Episode Transcript

Martin

Welcome to the show. Good to have you here.

Charles 

Thank you, Martin, and it’s a pleasure to be here.

Martin 

Awesome. So Charles, for our listeners who haven’t heard of the concept before, what is no dig gardening and why is it different and why is it important as well?

Charles Dowding 

It’s partly a method and it’s partly a way of thinking about what you’re doing, which actually extends from gardening into life as a whole, I’m finding, with teaching no dig to thousands, millions of people. The uptake is fantastic because it’s leading people to an easier way of growing food and then to a bigger picture of just

questioning other things as well and finding easier ways to live life generally. So what it is in gardening terms, no dig is disturb the soil as little as possible, but it doesn’t mean literally no dig. It’s a bit misleading. You know, we wanted a phrase to describe it that is not too many words and kind of gives the sense of what it is without, you know, in two words, five letters. You can’t really convey all of it. So, for example, if you want to plant a tree.

Well, you dig a hole, you know, it’s allowed. It’s not like a religion, but it’s minimal disturbance. And then feeding soil life, because it’s all based around soil life and allowing soil life, soil biology, organisms, which have been massively ignored until recently in favor of soil chemistry, which is about adding nutrients and feeding plant roots, that kind of thing. But it’s allowing the soil life to do the feeding and to maintain the structure of the soil, keep it aerated. And generally,

grow great plants and few weeds actually. It’s a massive time-saving option. So there you have it.

Martin 

And how does this differ? Like how did you come across No Dig? And what was it about No Dig that caught your attention and how is it different to maybe what you were taught in more conventional methods or yeah, how did you come into the world of No Dig?

Charles Dowding 

It was, I started with getting interested in food and what I was eating and I read a book called Animal Rights by Australian philosopher Peter Singer in 1979 and became a vegetarian overnight and then that led me into think about broader nutrition, which I’d never really thought about before and I’d grown up on a farm So I was aware of how food was produced and that led me to think is it good to use fertilizers and all this

chemical synthetic products to grow food, treat animals and so on. And that led me to organic farming, and then organic farming and growing led me to all books. A neighbor was really helpful. He had some old copies of the Stoics Association Journal, which was called Mother Earth. And that was in the 1940s. Late 40s is when they began. And that had one article in there called Not Digging. And it really resonated with me, and then that led me down.

an avenue of exploring other people who might have done this. Not many, but in the 1940s it was a bit of a thing in a small sphere of people and enough information in that to get me going and make me feel it could work because nobody was doing it that I knew of currently, or currently in that was 1981, 82. And I thought, well, I’ll have a go in my new one and a half acre, 6,000 square meter market garden.

Martin 

Nice. And take us back to that first farm that you’re running, or rather actually take us back to the farm that you grew up on and how different is that farm compared to the one that you have today?

Charles 

Very. I mean, that’s my life has been a voyage of discovery in that I grew up kind of as a farmer, if you like, on a farm. And then I was trying to take that mentality initially into my market garden growing vegetables. And then I realized over time, it’s taken many decades, that there’s quite a chasm, quite a gulf, not a bad one necessarily, but it’s an interesting one, between gardening and farming.

I’ve come to see gardening as what I do now, myself as a gardener. It’s more hands on, hands in the soil, handling plants, you being out there, not machinery. And farming is more nowadays, at least much more tractor work, you know, our computer oriented even a lot of electronics in a tractor. Even when I started, it wasn’t like that. So it’s evolved a lot, but it’s…

I would say farmers are not quite so integrated with their land. They’re a bit more remote and they’re doing a much bigger acreage, land, surface, handling huge amounts of animals, that kind of thing. Computers involved again. So I’m definitely in the form of camp and that it’s good to be aware of that difference. It’s taken me a long time to work it out. And I feel too much in my life early on. I was trying to bring the farming attitude.

