No-dig gardening. Its inventor’s unclear. Wikipedia mentions [1] Japanese Masanobu Fukuoka, American Ruth Stout, and Australian Esther Dean [sic, Deans]. For reasons unclear, I’m an inveterate tiller. But last Sunday Sweetheart Vivienne and I began our first ‘no-dig’ garden bed. Or more precisely, its derivative called ‘sheet mulching’ [2]. We started our new garden bed in our orchard where there’s some spare space protected from possums, wallabies and wombats. First we laid down, straight on the grass, a thick cover of newspaper. It should have been wetted first, but with two inches (49mm) of rain in the prior 24 hours, the ground was wet already. Then on top of the newspaper we spread a thick layer of hay. Actually it was the hay from our round bales [3] that the sheep and goats had left because they’d trampled it and pissed and shat on it. The trampling and piss and shit make it perfect for sheet mulching. We want to extend the new bed three times the length of last Sunday’s tranche. We’ll leave it to mature for 6-8 weeks. Hopefully it’ll stay wet courtesy of late winter and early spring rain. Then we’ll enrich it with some compost and maybe some Dynamic Lifter too. We haven’t finally decided what to plant there yet. But we’re tending towards potatoes and pumpkins. It feels great to be using newspaper and waste hay in this way. This is a work-in-progress, folks. Stay tuned.

The shape of things to come?

Vis-à-vis the farm part of Farmdoc, a recurring theme in this blog is hay. In the nine years my sharefarmer Sharon and I’ve been jointly farming our adjoining properties, we’ve used square hay bales [1]. (They’re actually rectangular but called square.) This is because they’re smaller and lighter than round bales – the hay in a round bale’s roughly the same as in 15 square bales – so we can handle them manually. (Lifting round bales needs machinery – which Joel Salatin derides as ‘heavy metal’ [2] – which we don’t have and don’t want.) As neither Sharon nor I is getting younger (and stronger), we’re seeking ways to make our farming easier. So we decided we’d experiment this year. Last Saturday we bought a round bale (pictured) (for A$50) which we rolled off Sharon’s ute into one of our paddocks where we have 36 sheep and 29 goats. Instead of feeding square bale hay to them daily, the round bale’s now available to them, buffet-like, 24/7. How quickly they’ll eat it, and whether it’ll be degraded by the weather or them climbing and then excreting on it, remains to be seen. But if you don’t ask the question you won’t know the answer. This aspect of farming’s fun. It intrigues me. Stay tuned.