In the above photo, vegetable plants are growing in a mixture of aged sawdust, bedding scoria and clay loam. This garden needs No Weeding and No Digging. The clay loam was from a building site and was mostly clean of weed seed

Fertilisers are lightly raked into the surface and the surface is covered with partially-composted nitrogen rich mulch such as grass clippings.

Ideally the soil should only be fed through the mulch.

If weed seed gets into the garden then Solarise the top 3 or 4 inches by placing a 3m wide sheet of clear polythene over the bed in summer and leave it on for a couple of weeks. Keep the soil moist so that you create a slow rolling boil, with moisture vapourising from the soil, condensing on the plastic sheet and dripping back down to the soil. Contrary to expectations this “cooking” of the soil actually improves soil fertility, eliminates bad microbes and allows the good microbes to recolonise the sterilised surface layer. You also get a boost of fertility from the mineralisation [oxidation] of organic matter which makes minerals more available to the plants. Needless to say, you don`t want to do this too often or you will burn out all your organic matter, so make sure you do not put weed seed in the garden.

Alternatively, you could continually mulch the surface of your garden with with weed-seed-free materials and because you are practicing No-Dig the weed seeds deeper in the soil will never see daylight and germinate. This will require customising your soil so it never compacts. Also any compost used in the garden will have gone through a “hot” phase eg. 60 celsius for a few days, but most backyard gardeners do not make hot compost because they do not have enough of the right materials on hand. Instead they have a cold compost heap which they build up a few layers at a time and often with weeds that have gone to seed in the garden. This will not do for a Weedless No-Dig Garden.

Preferably the materials you mulch your garden with are weed-seed-free, have been grown on highly mineralised soil so that they are of a highly mineralised quality and have a C/N ratio not higher than 25/1 and even more ideal would be 15-20/1 as the C/N ratio we need in the soil is 10/1.

The mulch we apply should be integrated with the surface horizon of the soil and not just sit on top of it. The worst case scenario would be to use hay loaded with weed seed, with a C/N ratio 100/1, grown on minerally deficient soil and sitting loosely on the soil surface.

The best and most readily available material is partially composted grass clippings placed not more than a couple of inches deep around your transplanted vegetable seedlings. If it is fresh grass and it is layered too deep it will heat up and go slimy and acidic. So it is probably best to make some small piles of your freshly gathered biomass, let it heat and turn it a couple of times till the initial heating reaction dies down, then use it as partially-composted organic matter for mulching the raised beds. This will reduce any weed seed you might have inadvertently gathered while harvesting your material.

So your main job is to scrounge biomass from all around your section and neighbourhood. You will have plenty of time for this as you do not have to spend all your time weeding and digging the garden. Acquire a handcart, a scythe, a mattock, a hay fork and rake, then trundle around the neighbourhood harvesting leaves, hedge clippings, grass clippings, weeds, kitchen scraps, newspaper etc etc. Another name for all these materials is DETRITUS, i.e. the decaying organic matter of formerly living organisms, either plant or animal. By using detritus as the foundation of fertility in your garden, you could consider yourself to be a kind of DETRITOVORE.

Shock your neighbour by offering to mow his lawn for free, even buy Lime and Rock Phosphate and fertilise his lawn for free. As you drive around suburbia view all the lawns you see as Fertility Generating Fields.

This system is modelled on the ancient Celtic Infield/Outfield system of farming. The area around your house is your Infield where you concentrate the fertility you have collected from your neighbourhood, the Outfield. But this does not mean you should steal your neighbour`s fertilty, unless he happens not to be using it !

Ultimately what farming is really about, is the Building Up of Biomass and its conversion to Humus so as to produce More Biomass. Agricultural goods are just a byproduct of this system.

Look around you in suburbia, you will see tremendous production of biomass, sometimes more than what is found in the countryside, because the rural areas are often just grass deserts. In suburbia you have trees, shrubs and fruit trees, which are carbonaceous materials, and weeds and lawns, which are nitrogenous materials.

So you have a choice, you can “take the garden to the fertility” or you can “take the fertility to the garden”. A system of rotational cropping or the fallowing of land is an example of the former, but this requires a lot of land which we just do not have in suburbia, also continually breaking in land can be laborious. That is why I recommend the Celtic Infield/Outfield Model, which was centred around the Balley [farming village] or what in modern times will be a suburban neighbourhood. In summer time they used to pasture their animals and live for a few months in the Boolley [ the mountains and hinterlands]. The modern equivalent of the Boolley for the Urban Farmer will be the countryside surrounding the city and it is hoped he will still be able to make forays into the countryside and seaside areas over the summer period, maybe bringing back a trailer load of manure or seaweed.

