Intensive Vegetable Gardening - a Total No Dig Plan

What's the easiest way to grow more vegetables with little labour - and fewer pests? Simply, group several different species closely together in the same plot. As soon as you pull out one food plant, you drop in another - of a different species. That's the basis of the fabled Ayurvedic system of gardening, used successively in Asia for several thousand years.

It's a time-proven model of high-yield intensive organic gardening.

By varying the plant species, month by month, you avoid a build-up of insect pests and disease in the soil. So you have less need to 'rotate' crops in any formal way. And because you set out the plants in a random fashion, one species against another, there are no enticing rows of the same species to attract insect pests.

You might intersperse beans with cabbage, tomatoes with lettuce and sweet corn (maize) with root crops. Each plant takes different nutrients from the soil and it makes use of the light at different levels.

That's a clever scheme: ancient but new. We might call it neo-intensive gardening. Can we adapt it to our own organic vegetable garden? Here's a system that many gardeners have used even in temperate zones to produce a fabulous yield of food.

It's called Intensive Successional Planting (ISP).

First, very early in the year, you sow broad beans and fill the space between them with peas, carrots and spinach. Spinach is the most reliable early leaf vegetable to grow in a temperate climate. You might also sow pak choy, early lettuce and rocket (aragula), although their food value is small.

Come early summer, the beans are tall and the peas have twined themselves about them. These plants can be cropped. Of course, you don't pull out the roots. Leguminous roots have nitrogenous nodules that enrich the soil for the following crop. You then put back the bean and pea haulm on the soil as a mulch, just as Fukuoka did. The spinach leaves are cut and any fibrous remains are left on the surface.

A natural mulch that conserves moisture

Your nest step is to drop in transplants of sweet corn (maize) and draw the mulch up to the stems to conserve moisture.

Then you plant among the maize some maincrop carrots and other root crops plus dwarf beans (Phaseolus vulgaris) and more salad plants. Of course, many other vegetables could also be planted.

This is the season when insect pests get busy so be sure to sow transplants of aromatic herbs everywhere, and especially in a cordon around the beds.

For example, nasturtiums on the borders act as a trap plant for caterpillars. (The leaves and pickled seeds are good to eat too.) French marigolds (Tagetes patula) deter soil-crawling insect pests like nematodes and add vibrant colour among the green leaves. And such herbs as oregano and caraway repel flying pests.

Grow more food with less work

In early fall, everything is cut. The roots stay where they are, to rot away and enrich and ventilate the soil. The discarded haulm is put back on the surface as a mulch to conserve moisture over winter and prevent wind erosion.

You might then plant rocket (aragula) and land cress amongst the haulm as a green manure. In a mild winter, they can be cut and eaten as a salad or garnish. In early spring, they are tilled into the soil or simply laid on the surface to rot down.

The value of this no dig method of truly natural gardening is that the plant roots aerate and enrich the soil as they rot. Nothing, other than root crops, is dug out. When the plant waste is laid thickly on the surface, it also deters most annual weeds. (Needless to say, diseased haulm should be burnt.)

The ISP system does away with formal crop rotation because, with so many plant species being grown together, a pest or disease that's specific to one species has little chance to get a hold.

Not only is the ISP method Nature's own way of doing things, it also cuts down enormously on time and effort. Lazy vegetable gardening and 'ecological gardening' are often the same things!


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Dr John Yeoman PhD is chairman of the information network for natural gardening ideas, the Gardening Guild. You'll find dozens of clever strategies to grow more food in your garden with less cost and work in his practical manual Lazy Secrets for Natural Gardening Success. Acquire it for free at:
http://www.gardeningguild.org/lazy