By Victoria Plum
The Reepham & District Gardening Club organised another useful talk for April by well-known local gardener Martyn Davey on vegetable growing, and it was full of straightforward information and good, traditional garden practice.
He also mentioned the concept of “no dig” and Charles Dowding, who is a keen exponent of this way of garden management.
There is lots of very useful information online from Charles Dowding and I certainly recommend his websites.
Someone else at the Zoom meeting mentioned a farmer in Hertfordshire pursuing similar principles, though obviously on a very different scale. (Look up John Cherry and his brother Paul, who farm 2,500 acres with no ploughing and minimal tillage.)
They have learnt that the top two inches of soil are full of life and the most crucial, and all their management is designed to protect this precious soil and not to destroy it.
What a contrast this is to the iconic imagery of the farmer in his tractor, with the shiny plough turning the soil right over (seagulls following closely) or the pictures on the front of my old gardening books of an old man in tweeds, resting his foot on his spade, and looking across at the newly turned-over soil.
Now I see that whole idea of “cleansing the soil” and leaving it to “weather” as short-sighted, destructive and wrong. Remember Percy Thrower?
The next Reepham & District Gardening Club Zoom meeting on Tuesday 18 May is with Hawk Honey, who will tell us about “Wasps, Malicious or Misunderstood”. Details on the gardening club website.
I am looking forward to this talk, changing the mindset of Norfolk gardeners from “oh, look, there’s a wasp, we must kill it” to “oh, look, there’s a wasp, let’s protect it”.
Photo: Tina Sutton