It is not widely known that the Celts were Raised Bed Farmers !

The basic unit of Celtic Farming was the Runrig, which was a wide ridge [rig] of cultivated soil, usually 6 to 10m wide, with shallow ditches or furrows [runs] on either side. Each family was allocated several Runrigs to farm and they did that by building raised bed gardens on top of the Runrig, which were known as Lazy Beds. So they were building long narrow mounds on top of long wide mounds.

All the work was done with spades and foot-ploughs, they did not use draught animals

A Scotsman building a Lazy Bed with a Foot-Plough

The sods were not broken up, they were just flipped over so that they faced down on top of the uncultivated sod in the centre of the bed, this is why they were called Lazy Beds. Before turning the sods over some seaweed and manure was scattered over the ground where the beds were going to be built and after the sods were turned over the women and children planted the seed potatoes in a grid pattern using dibbers. The next job was to dig the furrows deeper with the long handled Irish Spade and throw that soil on top of all the sods to fill in any gaps and bury the seed potatoes deeper.

I believe it is very important to learn how to grow potatoes, they are so easy to grow and produce twice the yield of grains. It is possible to start your first crop in August and be digging your spuds by early December. As well as that you can grow a main and late crop.

If we have a financial system collapse or world grain crops fail, you can live for long periods of time just on potatoes, just like the Irish did when 3 million people ate almost nothing else. The average person ate 8 pound of potatoes per day, for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

So maybe your first raised bed garden should be a Lazy Bed filled with potatoes. I have built one at Oromahoe and have modified the traditional Celtic method by using the sods to make walls so that the bed can be filled with compost and other soil amendments, such as rock dust, bedding scoria, pulverised clay, grass clippings, sawdust etc etc. The seed potatoes were just placed on the grass in a grid pattern with no paper beneath as the depth of the mulch was enough to smother the grass. Also I made the width of the bed and paths the same as what I would use for erecting an Organoponico so that the Lazy Bed can be turned into an Organoponico at a latter date if required.

This method allows you to simply and easily to begin customising your soil for raised bed gardening.

I think this method will allow you to grow a much greater crop than the normal method of planting in rows and mounding them up, because there is no loss of space between the rows and you can mound a lot higher over the seed potatoes, which gives the plant more volume of soil to form tubers in.

One of the problems people have by keeping a garden in the same piece of ground permanently is that it becomes run down and worn out, and crops do not do so well, and there is a greater incidence of pests and diseases. So after a few years they move their garden to a fresh piece of ground that has not been cropped for many years. A classic example of “taking the garden to the fertility”.

Well the concrete walls of an Organoponico are hard to move and many people in suburbia just don`t have the space to constantly move their gardens about. All this is not necessary anyway, because by “taking fertility to the garden”, you are constantly growing and replenishing the soil, so much so, that very soon the soil will be spilling over the side of your raised beds and you will be wondering what to do with it.

I do not worry too much about rotation and biodiversity, as I believe a healthy soil will grow a healthy crop even if it is a monoculture.

Right now, you have a WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY TO REMINERALISE YOUR SOIL, this window may not be open for too much longer and all fertilisers either organic or chemical could become a lot more difficult to come by and way more expensive.

Your Organoponico should effectively have two foot plus of soil depth and be loaded with high CEC [Cation Exchange Capacity] amendments, such as clay and humus. It is at the moment very easy and cheap to obtain mineral fertilisers, such as Rock Phophate, Potassium Sulphate, Trace Elements, Dolomite, Lime and many other amendments such as Fish Emulsion and Seaweed.

In by gone times, people worked very hard to accumulate these nutrients and it was generally done by recycling enormous amounts of biomass onto the land, through large applications of compost or manure, or fallowing land for long periods of time.

In the future we will have to get our minerals almost entirely from biomass, as biomass contains nutrients such as nitrate, phosphate and sulphate, but as well, it enlivens the soil and through the action of microorganisms makes nutients not normally available to the plant, avalaible.

For the moment we can get minerals out of the bag, so take advantage of it.

The most critical nutrient to be concerned about is Phosphate, it comes from North Africa and is finite like Oil