into my gardening work and I just allow myself actually to be more softer really in my approach and also with no dig it really least that as well because you it’s a hard thing to scale up you know I’ve asked this a lot so your approach could you how could you do it on 100 acres so you know 40 hectares that kind of thing and well you couldn’t I really could but what wouldn’t work would be the economics so you would be doing it

what my approach is about, and this is where we come back to gardening, it’s about vegetables, not potatoes or wheat for example, and it’s about a lot of leafy vegetables that are quite high value in modern economic terms. I’m not saying they’re higher value than wheat or potatoes, but they sell for more money at the moment. So in terms of making a living, you know, actually paying a wage to yourself, this approach works really well with

say leafy greens that is hand harvested mostly. I know there are now machine harvesters coming along that harvest things like certain leafy greens. I’m not convinced by that though. I feel that you’re losing something in terms of quality with crop from what I hear as well. That’s a debate to be had, but my approach is very hands-on. And I feel that goes back to what I was saying at the very beginning about the quality of no digging, how it leads you to ask questions, because it’s bringing you more intimately in touch with nature.

this hands approach and allowing nature to do the work, trusting soil organisms to do the work. You know, I’ve had this question put to me, there’s a lot of trust involved in that. Yeah, there is and that’s great. Yeah, it takes us to a place where we learn to trust nature, but you still got to learn also how to work with nature to the point to grow vegetables. Say, you know, vegetables don’t exist as we know them, you know, in a field or in a forest, you won’t go for a walk and find a nice bed of carrots, for example.

Because carrots, and like a lot of vegetables, have been quite intensively bred and selected to be a plant of a quality and result that we want. And that means to grow them, you need to set your garden up in a certain way to grow this desired result, which again links nicely to no dig. And using compost as the surface mulch, that’s very neutral in terms of pests. You don’t get a pest buildup like you would if you

use say hail straw in a damp climate particularly like I am. I should just say I’m in a temperate oceanic climate, latitude 51, it’s not a hot summer here but it’s a mild winter, it’s often cloudy, we get a lot of cloud not my sunshine. So we’re all about maximising quite limited inputs really of temperature and light and again No Dig does that really well because you get fantastic soil drainage if it happens to rain a lot. Plant growth as soon as the soil

more rapid because you’ve got all the biology in the soil that’s ready and present and itching to go. As soon as you get a bit of warmth it all springs back to life and plants grow remarkably quickly in spring and I’ve got a two-bed trial in my garden where I’m verifying that all the time or exploring it. One bed I dig and one I don’t dig and I see the difference. We plant the same, we add the same amount of compost to each bed. So I’m informing myself all the time about what I’m doing and I’m 65 now and I’m you know I feel like a school kid most days.

and learning, there’s always so much to learn. And that’s another wonderful thing about, I would say gardening more intimately, close connection with soil and plants, that they give you understandings as well, and you watch and listen, and always learning more.

Martin 

Yeah, so cool that you’ve been doing this for decades now and you’re still learning every day. And yeah, to like the you know, to the knowledge that I have as well around this is, it sounds like it’s a lot about, yes, setting up the systems in place to let nature do its thing and then, you know, let you get the best outcome of that. And as you said, it seems to be quite hands on intensive process, which brings people.

a lot closer to the food that they ate and getting their hands in the soil and stuff. It sounds fantastic. And then why, I mean, for someone that’s thinking about getting into gardening, yeah, who is No Dig for? Is it someone that’s looking to start as just a small scale garden or how big can it go? What’s the, yeah, who’s it for and how big can it actually go? Yeah.

Charles 

I’m glad you asked that question because I feel it’s actually most appropriate and it will make most have most impact applied on a small scale by individuals or families for their own consumption maybe sharing with friends and communities but it’s that kind of level where I would say it’s most effective efficient and worthwhile for example you’ve got also the biology of the food that

much benefit you get from consuming your own food harvested fresh from your super healthy soil. When you start to scale up, you lose a bit of that and it’s taking into a different realm. It then becomes more about production and economics and you may be able to take a few, cut a few corners. I was asked last year by an email out of the blue from a firm in Denmark who had invented a robot

lay cardboard and spread compost somewhere. And they said their invention was inspired by my work and could they call it the Charles robot? And well, I was very honored by that, but actually I said no, because for me that’s going too much in that direction, which I don’t want to initialize myself anyway. Fair enough, someone could do that. But what I really want to encourage is people to engage themselves. And so that’s the…

The emphasis of my teaching work is not I’m trying to reach out to farmers with big exploitations, but more people with just small plots, even one or two beds. No dig works really well in a small space because it’s more intensive, it’s high yielding and you can get a surprising amount of food from not much space.

