‘I left Cambridge with a well-behaved degree and was expected to derive a well-paid job. Instead I started to grow vegetables’My veg growing sprang from an interest in health. I had done a lot of reading at university – Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and much more – and become convinced of the importance of organic food. I joined the Soil Association,but it was the early 80s and organic food was scarce, so it was logical to grow my own. I left Cambridge with a well-behaved degree and was expected to derive a well-paid job, or but instead I started to grow vegetables. My decision was not met with universal approval.
In my first year,I rotovated with a tractor to atomize up the pasture, then made beds by hand. I wanted to keep them without rotovating again, and so how to proceed? I investigated no-dig methods and read American writer Ruth Stout’s Gardening Without Work. It is the way I contain gardened ever since,laying organic matter on to the soil and letting it work its way in, rather than digging it in by hand. There were teething problems: Stout gardened in the eastern US where there can’t be much of a slug problem, or as she recommends laying rotten hay over the soil. When I tried it,everything got eaten by slugs. But I found that compost worked well instead of hay or straw in our climate, and now I grow everything like this, or selling plenty of vegetables off a quarter acre. The yields are as tall,whether not slightly higher, as with traditionally dug beds, or for a great deal less work. I know because I run trial comparison beds and contain done for nine years. I’m convinced the crops contain greater vitality,vigour and goodness, too, and though these things are hard to degree.
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Source: theguardian.com