November 2022 make and spread compost, prevent pests, deal with weeds, new no dig books, amazing autumn growth
Now is a great time to boost the life of no dig soil with new compost and other mulches, wherever you can find space to spread them. Growth here is still strong after a warm and sunny October with decent rain by night! Most beds in this temperate climate can still be growing plants, including new plantings.
The feature photo is 26th October.
Weather and light
The last two months have balanced to some extent the dry summer. September and October have contributed 40% of the year’s 505mm/20in rainfall, over 200mm in the two months compared to 86mm in the three months of summer – see my weather reports.
November will not see growth like this! Even if the temperature stay above average, the lack of light means new leaves are thinner and smaller. Plants which show most growth are those with already-strong root systems, such as leeks, kale, spinach and Brussels sprouts.
- On a personal note, I was thrilled in late October to hear that Edward had won the Paul Mellon Centre’s British Art in Motion award. It’s for his documentary about the 1930s, through a study of Edinburgh’s Southern Motors garage by architect Basil Spence.
- Allotment support, please sign this petition to protect a Lincoln allotment site from being built over.
Homemade compost
You can still make new heaps now as long as you have sufficient green material. This could be fresh green leaves for another few weeks, and then as we go towards winter it becomes materials like coffee grounds and fresh horse manure. Green provides volume, warmth, and bacterial breakdown.
Ideally to these greens, add a quarter to a third of brown materials. These include any woody material in small pieces, soil, paper, cardboard and wood ashes.
When you add different materials in layers you don’t need to physically mix those layers, The microbes do a great job of that. Layer thickness could be 5cm/2in green and 1cm/half inch brown, roughly!
Brown heaps
If your main add is browns, you will have a more slowly decomposing heap with mainly fungal action. An example is leaf mould which can take two years to become compost. You can speed it up to one year, by running a lawnmower over tree leaves and adding grass.
Spreading compost now for no dig
It’s that time again. Late autumn is when earthworms and other soil life are looking forward to a good meal of organic matter landing on the surface, from tree leaves and plants dying as the season finishes. We replicate and multiply this by spreading compost as a surface mulch. There is no need to sieve it
The word mulch means any material on the surface. Surface compost has many advantages including it’s high concentration of microbial life, a variable amount of nutrients which are not water soluble, and minimum habitat for molluscs including slugs.
Path soil
Now is a good time to feed the soil life in your paths. A thin 2-3 cm depth of preferably small wood chips serves to keep path soil in top condition. Then it’s more able to offer passage for roots which can feed and find moisture, these roots are under your feet during the growing season. Chips of any type of tree are good to use, including conifers.
Other sources of fertility
When working in the Inner Hebrides 1981, on Iona, I observed the islanders spreading a lot of seaweed on their gardens in the autumn. Then most of it had decomposed before spring, adding lots of organic matter to the sandy soil below, with a fine nutrient balance. They laid seaweed up to 15cm/6in thick and without washing out the salt, despite what you may hear.
In the spring after doing this, you often need to remove seaweed stems. At least before you can put in seeds or small transplants.
Qualities of different composts
I’ve been running a trial all year of different composts in these sacks, and the first harvest was in July of potatoes. I had planted them in April, two per sack which could have been one, of Charlotte. We have made a video about both plantings and shall release it before Christmas.
The leek harvest was mid October, with many of the leaves showing pale green verging on yellow. Som could have grown more, especially the mushroom and homemade composts.
New Books
It’s been a busy year in every way, also with my Skills book and the annual Calendar, which we offer as a bundle.
The cookbook is shipping from 5th November, you can preorder now. We are holding a launch event in a café in Saint Werburgh’s Bristol, on 10th November. Book soon if you want to place because there are only 40 remaining.
The Children’s book will preorder from us in early January, and is online to preorder at Waterstones now.
Promoting no dig
We are doing a lot and want the international day of no dig celebration to be a joyful occasion, widely publicised. We look forward to seeing your exploits and are already receiving some lovely entries for the children’s garden competition.
On 3rd at 11am I’m doing an Instagram live with Gardens Illustrated. Part of this is a competition on their website, where you have the chance to win my No Dig book.
