Meet the no-dig pioneer revolutionizing gardening worldwide—nearly a million people follow Charles Dowding tending his vegetable garden

Charles Dowding appears somewhat weary but cheerful as the video interview begins. The busy no-dig guru doesn't have free time until late in the evening, as his days have lately been filled with constant filming.

he videos and photos taken at Charles’s Homeacres farm in Somerset offer detailed insights into no-dig cultivation—a method where garden beds are regularly covered with compost mulch and the soil is never dug. His posts have garnered worldwide attention on social media: Charles Dowding’s YouTube channel boasts over 600,000 subscribers, and on Instagram, his followers number nearly half a million. He believes that the popularity of no-dig gardening is largely attributable to social media.

“I’ve been cultivating using these same methods for almost 40 years, but previously I got little publicity for my ideas,” he says.

According to Charles, the COVID-19 pandemic led to a notable increase in his social media following, as people confined to their homes became enthusiastic about gardening. He considers climate change and the general rise in environmental awareness even more significant factors in his method’s global success.

“No-dig is beneficial for soil life, whose importance we’ve only recently begun to understand. Because the soil isn’t dug or turned, the soil organisms remain undisturbed. Additionally, no-dig cultivation helps sequester carbon in the soil.”

Charles Dowding has been farming throughout his life. He grew up on a dairy farm in Somerset, southern England. His parents insisted that their son shouldn’t follow in their footsteps, so Charles attended university to study geography. However, during his studies, he became interested in vegetarianism and clean food, and shortly after graduating, Charles decided to dedicate himself to cultivation, despite his parents’ wishes. He established his first commercial vegetable garden on the family pasturelands in the early 1980s. To eliminate weeds, he turned the soil and prepared the garden beds by hand. At the same time, he realized with dismay that a similar amount of work would be required every year.

The labor-intensive traditional cultivation method soon changed entirely when Charles read Ruth Stout’s book No Work Gardening. Stout was an American pioneer of mulching cultivation, whose first book on the subject was published in 1955.Like Stout, Charles abandoned soil turning entirely and began applying mulch to his garden beds once a year.

“Stout advised using hay as mulch, but in the very first summer, I noticed that slugs thrived under the hay mulch. I lost many seedlings to them. I ended up trying compost as mulch, and the slug problems stopped immediately.”

Thanks to the compost mulch, the work became easier. The cultivated areas expanded year by year, and there was a good market for the vegetable harvest, but in the early 1990s, Charles wanted to try something new. The following years included no-dig cultivation in both Zambia and France, but eventually, Charles returned to Somerset with his family in the late 1990s and established a commercial vegetable garden focused on growing salads. The mixed salad bags of various lettuce varieties were a sales success in local grocery stores.

Homeacres became Charles’s home in 2012 when, after his divorce, he needed to find a new place to farm. The property’s vegetation had grown wild, and the soil was full of weeds, but Charles already had plans for yet another no-dig garden. Because of those plans, the moving load included a batch of compost.

“The soil here is extremely clayey. In winter, it’s very wet; in summer, quite dry. But for me, clay soil was ideal, as I’d learned in my previous gardens that it’s excellent for no-dig cultivation. In fact, I was able to acquire Homeacres only because the neighbors considered the soil quality here so poor that no one else wanted to buy the place,” Charles says with a laugh.

Charles’s cultivation methods and the scarcity of weeds in his vegetable beds had already drawn attention among visitors to his previous farm, so Charles decided to focus mainly on teaching and writing about his cultivation methods in his new garden. Since 2007, he has published 14 cultivation guides. The farm still grows salads and other vegetables for sale, but on a smaller scale.

“Nowadays, my passion is to tell people about no-dig gardening because it makes gardening so much more rewarding and less labor-intensive. The yields increase, and at the same time, the soil’s condition improves.”

To demonstrate the method’s effectiveness, ten years ago Charles established two identical vegetable beds side by side. One was made in the traditional way by turning the soil; the other represents the no-dig approach. Each year, the same seedlings are planted in both beds simultaneously, and their harvests are weighed. Regular record-keeping shows that, despite weather variations, the no-dig bed produces at least as much yield every year as the other bed, often somewhat more.

Moreover, the yield from the no-dig bed comes with less labor because the thick compost mulch effectively suppresses weeds and retains moisture so well that the need for watering decreases. The traditional bed, on the other hand, is plagued by weeds and suffers easily from drought. In a bed that has dried out, much of the watering doesn’t even absorb properly into the soil but runs off like water off a duck’s back.

Charles says he’s grown accustomed to questions about whether no-dig gardening is really as blissful as it sounds in his talks. Doesn’t the method have any downsides? Is it suitable for every gardener? He thinks carefully before answering.

“I honestly find it hard to come up with any. I admit that establishing a no-dig garden often requires a bit more time and patience than traditional methods. However, I maintain that from then on, everything becomes easier. It suits soil types that are considered challenging. Edible gardening is my specialty, but the same principles apply to ornamental plants, as well.”

In Charles’s opinion, only potato cultivation requires slightly more effort from the gardener. Typically, when planting potatoes, a furrow is dug into the soil where the seed potatoes are placed and covered. For no-dig potatoes, a slit is made in the mulch layer through which the seed potato is inserted about five centimeters deep. Since the new tubers grow quite close to the surface, during summer, you will need to add an additional layer of compost to the potato bed to prevent the potatoes from being exposed to light and turning green. Harvesting is straightforward because the potatoes don’t need to be dug out from deep in the ground. They come up easily by gently pulling the stalk from the mulch layer.

Read more: No-dig gardening master Charles Dowding reveals his secrets: how to start growing without turning soil