Martin 

Yeah, super cool. So it’s not necessarily about that big scale. It’s more or less, yeah, small scale, smaller number of people, but more intimate, more intensive, like more intensive, and I guess richer plants that come out.

Charles Dowding 

Yeah, and more life changing, you know, so more people being involved, it’s bringing this quality of nature to more people. I feel that we’ve got too much into a default way of thinking, which is that agriculture is big, that’s how it exists, and that we basically need to replicate everything along the lines of the existing model we’ve got. And I would say better actually question some of the assumptions that are built into that model, which one of which is that…

a few producers are going to feed the world. And okay, that can be efficient, but is that actually the way that it’s going to set up a healthy working system? And then you’ve got massive questions of distribution and where you get producers separated from their markets. Things go on commercial farms that I think many consumers would be horrified by the way animals are treated, the amount of insecticides and weed killers that put on ground.

It’s actually pretty disgusting to use a moral term. But you know, not in that trying to blame anybody. It’s more the system, the way that we’ve been kind of herded together almost into this coral of this is how it’s got to be done. And I feel that you’re not going to get out of this by trying to persuade governments to write a law that, you know, legislates we had to have small farms. That’s just not going to happen. And it wouldn’t really be worth it. I think.

change can happen is from the bottom up. That’s where I’m going, I’m connecting with thousands, millions of gardeners at the ground level, and then we’ll see where that goes.

Martin 

Yeah, awesome. And I mean, I guess that’s a good segue into how did you get into starting to teach people and where did that start and how has it evolved today?

Charles 

It’s evolved a long way because I go talks in the 1980s actually when I was a young lad in my 20s and I’d go to these gardening clubs they’d ask me to give a talk about organic gardening. It was not about no dig. In the 1980s nobody wanted to know about soil really, that was not a hot topic but what they were interested in was reducing or avoiding the use of pesticides and synthetic chemicals because there was rising concern about that.

And on the gardening level, that’s certainly possible. So I’d be invited to give these talks to gardening clubs. And in my eyes then, as a 25-year-old man, say, you know, God, these are all old people. Because that’s the age on average that people would join these clubs. And obviously, there were young people gardening. But I still carried on and really enjoyed doing that and connecting with people. And I found I could give a talk and actually.

inspiring people and then I was on television with Jeff Hamilton on BBC in 1988 and they did a whole programme actually on Gardeners World with him and one of his questions I remember well it was he said so Charles you’ve grown all these amazing vegetables without using any chemicals and no herbicides and pesticides and on TV you can just see me saying yes I could be a bit more

He was maybe egging it up a bit for the camera. But there was a strong belief in the 80s, I would say, that you couldn’t be organic. It just wouldn’t work. That’s why chemicals have been invented. So there was all of that to get through. And then I had a period when I went off doing different things a bit in the 90s and 90s. I was starting a family, and I was doing a few other things. I came back big time in early, what, 2003, starting salad bags. And then

I got approached to write a book by Green Books. And that was my first book, Organic Gardening, I wrote in 2006. And that really opened the door. What I noticed is once you’ve written a book, people take you more seriously. So that was nice. I’ve actually written 14 more since then. And I publish every year an annual calendar of so and so on. So I’m quite prolific in terms of output of written stuff, but then doing a lot online. And I started my first one, produced my first video in 2013.

Charles 

That’s 11 years now and time has flown by then getting fluent on social media. And that’s enabled me to connect with so much a bigger audience. Because I find that before social media, the media was more in the hands of a few people. Like, you know, how do you get an article in a newspaper or magazine? You’ve got to get it approved by the editor. Fair enough. That’s how it works. And whereas with social media, it can be a downside as well. You know, anyone can post anything.