Edward filmed me in a video to preview no dig day, and our small garden video is appearing 31st October.
Brassicas with no dig and surface compost
When I started gardening 40 years ago, these were always called “heavy feeders”. Yet with no dig you can treat them the same as all other plants. For example every bed here has the same amount of compost spread on it, around 2.5m/1in annually..
- A compost mulch means fertility is always high. See the third photograph below, with large cabbages growing in the eighth consecutive year in the same bed. Learn much more in my grow-cabbage online lesson.
More importantly, I pay a lot of attention to pest control, so important for brassicas.
- No dig helps because the moisture retained by undisturbed sol and compost mulch reduces whitefly and aphid populations.
- We spray Bacillus thuringiensis over the top of brassica plants, every 18 days from 10th July to mid October. It’s a soil bacteria which has the effect of making leaves in the adjustable two caterpillars only. Buy it now for next summer, it’s in dry powder form and stores for years.
Weed Control with no dig and surface compost
I had a question on Instagram about couch grass shooting up in many places after mulching – what to do? The photo looked dramatic and showed that there were a lot of strong roots in the soil. A subsequent message revealed that the plot owner had used thin packaging cardboard, and this is not sufficient to delay rapid regrowth of couch grass. If you have that situation, use even a double layer of thick cardboard.
I suggested to buy or scrounge a large sheet of black plastic – simple black polythene, not woven polypropylene- to cover the whole plot including paths, until mid March, even early May if planting courgettes, sweetcorn etc. You could roll it back in stages, and you can use it again. Make a few slits to let rain through in winter, and remove any green shoots of new couch grass leaves, when still small. And treat other perennial weeds the same way.
Annuals or perennials
Annual weeds are best tackled small, even at two leaf stage which means they’re pretty well invisible. If you can disturb them at this point, using a trowel or hoe and preferably on a dry day, they should die without needing to be removed.
Whereas perennial weeds do not die so easily and I put them on the compost heap, toots and all. As you can see in the photo below of bindweed roots, which I had levered out with a trowel, and some were from a heap of delivered compost which they were growing in, from my soil below the heap. Hence very long!
Bindweed, Convolvulus and Calystegia
The exception is bindweed, because of how it does not grow during winter. Therefore any cardboard or plastic applied now on bindweed roots will have little effect until April. It may still be worth mulching for other weeds, but be ready in April and onwards to keep removing growth of new bindweed shoots, which will appear through the mulch you have applied now or in the winter.
Pest Control
I have been caught out! We generally suffer some damage to plant roots from wireworms, which can live in soil for up to four years and are the larvae of click beetles. I’ve not taken them too seriously until this autumn when they have done terrible damage to rye, for grain harvests next summer. The photos explain more.
With no dig, these pests are not exposed to the surface where possibly they might be eaten by birds. That however it’s not guaranteed and I would still prefer not to disturb the soil because it would damage other inhabitants. For me that outweighs potential reduction of pests. I know a farmer who cultivated regularly for nine years attempting to be rid of wireworm, yet he still suffered damage to new plantings, as well as all the damage he had caused to his soil.
No Dig Success in a Dry Summer
Rhys has been a no digger since 2007. He read my frost book, came on a day course and was one of the main contributors to my forum in those early days. There were not many of us practising no dig in those days, and I really appreciated Rhys’ comments and contributions.
He’s a thoughtful guy and likes to analyse and understand what’s going on with his soil and plants. His results this year have been wonderful, after the allotment site run out of water in July. Do have a look.
Rhys Jaggar, No dig in a year of drought 2022
Autumn’s speedy growth – warmth not light
As Rhys comments, the amount of growth in a mild autumn can be phenomenal. And yet the day length is equivalent to mid February, during October’s last week. The amount of growth in autumn reflects temperatures being much higher than in February, and plants having strong root systems already in place, so that they can put on growth more rapidly.
