What's going on everyone? How's it going? Kevin from Epic Gardening here. I wanted to take today's

episode to talk about some things that I learned while touring through Charles Dowdings Garden.

He, for those of you who don't know, is kind of the

godfather of the modern no-dig gardening movement, where as the name suggests, you are not really

disrupting your soil at all. You never dig into it, you never disrupt it,

you just top dress, in his case with about two inches of compost once per year, and from there you have incredible

incredible yields. So some of you listening might be thinking that

doesn't seem possible. It seems like that's too simple and that's actually what I thought

but Charles being the gardener that he is has been conducting an eight-year

ongoing experiment of a dig versus no dig bed.

So he has one bed that he digs up every year and reamends,

and he has another bed that he simply does a top dress of compost on.

Now he's measured the harvested yield and he plants the exact same things.

Everything else is the same in these two beds except for that bed prep.

For years he's been tracking the harvest.

What's interesting is he started to really see some differences in the

yield on years six, seven, and eight to the tune of an additional 60 pounds of harvest out of the no dig bed as compared to the dug bed, but it did take five plus years to get to that point.

But remember, he's planning the exact same number and variety of crops in each bed.

So a 60 pound differential is a true bonus.

It's not like he just planted some extra stuff over there and that's why there's more.

It's the same number and variety of plants grown much healthier, more vibrant and

clearly bigger and heavier.

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