The images I can put up of my garden together with coherent explanations of why it works so well and how much time you can save, that’s really without too much effort really, you know, not somebody who goes big time on hashtags and all that kind of thing or don’t produce a regular amount of effort for every day at the same time, whatever, you know, I just don’t look into that, I just put up what I feel like when I feel like it and that has worked as maybe I got into it a good time.

and quite quickly build up a big audience and find that there’s a huge amount of interest out there. That’s actually what propels me. It’s not that I want to do it just nakedly like that, but if I feel there’s a strong interest in it, I can help people, which I really do feel and I’m keen to answer their questions. I do a lot of that, which is a job. It takes quite a bit of time, but I don’t regret it because I get ideas from what they say, what they ask, what they need to know. And it informs me about.

what’s going on elsewhere, different climates, different countries, different situations, family, everything like that all counts and I’ve made connections all over the world, you know, it’s really illuminating, like it ended up in me going to Chile this last winter. I put in my newsletter, so I do a newsletter, you can sign up for that if you want, it’s the sign up button on the home page of my website and it now has over 36,000 subscribers, so it’s reaching a fair audience.

When I sent, I thought I’ll just mention in this news that I’d like to do a Southern Hemisphere holiday in the winter, because that’s a good time for me to leave the cold behind. And I thought, right, I’ll put this in my news session. She said, she said, I think he going to Chile. Ah, their response was overwhelming. And within two weeks, there were like six workshops arranged that are pretty well sold out, just like that. So that happened through social media. 

Martin 

One second, let me just think of the segue, the right question to ask you here. Yeah, okay. That’s fantastic, Charles. So I’d love to hear a little bit more about some of those success stories that you mentioned there. You mentioned projects in Chile and stuff like that. I know you’ve been doing stuff all over the world and teaching people all over the world. So yeah, we’d love to hear more about some of those success stories around the world.

Charles 

Yeah, well it really surprises me the input I get from like central Australia there’s a guy right in the middle of Australia in this desert conditions and he’s saying how successful No Dig is for helping him to he’s running some kind of food project to feed local people and it’s increased his output and just using the same approach and compost monster

Quite a few people ask, well, if you’re in a different climate, say an arid climate, wouldn’t you need a different kind of march? Because the compost dries out on top in the sunshine. You look at it and it’s dry. But it actually, then, as soon as it rains, it’s not necessarily drying out further down. The dry surface is kind of insulating layer, if you like, and keeping it moist below. And then as soon as it rains, the moisture is entering the soil ecosystem more quickly, I would say, than if you’ve got a thick layer.

mulch or straw on top, which initially was conserving existing moisture, which is then used up by plants. And then the soil is dry. And so when it rains, it can be the straw that takes most of the moisture. It doesn’t get down to the roots, which can’t root into the straw. So I think that’s where compost has been really successful in very dry conditions. And then had a visit last summer from some farmers in Malaysia, tropical humid rain conditions, where they were saying that no dig has been brilliant because

when in the heavy tropical rain it lands on the soft compost surface and doesn’t smash it down hard compared to the local farmers they’re seeing they rotavate regularly and then they’ve got the rotavated soil on top it’s basically lost its structure because it’s been so broken up by machinery and that means that when the heavy rain on it kind of collapses in on itself and you get this hard crust as the soil dries out after the rain

And so what do they do? Well, they have to roto it again. You’re kind of stuck on that treadmill. It’s a lot more work and rotovating soil or any kind of disturbance like that tends to encourage more weeds to grow. It’s a disturbance and he’s healing that healing is soil’s way of healing is weed growth. It recovers literally. And with no digger cutting out all of that, you know, difficult byproducts of, you know, cultivating soil.

So they’re really happy with it. That’s in humid tropical. And then I’ve had great feedback, yeah, from Arizona, Utah, Canada, freezing conditions, all short season. Short season is great, actually, because with no dig, your soil is ready to go as soon as it warms up. Get your compost much on before the winter, ideally. Some people do it in the spring, but I would say before the winter is better. Compost doesn’t hurt for freezing. Same with heat. The microbes go dormant, and then they spring back to life when the temperature.

meets their range of operations so to speak. And so what it means is with cold conditions, you’re ready to go the spring is, you know, so precious the time, soon as spring arrives, you can leap in and make the most of every bit of light and temperature. So yeah, really great feedback from different conditions.

Martin 

Yeah, it’s super cool to hear that even in, if I’m understanding it correctly, like harsher conditions, whether it’s super cold or super hot, no dig seems to still work.

Charles 

Yeah, it just somehow it takes all the boxes. Honestly, people ask me, you know, what’s the disadvantage? I really struggle to think of one because, you know, you get little bonuses too, like in really wet conditions. I was giving a talk once in Scotland in near Perth and a guy came up at the end, he said, I’m a farmer in Scotland. He said, it’s always raining. But I love my no dig vegetable garden because I don’t get muddy boots.

