- Initial Bed Placement: When starting a garden, the first task is deciding where to place the initial beds. Considerations include proximity to the house, existing structures like old concrete bases, and avoiding areas near tall trees or hedges that may encroach on the garden space.
- Bed Orientation and Size: Beds are traditionally aligned north-south to minimize shading by tall plants, although this might not be crucial depending on the types of vegetables grown. Bed and path widths are also significant; standard recommendations are 1.2 meter-wide beds and 40 cm-wide paths, allowing easy access and minimizing soil compaction, especially in no-dig gardens.
- Access and Pathways: Access points are crucial for determining how beds and paths are aligned. In sloped gardens, beds and paths running up and down the slope rather than across can prevent soil erosion and make maintenance easier.
- Adjustability and Experimentation: It's advised to start with small, manageable beds to observe how they perform and adjust as necessary. This flexible approach allows for testing different configurations to see what works best in the specific garden environment.
- Planning and Layout: Before any physical work begins, planning the garden layout with markers like bamboo canes can help visualize the space. This planning stage is vital to ensure there is enough room for pathways and access, preventing overly cramped garden layouts.
Video source: Charles Dowding / Youtube
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We use this method and love it thanks 8-b Florida
If I have slope that is east west, so down is east, would you let north south prevail in your choice? So the beds would be facing east? Or as a ‘terraced’bed along the slope?
Good morning, Charles, from Windermere, Florida zone 9b
50°F at 6a.m and expecting 70°F for a high. Great tourist weather 👌
Your advice is always appreciated ❤
Take care
❤Peggy❤
Really interesting to hear how you planned it all at the start Charles. I do sometimes wonder about setting up veg beds in our small paddock out the back of our house rather than the allotment.
The paddock slopes gently SE to NW. It's heavy clay and this time of year the paddock is very water logged on the lower part. There is also a raised area in the centre where the grass doesn't grow as well. I think the soil has been heavily compacted by years of cattle and recent years of boys playing football!
Great advice Charles! Thank you! Your garde looke so beautiful and orderly! Blessings!
Great advice thank you. We moved into an established property. Expanded from ornamental garden. Ran with the slope and against. Toughest challenges is very big trees. Great shelter but small veg. And big fluctuation of day night temps with being alpine so prone to things bolting. Im slowly creating better compost. Some very weedy but fertility is rising! No dig benefits are showing. Ive managed to convince my partner its greatness with observations. Thank you for your help!
I am gardening in an urban lot. It has taken a year or so to figure out how the neighbours’ trees, my trees, the fence and my house affect sun exposure to the garden. Also to keep in mind is when the trees drop their leaves for winter (I garden all year) and how the sun moves across the sky from season to season. The sun for my fall/winter garden is very different from the spring/summer garden. Wish I had a nice open field but, alas, that is not the case. ☺️
`hi @Charles, thanks for the voicing your opinion andthe good sound advice. I would argue with your take on bed alignement, especially the part about contour lines. I think your rules of thumb apply to small-to-medium size gardens,, where there is little catchment. If you have more catchment (above your project), so water is moving in the ground, and rain events also come with high winds, than slope stability is really atop the list of criteria.
Soooo helpful❤
I'm replacing the wood around my beds after 25 years of use, what wood do you recommend?
I built two beds near a mountain ash and not far from a laurel hedge. Darn roots are knitting themselves in my beds. Argh! I guess I’ll have to move them, but limited space in our front yard.
It's such a joy to see your garden and listen to your stories and advice on Organic methods.
Many thanks for sharing your knowledge with the world, it is invaluable to many who try and garden like you.
William, North Central Florida, USA
My problem is the very invasive quack grass, how do I stop and deal with this menace?
I had to hire a garden architect to make the design (measurements) changes to the grading of my garden so we could build it. My garden is not facing the north/south direction but everything grows beautifully. I think it is due to the fact that we get a lot of sun straight down over us during the day. I had to clear many trees too. Gosh, I can’t wait for growing season! Although I do grow something year round, the lushness of summer is my favorite time. Happy New Year, Charles!
