There’s a certain thing that happens to you when you start to garden in the no-dig way. You’ll go to a park and observe the piles of fallen leaves carpeting the earth beneath the trees. You’ll visit a coffee shop with a friend and note not only how green the neighbouring lawn is but also how packed full of dandelions and clover it is. Your sister will tag you in a Facebook post from someone bemoaning the dump fees for removing their lawn clippings and remark to the poster, “I know someone who’ll take that off you free of charge”. Where other people see waste, you see the potential for growing soil. Yes, soil. You grow plants, too, but your passion is for turning all these by-products into a thriving, rich, dark soil. You are literally growing your garden from the ground up.

No-dig gardening has no clearly defined origins and has been espoused in various forms throughout the twentieth century, with pioneers such as Masanobu Fukuoka from Japan, Ruth Stout from the USA and the Australian Esther Dean. Its modern proponent is Charles Dowding, a market gardener from Somerset, England. But wet and mild Somerset is a far cry from Traveston, Australia. While I read enviously about his colourful autumns and winsome springs, and most of all about his summers where the average temperature is 21 degrees, my reality is aridity and heat, the sort of heat that makes me restrict my outdoor activities to the late afternoon for fear of heat exhaustion and sunburn. Relying only on my naturally sandy soil to house my plants would be committing them to a bleak life and an early death. No matter how much water I showered my plants with, it would all be for naught if the soil didn’t hold it. And water here is a precious commodity. But on the hottest day here, I can wriggle my hand through the layers of the garden bed before me – a dry cover of mulch layered above damp and decaying old leaves that are slowly mouldering into smaller pieces, the manure, little pockets of fecundity smelling only of earthy sweetness now, the fresh grass clippings laid down three weeks earlier that are today layers of darkening sponge – and feel the dampness apparent in every handful. And I can celebrate its miraculous fertility – an Eden-like oasis amid paddocks of brown.

In the past, farmers have relied on herbicides, pesticides, and artificial fertilisers to combat soil deficiencies. But people are growing aware of the damage that wholescale practices of growing monocultures have on the environment. We want variety, we want abundance, and we want to aid the environment while we do it. No-dig gardening, especially mixed with permaculture principles, is not only environmentally friendly but, at its core, mimics how nature works.

In nature, organic matter drops to the ground and decays. Organisms in the soil rise to the surface and pull down that decaying matter, adding not just nutritional matter to the earth but also creating channels for water and air. There are various ways to accomplish this. Charles Dowding makes his compost in large bays and then puts the finished compost directly on the beds to plant in. The bugs and microbes have a head start incorporating that vegetative matter into the soil. I, however, prefer the method of layering ‘browns’ or carbon-rich materials (hay, dead leaves, shredded paper) with ‘greens’ (manure, fresh grass clippings, vegetable matter) directly on the ground’s surface. It has proven to be the easiest one for me as I can just source the ingredients a section at a time. Plus, I’m impatient. I want a garden now. I don’t want to wait a season for the compost pile to be ready. My method is composting in situ to create a nutritious, water-holding, arable soil that only gets richer as it decays. But in essence, both Mr Dowding and I are growing soil.

Understanding the difference between soil and dirt is paramount to using the no-dig method. In its simplest terms, dirt is ‘dead’. It is purely the mineral makeup of the particles of rocks that have been worn down by eons of weathering. It is made up of sand, silt, and clay. Soil, by contrast, is ‘alive’. It is an ecosystem of organic matter with dirt as its base. The more organic matter there is, the richer the soil. For optimal growing conditions and water retention, you need living organisms. You need the worms, fungi, microbes, and bacteria created from composting, and they, in turn, help form it into a thriving, self-sustaining biome, just nudged along with a bit of help from the home gardener. According to the Soil Society of America, soil has four components: minerals (your dirt), organic matter from decomposing plants and animals, water, and air. When you get this mix right, the magic happens. And this is where the other facet of no-dig gardening comes in.

Digging has always been the farming tradition, meant to aid with aeration, weed suppression and fertility, but scientific studies are proving this wrong. While tilling may alleviate compaction momentarily, when you dig the soil, you destroy the natural channels and air pockets created by the earthworms and decomposing matter. Fertility is reduced because you expose the beneficial fungi and microbes to UV, which kills them. In addition, digging can promote weeds, as it turns up dormant seeds beneath the ground. And digging is back-breaking work! I would prefer to let the earthworms do that job for me, a position they are designed for so much better than I am.

In 2016, David Attenborough said that it’s our responsibility to do everything within our power to create a planet that provides a home not just for us but for all life on Earth. No-dig gardening is a way of food production that provides both for the soil life and our own lives. It is a symbiosis that, in uncertain times, can ground us by connecting us to the fundamental cycles of growth and decay and, in so doing, imbue us with the stoicism of nature itself.

Banner photograph by Jonathan Buckley. www.jonathanbuckley.co.uk