That’s true because you could go out there any time. Soil is only sticky if you disturb it, and then it will stick to your boots. But with no diggity, keeping that surface layer, it kind of seals over a bit, not in a bad way, but just keeps your feet clean.

Martin 

Yeah, that’s a good bonus. So you’ve spoken a lot about as people delve into no dig gardening and understanding the process and getting to experience it, you sort of mentioned a few times that it gives new perspectives, not just in the gardening process, but in the world as well. Can you speak a little bit more about that and how no dig can open people’s minds?

Charles 

What I’ve come to realise is, through looking into it more and more, and the difficulties I’ve encountered with people rebutting it initially, how we’re all pretty much locked into a system of beliefs that is not necessarily correct. I would say that most of us have…

slightly indoctrinated, you know, it’s hard for you to say this without using value-laden terms, but we just need to question why we think what we think and you’re not going to find those answers in the media, I would say, for one thing. That’s why I love doing podcasts like this, because I probably wouldn’t be saying this on the BBC, for example. Just to be a bit political. The establishment, for want of a better word,

you know, they don’t want to rock the boat too much. And I get it on a personal level, I totally get that. It’s reasonable. But in terms of moving things forward, getting better understandings of how the world can actually heal itself from the crazy predicament it’s in. Where are we going to go? And with No Dig, you could, it leads, because you’ve already asked that question, well, gardeners in particular, you know, I would say they have been indoctrinated into believing they have to dig. That’s a very simple statement like that.

Most people would have to agree with that because from the feedback I get, you know, it still seems very radical to a lot of people. Having said that, we’re making good progress. And, you know, even people like the RHS Horticultural Society lesson, they’ve been really, they’re really willing to look at this and see, for example, how Nodig, you’re not disturbing the soil, you’re keeping carbon in the soil, because when you disturb the soil, it releases carbon as carbon dioxide. In my two-bed trial.

where I’m putting the same amount of compost on every year. The dig bed, which I dig every year, has now 14% carbon. I recently got it analyzed to check that level. And the no dig bed has 18%. That’s like one quarter more from the same amount of input from doing less work. And that among many other things, I had a nice book review in the Financial Times of all places. They’re getting on board with this.

The journalist came down and said, hey, the Financial Times, we haven’t covered no dig yet. And I thought, well, this is amazing to hear from the Financial Times. They wrote great review in it. The headline was no dig, no brainer, which it is really. But then you think a lot. I make bread, so I love to eat my own healthy bread. And I don’t like I don’t think anything that’s unnecessary work. So it’s been around a while. This is nothing new. And I didn’t invent it, but no, no need. So I don’t need it. I just mix up the dough, spoon it in the tin.

leave it overnight and bake it in the morning. It’s a very simple way to make bread. And these kinds of bits of knowledge are very empowering because it enables you to take more control of your life, to be more healthy. You know, in processed food, which most modern bread is basically processed food, God knows what is in there and it’s made in a really unhealthy way. It’s almost like plastic food. Whereas if you can make your own and it doesn’t take you too long, that opens the door to be more healthy. And then when you get more healthy,

you start to think more clearly. And this is something that needs to be better known that what we eat brings microbes into our gut. This is why I was saying that, you know, when you eat your own food from healthy soil, you’re getting healthy no-dig microbes in your gut. They’re just healthy microbes basically, but you get more of them with no-dig. And the gut is 80% of the immune system. I mean, how about that? That’s a pretty major piece of knowledge. And the gut is a quarter of your brain, roughly. I don’t know how they analyze that, but a lot of…

sort of thinking process, you know, like that expression, gut feeling. Well, that’s your brain. It’s down there at the bottom of your stomach, linked to the food that you eat. And I found myself since paying more attention to eating a bit of soil every day, actually. You have a lot of more microbes going in and things like microbacillus vacca. That’s a bacteria that’s very present in soil, in the air above soil. And that’s one of the.

microbes which helps us to feel good. It links to the production of serotonin in our brain. So if you don’t have connection with healthy soil you maybe don’t have quite so much serotonin. Quite often I’m asked on my videos on YouTube, people say, what are you on? It’s like they think I’m on some kind of drugs or whatever or been drinking the alcohol. And actually I think it’s just because I’m feeling happy and generally good and that’s how it can be when you eat healthy food and you’re out there.

