vegetable production. But if we had these as permanent beds, for sure we would use wood chips in the pathways. Now, a lot of people I know are using whatever they can get. So broadleaf trees, which is much better for the soil, in my opinion, but they break down so incredibly quickly. And as we start to really build a nutrient cycle and in our soil those things will break down faster and faster, and that means a lot of work to replace it. Here in the north, at 59 degrees, we have access pretty much only to spruce, and spruce breaks down over four or five years. Every five years, we'll put another 50 cubic meters across our entire beds, which is about 1500 square meters of actual bed space. And the slowness of that break sounds really nice. We like to keep the beds level with the pathways. It makes seeding, harvesting, and using a lot of the innovative tools we use a lot easier. And so we like to fill up the pathways to meet the top of the beds. Some people are concerned about using pine, spruce, etc. Thinking it will rob nitrogen. Look back at our videos. I've never experienced any nitrogen robbing. In fact, they can help keep the edges of the beds moist because they're filling up and absorbing moisture. And so often plants grow really, really well on the edge of beds. And we're putting down this balanced, nutritious compost. So we've got no fear of lack of nitrogen in what we call east and west beds. We've now got asparagus and wildflowers. These are our paddy ponds. We just play around growing rice. And now we've put the west beds over to perennials. So we've got strawberries and we've got rhubarbs. And Johanna is busy planting some extra currents around here down behind the apple trees. These beds are south facing and sloping towards the sun so they get extremely hot and dry comparatively. And so this is our plan to put all this into perennials. And we still have nearly all of our beds, 180 beds over here and in the south here south beds have gone into onion, shallots and potato production. So really long term storage crops. We'll have a look in the tunnel here. Garlic's coming up wonderfully behind me. These are the caterpillar tunnels that I designed and got manufactured working alongside first tunnels that we're still selling via Jake Eldridge over in the UK@CaterPayerTunnels.co. this is the 20 meter version. They're designed to straddle four beds. How wide you make the pass is up to you. It depends how big your bum is and how you like to work. I like to crouch down and I learned to sit like that after living in Southeast Asia for many years. I find it really comfortable and I actually can sit and wait for a bus for half an hour like that. And that's how I like to work ergonomically without hyperextending my back. And that's where 75 centimeter beds are perfect. All the modern great tools developed by people like Elliot Coleman and then subsequent leaders in the field are based around 30 inch beds, 75 centimeter beds. And so we stick with that, it makes most sense ergonomically. You can easily walk over pathways without tripping over everything, and it just works really well. Another benefit of these wood chips in the pathway is we can be growing edible fungi. Whilst fungi proliferate through no dig systems naturally and help with distributing water and nutrients, we could be growing choice edible mushrooms, like King Stropharia, for example. And by putting down 50 cubic meters every four or five years, there's potential to grow up to four tonnes of edible mushrooms. Now, mushrooms evolved alongside animals and people, and you'll notice how the highest concentrations of mushrooms grow alongside the pathways through the forest, where animals are naturally carrying spore trails with them. And likewise, what happens when you grow fungi in the pathways is they don't stick up in the middle of the path because that's the compact area where you're walking all the time. They'll come up on the edge of the beds and sometimes up amongst the crops. But most of those choice edibles, like King Stropharia or the wine cap mushroom, they're only fruiting for three or four days, so they very rarely would get in the way of your crop at all. And they'll bring a lot of benefits in the process of breaking down that wood chip so that it can be added back to the soil fertility as you go. Another way we make compost is with these lean tube bays. They're about 9 cubic meters each, and that's where we put veg scraps. If we don't have pigs. Of course, if we have pigs at the farm, I'd much rather turn veg scraps into bacon. Makes a lot more sense to me, but that's another method of compost that we will turn a couple of times during the year. We also make Berkeley compost or 18 day compost, but that's specifically for making compost teas, because it's the most biologically rich compost that you can possibly make. And there's videos on our channel of how to do that. It's very simple. We've done it all over the world hundreds of times. Times can't really fail. And it makes a fantastic inoculant compost to put into, say, municipal compost or into making compost teas that you can spread all over the entire land. So, as you can see, tomatoes are itching to get out. One caution note up here at 59 degrees is that we get what's called the Iron Knights. Typically, in the first week of June, we can see a big drop in temperature and it can even be frosty. We've even had snow at this time. I don't think it's going to freeze this year, but it can drop significantly below 10 degrees, which is not ideal for tomatoes. You want to keep them at above 10 degrees Celsius minimum. Things going great in here. The team have been doing a fantastic job keeping this at temperature. This is heated by the excess heat from our house on the thermostat in the winter months, but in the summer it gets really hot. We have fans circulating the air and we have vents up at the apex of the roof here and that really helps. But we've also got screens that we put on the door that stop cats coming in and that allows airflow all the way through the structure. For those of you that aren't familiar with this space, this is a low cost greenhouse using bulletproof glass from the Stockholm police station. We built this whole structure for €1500 and we used excess heat from the house to start all the seeds for the market garden that we run here. It's been a real pleasure over the last years to watch the Richdale style of no dig market gardening really reach the masses and change a whole new generation's outlook on an efficient, low cost, lean, smart way of doing market growing. And so that always brings a lot of joy to my heart when I see all the sharing on YouTube and Instagram, Facebook, etc. It's a smart way to do things. I will never go back to the tillage method and I hope many more of you will try it out in the future. Thanks so much for watching our videos, folks. As always, you can find out a whole bunch more in the links below. Don't forget, if you have questions about no Dig production, then you can put them in the comments below and I'll try and weave those into future videos. We'll see you in another video soon. Don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't.