Nice video as usual Charles. At my old place, I began converting to 1,5 meter wide beds and the same paths from 0,75 meter beds. I found the bed:path ratio depressing after seeing how much more space I could be cultivating. Wider beds also, to me, just look a heck of a lot better than lots of narrow ones. Surely a mix makes sense once a farmer has their crop rotation down and a good sense of their market. For example, the narrow beds do very nicely for direct drilling with a manual seeder like a Jang model from South Korea. But the wider beds? They just feel nice and weren't that big of a pain in my situation. I had sandy soil with high organic matter, so if I were in clay I'd go more narrow but still >75 cm for sure!
There's nothing better than a garden in which things just flow and your video really helps people understand that. I simply enjoy watching your garden now that I don't have one myself any longer. 😊
Great video. After ~18 years of gardening in a backyard plot (~25×50 feet), I find that my eternal menace is invasive grasses – couch grass and yellow nutsedge especially. Broadleaf weeds come and go but they're easy to remove and you can leave them alone until they go to seed.
It's been hard for me to maintain true no-dig because I'm always pulling rhizomes out of the soil. I think the smaller size of a backyard garden is part of the issue – my paths are only ~9 inches wide so I can push a wheelbarrow through and maximize my growing area. Would love them to be 2 feet to stop the spread of grasses.
2 years ago I top-dressed the soil with a thick layer of leaf compost (~4 inches) and put cardboard sheets and wood chips over the paths, and that is finally making a difference. TBH, it hurt the productivity of the garden compared to my normal compost (kitchen scraps) but I think it has helped block out enough light to slow down the grasses a bit.
This winter I made a massive leaf-composting bin out of fencing and got leaves from around the neighborhood. Going to mix in my normal compost and cow manure, hoping I can compensate for the narrow paths with deeper beds.
Keep up the good work.
Invaluable knowledge from you Charles. Video quality 5 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟
My flower beds are open edge, my veggies are in raised beds so I can keep my dog (and rabbits) out with a makeshift chicken wire fence. 😊 My raised beds are no dig as well.
Sounds like solid advice Charles. Thanks for the advice.
I stopped my veg garden to grow a year can I still work by no dig and maintain well? Can you suggest me
Very useful advice. I have grass pathways wide enough for my tractor mower. Don’t make pathways so small that it is hard to wheel your wheelbarrow. Don’t make bed so wide that you cannot access the middle of the bed from either side. My two cents of advice!
Great video brother
New Subscriber ❤
Short quick question, how long are your arches for beds if you use 2m wide covering over them?
ALWAYS, have your beds going down hill. I bought 16 acres 2 years ago that is all on a gentle slope. I tend to close down my earthmoving business in 10 years & start a Home makers garden phase 2 😁 ill definitely be keeping my bobcat & excavator though, but sell my truck. Ive watched ALL your videos & check every day (sometimes twice) for new videos. Thats how much i love your content & advice
Nice work govener.
Gary, 7th generation first fleet convict from Australia 🇦🇺
Hi from Germany! I guess on this channel is good chance, that a lot of experience is looking for my question. 🙂 – I'am a newbie and I started to study horticulture at a university. But now I'am really wondering if there are enough benefits from gaining scientific knowledge to weigh out the self-made experience gained by starting a (very) small (market) garden. Also if the time invest of at least three years in only theory is really worth it, when the aim is to build up a market garden, that can grow in size over the years. – I hope my question is clear enough to say something. 🙂
❤️❤️💚💚💚
Your garden is always green with all kinds of vegetables no matter the season of the year. You are really very good.
I would recommend wider paths for those of us who don’t have much upper body strength. That way you’ll have enough for a 2-wheel wheelbarrow to get through easily.
Now you tell me! Reworking beds because I thought I was clever last year making smaller beds now wish they were wider so will be disturbing soil once again. Hopefully I’ll be forgiven once the compost is in. Thanks for your content. It’s always a delight to watch your videos.