Martin 

And eating soil.

Charles 

Yeah, children love it when I say that. And I do love connecting all this teaching this with children because they get it. They really get no dig it. It’s easy and simple. It doesn’t result in a load of unnecessary weeding and that kind of thing. And they can just get on with growing some nice carrots and peas, whatever they want to grow. It’s what I do a bit of funding for schools, actually, because I’ve got a YouTube membership screen. You can join my channel. It pays through five pound a month. And that money.

diverting some of it into schools by poly tunnels and that kind of thing. So for me, that’s a nice linkage of social media and getting money back to where it’s more needed. If any of your listeners want to follow that avenue, please contact me through contact on my website. We’re more than happy to hear from you and consider your application for some funds to do some great teaching work with kids.

Martin

Fantastic, fantastic. Yeah, absolutely. Getting kids involved in this process from an early stage, getting them out in the garden. My parents run a daycare and yeah, I know that’s something that they, yeah, try and actively get them involved, get them out in the garden, you know, get some soil under their fingernails and just, yeah, getting involved with, I think a lot of us are, you know, in modern society are very detached from the food that we eat and, you know, it sounds like no dig is that way to get back in touch with that and actually.

Charles Dowding 

It’s a way in. Yeah, I mean, I’ve got some amazing, amazing figures here from one bed of 1.5 by 5 meters. That’s 5 feet by 16 feet. Every year, it’s producing 100 kilos of food. That’s an average over 11 years. So 100 kilos of vegetables, you know, from not a huge space. I found that really thought-provoking. And I love to say that, share that with people. And yeah, it’s a way of getting them interested.

Martin 

No, absolutely. And the carbon, the carbon capture, I think is fascinating as well. You said a quarter more carbon capture in the no dig bed. So I want to sort of segue it a little bit and go, okay, you’re talking about no dig is more ideal on a small scale, but obviously if there’s more and more people doing it on a small scale, that can have a greater impact. So how is there, how do you see

uh, no dig evolving, like how can we make a bigger impact here of getting more people involved with it? Um, and obviously how can that translate into the climate crisis to go, to go big picture with you.

Charles 

Well, you’ve really opened a big question here. I think just on a very simple, practical way, what we’re doing on my website is we’ve created a world map. Anybody can apply to join. And what we’re looking to do is to link people together in all over the world, because strength comes through being together, making sense of community. And this map, just for example, a couple of weeks ago,

We posted someone asked to be on it from Ethiopia. So we put that up there. And then we got an email before we knew it from Kenya, someone in Kenya saying, hey, I’ve just seen there’s someone in Ethiopia doing no dig. And I wanna know how is that working for them in the tropical African climate? It’s like that really made me think, oh, you know, the potential for linkage there is huge. We’ve just dipped the toe in the water. So I really wanna promote this, if any of your listeners are…

are interested to join, please do. If you’re running any kind of noted garden, market garden, whatever it might be, just growing food in a simple way, ask to be put on and you’ll be on. Then you’ll maybe realize, oh, god, there’s someone else nearby. Or just have a look and find someone nearby. Usually people are putting in their email some contact details. So that’s one very small thing at grassroots level. In terms of the bigger picture, I hesitate to go there, to be honest. It’s such a big picture. And I think the.

The biggest way to chip away at it is personal action at grassroots level. I don’t like to sort of stand on a podium and say, this is the way to heal the world sort of thing. But I feel if we’ll do something and encourage each other as well, that’s important, you know, maintaining morale in the face of what looks like daunting odds, and you can’t change those daunting odds just like that, but you can. If, you know, say a million people listen to this podcast and sort of start growing their own food.

That actually could make quite a difference. And then they talk to all their neighbors and friends. So.

Martin 

100%. And what about in terms of if people were to start a no-dig gardening project, how long does it take for them to get started? Can they get started quite easy? Is it quite difficult? What do they need to know? Yeah, how do they get started?