Undercover
Growth in polytunnels and greenhouses is now significantly more rapid than outside, thanks partly to wind protection. It’s not about frost reduction because plants in a polytunnel will freeze on a cold night, due to warmth escaping rapidly though the only-thin sheet of polythene. I actually leave the doors open at night (except in gales) because some movement of air prevents the temperature dropping too low.
One thing that’s important is to clean your plastic, so that all the precious winter light can enter.
Dear Charles
I’m using organic horse manure on my allotment plot and I’ve been pleased with the results on soil texture and plants. No sign of the dreaded aminopyralid! But I’m wondering about parasite treatment etc. given to horses and the effect it might have on soil organisms. Can you reassure me on this?
Thanks, Maggie
Hi Maggie, good to hear.
Where we use non-organic horse manure, the heaps are full of brandling worms and growth is excellent, suggesting the soil life is good.
This is the perfect new year plan for any person. I think 2023 can be a good start now.
Charles
I just got my 2023 Maria Thun calendar through the post and immediately noticed that the 15th February, your normal start date for early spring sowings, falls in the 4th quarter of the lunar cycle. It might be an interesting time for you to discuss the relative importance of sowing date vs lunar cycle time. Onions for example, would ‘optimally’ be sown on either 1st February or 26th February using a lunar calendar, neither of which fit with your normal date of around Valentine’s day.
The calendar looks perfect for leaves in the last week of February, tomatoes in early March or early April, parsnips in early April, July Beetroot in late April, main-crop carrot in early- or late May, winter cabbage in late May, summer/autumn leaves on the Summer Solstice and June 30th, fennel in late June, turnip and winter radish in the 3rd week of August. Less perfect for many other things.
Like all these guideposts, they are but an imperfect approximation, but my experience has been that the Thun calendar has some value, even if I’ve not done rigorous scientific experiments to prove it.
Hello Rhys
Thank you for this thoughtful comment. It sounds worth a little experiment. On the other hand, what I’ve noticed when experimenting with moon dates is how the results can be influenced by all the other variables. For example, supposing it was unusually warm in mid February, and then colder by early March, just the weather change would favour the early sowing, possibly!
The trials I have done of this nature suggest to me that it’s almost impossible to evaluate precisely. And I’m not convinced by what I’ve seen from the Thun family, in terms of solid evidence. And how receptive are different soils, to moon influence?
Over the years, I have made sowings on days they strongly recommend against, and results have been fine.
One thing I have changed this year in my calendar is to put in more sowing options, because I don’t want people to worry that if they missed the first couple of dates, then it’s ‘too late’. This year, my best onions were from sowing on 1st March!
Yes, the test of the calendar is in the sowing of seeds, isn’t it?!
I must say, all my module/tray sowings are done indoors at 20C odd, not for any other reason but that I have no greenhouse! That does eliminate the external temperature variable for me. But you’re right, you still have to start transferring things outdoors at some point, at which point climate issues come into play.
I must say I’ve always struggled trying to transplant onion modules into soil in mid March – probably my soil isn’t as perfect as yours, so I tend to go for a slightly later sowing date for those anyway. They seem to get munched under the fleece much more in March than if transplanted out in early April. They don’t end up as big as your onions, but at least I get a reasonable crop!
The Thuns do seem to suggest that only ‘biodynamic’ soil responds to lunar modulations, which does beg the question as to whether you can ‘diagnose’ a ‘biodynamic soil’ through any kind of specific analysis (be that ecological, paramagnetic etc)?
I have a question about compost. I recently learnt about composting directly on the veg beds (green waste topped with layer of hay). I’m a little bit in doubt if it will work for me. I currently make compost in very durable plastic compost bins that don’t degrade or leak chemicals. Are there any issues I could experience by composting directly in the bed vs in compost bin? Is there a major benefit to composting away from the beds in compost heaps or major draw back composting directly on the veg bed that I should consider? I love your work and can’t wait to use my very first compost on the veg beds this autumn thanks to you! 😊
Hi Inga, thanks.
What do you suggest is possible, but if your climate is damp than having decomposed matter on the surface increases the numbers of slugs, and this is not good for your vegetables! I know from experience.
