It’s easy to start a no-sweat food garden

Does it sound unbelievable to have an abundantly producing food garden with only 8 to 10 hours of work per Year?

This may seem incredible, yet it can be achieved when you use the correct method. Think of tropical jungles and natural woods, which are perpetually bursting with life.  In undisturbed natural habitats everything grows by itself, continually.

If we then follow mother nature, we can have a no-sweat garden full of palatable food without having to break our backs digging and turning and without depleting our savings for synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.

The secret for a non-stop growing vegetable garden like this is first of all the soil. If you inspect the soil in natural woodlands, you’ll see that underneath the layer of leaves and dead plant material it’s moist, loose and crumbly and has an earthly smell. You need this kind of soil for your garden to continually produce food.

I don’t advocate that you now run off into the woods to collect bags and bags full of the good soil. For most of us that’s impossible in any case. So if you can’t get it from the woods, what then? The shop? No, you probably won’t get this kind of soil in shops.

But you can start producing it yourself, without much sweat. It’s actually very easy and cheap – you just start composting. Compost is the best and cheapest soil conditioner you can get, that’s to say when you produce it yourself. It consists of organic scrap material from the kitchen and the garden, scrap that normally ends up in the waste bin. Just remember, old newspapers also are organic scrap.
When you start composting, you recycle your organic waste yourself. That’s why it’s the cheapest way to condition your soil.

If you want to start a no-sweat food garden immediately, you’ll have to buy some compost first. Here you have to be alert so you don’t get compost that’s enriched with synthetic fertilizers, you want organic compost.

You will need a constant supply of compost for such a no-dig food garden. Therefore you’ll want to produce your own compost as soon as possible in order to save costs.

The best way is to start collecting all your organic waste as from today. So you will need a container for that and a space outside where you can place the container. If you happen to have an unused corner in your existing garden or outside space, you can just fence this off with old chicken mesh or second hand corrugated iron sheets to properly contain all the waste.

Another thing to remember when composting is to put layers of different organic waste into the bin, i.e. a layer of dry leaves, then a layer of horse, chicken or cow manure, then a layer of dry grass clippings etc. This ensures faster decomposing of the materials.
And yes, of course, if you can get hold of earthworms, they really work fast on all organic waste and they reproduce quickly, so you only need to start with a few.

Tagged as: Easy, Food, Garden, It's, nosweat, Start