Charles 

Hmm. OK, that’s a key question. If I hesitate, it’s because I’d recommend that the easiest way to start is by getting hold of a decent amount of compost, which can be any organic matter. It doesn’t have to be perfect compost. Compost means anything decomposed. It could be old woodchip. It could be old leaves. It could be stuff you’ve made that’s more or less good. It could be old animal manure.

have a look around, you see what’s available. You might buy some old mushroom compost, green waste compost we call it. If you can’t buy or get hold of some, then we’ll just use a bit less. So the reason I’m emphasizing the compost is because you don’t necessarily need a huge amount. What I say is put a decent amount on a small piece of ground rather than a little bit on a larger ground and slowly build up from that. And you should find that you get a worthwhile amount of food for not much work.

on a small amount of food, and then that gives you time to maybe make some more compost or find other sources. The two are kind of linked because it’s like I said earlier, the vegetables are not natural plants, I’m afraid. It’s very easy to grow weeds. And what is a weed? Well, it’s just a plant that grows on its own without much help. But lettuce and spinach and cauliflower, they don’t really do that. They need a bit of our help, and that’s where the compost links in to build up the soil fertility. So don’t be daunted by that.

Because once you’ve got hold of a good lump of initial compost, maybe four inches, 10 centimeters on the surface. I know this causes shock and horror for some people. But actually, if you look at that as a long-term investment, it’s not just for the first year. It’s for four or five years ahead. Ongoing, you don’t need any more compost with no dig than you do for digging. But you’ve got a lot less work. As a result, you’ll spend a lot less time weeding, less time watering. You won’t get muddy boots. You know, all of those benefits.

you know moisture is conserved so that gives you more time to be positive and look at these other things like makeable compost for example. So it’s all interlinked, start small would be my advice to anybody, be prepared to be amazed how much food you can grow and start at any time of year. Obviously if you start in the spring you’ve got a whole season ahead but you know just go for it. If you’re afraid to start because you don’t know enough just start anyway, be prepared to make some mistakes.

Watch a few of my videos. We’ve got a few about getting started on YouTube. I’ll give you some ideas You don’t have to copy it word for word One of my favorite sayings actually is it’s not what you know It’s what you understand and that’s what I hope to convey in my teaching If you understand a bit of the process you can adapt the details to wherever you are What you’ve got to hand the raw materials and so on and have a bit of fun with it, too You know, don’t be literally don’t be afraid. It’s an enjoyable process growing

growing food, if you haven’t done it before, planting seeds, you know, it’s just incredible. All being well, you know, you won’t have too many slugs patrolling the plot, that kind of thing, that can happen. But you should find that enough grows to make it feel really worthwhile and get healthy food.

Martin 

Yeah, super cool. I can see the joy in your face, Charles, even today, you know, you’ve been doing this for so long. And yeah, as you said, you still just it brings it brings you a lot of joy to be to be out in the garden. And it sounds like it’s a little bit more effort upfront to get that initial base going. But it sounds like over year after year, it’s less work, less equipment and fertilizer needed and better plants. So yeah.

Charles 

Yeah, I mean, I wouldn’t necessarily say more effort. I would say there could be a bit more investment in buying compost at the beginning. But if you spread that over the years, it’s gonna bring a benefit. It’s actually not expensive on those several years. But yeah, if you can just find that, look on it as an investment, you know, how have you managed to do that? But that will put you in a good place going forward, so no doubt about it.

Martin 

Yeah. And I mean, you’ve got quite a project. Your garden is quite impressive. If anyone curious about it, go on to Charles’s Instagram and on his website, check it out. It’s absolutely stunning. How many hours are you spending in the garden per day, on average, would you say? We’d just be curious to know that.

Charles

Not enough. At the moment, because I’m doing so much writing, teaching, work videos, and I’ve got another book coming out in the autumn which is called Compost, Pure and Simple. So that does take more than half of my time. I get up really early in the morning, I manage to do quite a lot of social media then. But I’ve hardly time to be out in the garden about half my time, maybe 35 hours a week at the moment or something like that.

if I’m lucky actually, more in the summer, less in the winter. So as much as I can. I’ve got a good team now building up a good team here, working with a few more people. We’re keeping the standards up, that’s important. It needs to look nice and produce lots of food.

Martin 

Oh, absolutely, it certainly does. And just getting back to your, you said it’s been 11 years or 13 years since you produced your first video. Is that correct? Was that on YouTube? You started on YouTube?

