快猫短视频

OF ALL my garden tools, the one I have used most must be my trusty spade, a lovely small and light one with a comfortable wooden handle. But recently, it has been getting less action because I have been stepping up on the 鈥渘o-dig鈥� approach to gardening.

All gardeners need to dig sometimes, of course, such as when making holes to put plants in or rooting out weeds. , to aerate it, improve drainage and mix in soil improvers like manure.

For the past few years, though, I have been increasingly embracing the no-dig approach. On the allotment, I suppress weeds on bare ground over winter by covering the earth to block out light as much as possible.

I used to do this using plastic sheets weighed down with bricks. This year, I have started adopting the system of no-dig advocate , a UK market gardener and writer. You put down flattened cardboard boxes and cover with some kind of mulch, such as manure or home-made compost. As the cardboard rots, worms take the organic matter down into the soil.

This approach may also be better for the soil. Most plants get help in absorbing water and nutrients from a fine network of thread-like fungi on their roots. A large component of these fungal threads is a sticky protein called glomalin, discovered in 1996. Together, the threads and released glomulin make soil clump into bigger particles.

If soil is dug over, it breaks up the particles and exposes organic material they contain to decomposition by microbes, releasing carbon dioxide. Soil with larger particles retains more moisture and is less prone to nutrients leaching away.

A recent trial in farmers鈥� fields shows that 鈥渘o-till鈥� boosts soil glomalin and is also . On a smaller scale, Dowding says trials in his market garden show no-dig plots give .

When it comes to garden borders, cardboard coverings may be impractical but there are other ways to boost soil glomalin. You can add the fungi to your soil, either by buying packets of arbuscular mycorrhizal spores or adding home-made compost, a natural source.

Dowding also questions the standard advice for planting new shrubs or trees, for instance, which is to dig a hole two or three times wider than the root ball and loosen the surrounding soil to help the roots penetrate. 鈥淚t鈥檚 a myth this is needed,鈥� he says.

Instead, we can just dig a hole the width of the root ball to avoid disturbing the soil more than necessary. I can personally vouch the new approach is easier on the back.

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