In dry conditions, the undecomposed matter can serve as is a moisture retaining cover, however, even this is not as straightforward as it sounds because any green leaves quickly dry in the hot sun and then lose the moisture retaining qualities.
It sounds like you are doing well with your compost making and what comes out of your bin will be ‘imperfect’, but that does not matter at all. It’s organic matter in a more than half decomposed state which is sufficient to feed soil life rapidly and increase fertility without increasing pest numbers.
Thanks again Charles for your generous sharing of your experience and experiments. I ate my first ever winter squash yesterday (crown prince). What a pleasant revelation! I shall definitely be growing more of those next year. I have at least one bed full of vegetables for Christmas and two others with some winter veg. I am growing tomato suckers in pots like you – they have been producing flowers! So I have pinched them off. I am in the middle of laying compost for the year and now look with great satisfaction at all the mushroom activity. Despite the stiff joints I can’t keep away from the garden. Thanks again.
If I have both outside and inside space and no obvious rodents, is it better to sow broad beans directly or in 2″ modules? I don’t mind either way but want the best option. Perhaps sow direct and also sow undercover to fill any gaps?
Thanks
In my humble opinion, it is best to sow undercover (I believe this sowing may be now rather late in thé year?) Here in Southern France it would be thé right time. Anyway, if time allows it, I always sow undercover because it allows me to choose thé strongest plants thus improving my crop in subsequent years.
Dear Charles, a question about paths between regularly mulched and cultivated beds on allotment : –
– if there is concern about woodchip being a nice habitat for slugs and snails, is there any problem about leaving the paths uncovered ? Or is there risk that the soil underneath the paths becomes degraded over time, and so not available as nutrient source to the plant roots adjacent to the paths ? If that could be the case, should the permanent paths also be mulched with the organic matter used on the beds ( which would add to the amount of organic matter needed each year ) ? Many thanks , Vee
Yes Vee, path soil needs mulching to maintain and improve its fertility.
A little compost is always good, we find some falls off the beds which is fine.
Woodchips do not attract slugs if they are not too deep, hence my advice to go no more than an inch/2.5 cm of newly applied wood (can be half composted), once a year.
This is all maintenance so it makes sense to have pathways not too wide, and I always suggest 16 in/40 cm.
Dear Charles, thank you for that. Can you clarify what the significance of new / half composted woodchip ? I ask because I have access to new woodchip and to probably-more-than-half composted woodchip from last year…..Oh, and to say : I’ve just seen your Youtube on woodchip (excellent) . Got your new book from WHS on the special offer ( I like it. Calmly informative) .And thank you for the free courses on No-dig day ( broad beans are in !)
Best wishes, Vee
Nice to hear Vee and it’s that fertility builds faster if woodchips have already decomposed partially, in a heap. Small gain.
You are doing some good training there!
Happy no dig day Charles!
Sorry to hear about the wire worm infestation. I seem to remember a suggestion from Lawrence Hill’s book back in the 80’s was to attract them to potatoes buried in the surface soil within a tin can with holes punched in the side. No idea if it works!!!
You mention using conifer chippings on paths – can these be put down fresh or do they need to be rotted down? If so, for how long?
Thanks Peter.
Yes we have some cut potatoes there + sowed some mustard.
Fresh is fine, no more than an inch.
Thanks Charles, you might like to know that No Dig Day even reached Switzerland!!
I celebrated by not singing “The World Turned Upside Down” (“We come in peace” they said “…to DIG and sow” ) and thinking that I really must sort out a rain cover for the compost bin on the new allotment….
How is the wire worm trapping going since you last wrote? – and what is the reasoning behind the mustard sowing?
Hi Peter
Nice to hear ad we have reports from much of the world in fact 🙂
V few wireworms in the potatoes but we hand caught a lot, on the rye roots.
The mustard may repel them, just trying!
Hi Charles, thanks for this update. It reminds me to clean my greenhouse now and not in April as I did this year. Makes of course much more sense. Any advise on how to avoid mildew is very much appreciated. I am not talking about zucchini as that is obviously normal, my problem is mildew on cabbage, kale, chard and even lettuce! I hope to enjoy these winter veggies for a long period and now the leaves cannot be used. Greetings from Germany, Hunsrück at 500m altitude.