Charles 

Yeah, that was on YouTube. I had a friend who said, God, your garden looks nice. Hey, you should make a video about it. And I never thought about that. And she said, my brother’s a videographer. And so he came along and we made this video on it. Yeah, it was a good experience.

Martin 

And that was, so then from there you just said, I’m gonna keep making these videos. Like was it well received that first video or what sort of motivated?

Charles 

Yeah, well, it’s like, it’s something like, I can’t remember the number of, it’s something like 30,000 views in a year, which at the time seemed a lot. And enough comments, you know, from people appearing interested that I thought, yeah, this is worth pursuing. And then I also, my youngest son, Edward, who was 17 at the time, got interested in videography, didn’t have any other sort of big life projects. So I encouraged him to work with me and we started making a few videos. And I found that.

and a great way to connect with him. Together we made this video in 2016, I called fourth summer at home because it was my fourth summer there. And we planned it quite a bit, much more than any other previous video and did a few more takes than normal. And this one took off, it got picked up by the algorithms that winter. And that one has had actually now over five million views. It’s my most popular video.

still being watched. It’s just something about it we managed to catch a bit of atmosphere here’s video crew is really good and that really made me think hey hang on a minute there’s something here that’s worth pursuing so I’m nothing like full time at this so I wish I could spend more time on all of the things I do. Probably video making and answering everything is maybe a day and a half a week I’m doing at the moment and it’s only me really doing most of it. I get a bit of help with timings and subtitling we do in different languages so

I really want to open it up to we do Portuguese, Spanish, French, German, so that people from other countries can enjoy the videos. And yeah, I mean, I don’t know how quite how I do it. Edward does all the filming and editing, but he’s actually just decided to become a teacher. So I think about that. How are we going to go forward?

Martin 

Super cool. So yeah, tell us a little bit more about if people wanna learn more about Node.ig and the resources you have available. Tell us about, I know you’ve got books, courses, workshops. Yeah, give us a bit of an overview of what people and how people can learn from you.

Charles 

Yeah please do have a have a have a good look at my website really I would say most of the entry points are there so you can see how to find out about my online courses for example one is called no dig one is called skills which is all about learning how to grow food if you’ve never done it before it’s not straightforward you know I couldn’t say that there’s quite a bit to learn about you know how you space plants how you propagate them all that kind of thing it’s all fun stuff to learn but you can have much better results if you get good information at the beginning

So that’s what the online teaching is about. And then it’s not interacting with me, I’m afraid. I couldn’t do that, but it’s what I put up there in videos. And it’s a great learning resource. So we’ve got one called Seed to Harvest, how to grow every different vegetable, right from seed to harvest and storage as well, even saving the seed from it. And then I’ve written all these books, which are available also through my website. If you want to sign copies, we’ll write a dedication as well, if you request that. Great Christmas present, for example.

And then on social media, Instagram, like you mentioned, I’ve got a busy account there. So yeah, all in all, it’s quite a lot. Facebook actually is quite big. It’s really interesting comparing the audiences too. Facebook, I’d say slightly older, slightly more serious in a nice way. Audience has some really good conversations on Facebook. And I like the way people talk to each other, a bit more than on any other channel actually, or on any other platform, I should say. Instagram is a bit younger audience.

probably a bit more international. But yeah, they all bring different things to me and hopefully get my information out to more people.

Martin 

Yeah, super interesting insights on the different platforms. Actually, yeah, Facebook definitely seems to be there’s more dialogue still happening on there as opposed to Instagram. It’s more consume and yeah, sort of watch from a distance almost. Um, but yeah, no Charles amazing, uh, resources you’ve got available for everyone and what you’re doing, like really love what you’re doing and, and just super impressed with the reach that you’ve had, um, as you know, uh, humble man, as you are to sort of take that just honest approach.

what you’re doing and you know you didn’t really complicate this too much you just wanted to share the yeah the power of no dig and hopefully some people listening today have got to yeah I guess feel that and hope we’ve inspired a few more people to go out there and start their own project and yeah just want to say thanks a lot for jumping on and yeah it was really great to have you on here.

Charles 

It’s been a pleasure Martin, it’s been a pleasure to get to know you a bit as well and I wish you well in your work.