Hi Sabine, nice to hear.
When it’s dark, as in the days are short, plants cannot support many leaves, therefore larger leaves start to die off and mildew is one way they die. It’s normal and natural. In other words, regular removal of leaves to harvest is good, always leaving the smallest ones. With lettuce, just water less frequently. Here in January often I do not water at all for example, for lettuce, growing in soil.
Those Lepiota look like L. cristata – I’ve seen them a few times on areas with woodchip. They have a smell that reminds me of something similar to burnt rubber.
Thank you for the tip about lime to reduce sorrel infestation: shall try that, as it does go everywhere. Problem is that at last I have a garden where I can plant out camelIia, magnolia, azalea (with extra ericaceous compost) and don’t want to spoil it. So it will be just on the vegetable plot.
I don’t have filming facilities for No Dig Day tomorrow but shall be (starting today) spreading compost, removing (it’s a mad year) French beans which are unblievably still productive but getting a bit leathery, removing tomatoes and peppers from greenhouse and planting my impatiently growing winter salads, also sowing some tall peas for shoots. Hope it doesn’t suddenly turn Arctic.
I love the 360 degree shot with Alessandro. Looks really dare I say it “iconic” as if showing off this quite delightful productive little planet.
Hi Alan, congratulations on a productive plot, whatever the weather – and yes that photo is such fun.
Ah, I’m bummed you fell victim to the curse of the wireworm! Last year they were a scourge for me on potatoes and carrots (and maybe some other things I didn’t find them wiggling in). Was better (but not gone) this year, I’m assuming every year one fifth of them will turn into beetles, as I had laid down my compost quite deep on old lawn which from what I’ve gathered is their normal home, along with fields like your new area. I’ll be interested how your progress goes, and good luck!
Thanks Chris. It helps to share our woes! Glad it’s better for you – we find the damage is inconsistent, so far, and they really like cereal roots!
Any advice to deal with a perennial weed called field sorrel? It’s taking over my garden and spreads like bindweed with rhizomes. It has come up through my mulch of cardboard and chips. I’m finding I am just pulling it out best I can. Thanks!
Yes, it can be a vigourous plant and suggests that your soil is perhaps slightly acid. You could try spreading some lime, perhaps on a small area to see if that makes a difference to its vigour.
But the main method is exactly what you are doing, repeated removal, and although that might seem hopeless at first, you will get there because ultimately it does not have limitless resources, and the root system is quite shallow. Pay attention to edges as well, you need to mulch to stop it spreading back in.
Really looking forward to the small garden video. My back garden veg plot is the same size but looking forward to an allotment with more space and fewer trees.
Hi Charles, I noticed you mentioned wireworm in your post. They seemed to flourish in my potato bed this year so now I’m trying to decide what to plant in that bed that they won’t bother next year – or consider nematodes treating them instead? What would you do?
I think I answered you on Instagram! I would not use nematodes because they are expensive and do not necessarily work. Brassicas are the best bet, and then see how it goes.
Can I set up a no dig bed now in November/ December and not plant in it until next year? Will I need to cover it?
You can, any time in fact.
It’s not usual to cover them, unless you perhaps have particularly ferocious couch grass. I do mention that in this piece
Time we had a tv programme devoted to no dig. Are you up for it Charles? Could come from Homeacres with Edward on camera, Channel 4 might be up to it, they did organic NEC upon a time before that was main stream.
Thanks Linda. The main channels have their own plans, and camera people. I have probably more freedom on You Tube.
I really wish the BBC would treat No Dig more seriously instead of the “sideshow to the main event”. They might do a brief feature on setting up a No Dig bed, but they don’t televise its progress, so why would anyone bother? Not everyone knows about all the great information on YouTube from yourself and others, or indeed how hidebound the BBC’s approach has become, with its often designer-led, elitist approach from people who have huge gardens. They don’t even discuss composting properly, which people need to know, whether they do No Dig, or not. I’m sure the audience is ready for something else.