No-dig organic gardening course

Keen to learn more about organic gardening? This course with garden expert Charles Dowding will not disappoint. With an emphasis on sustainable gardening this comprehensive course will cover a wide range of topics and will provide you with handy tips and tricks so you can fully take advantage of your garden. Most of the course, and the included lunch, will be held outside if the weather allows. Otherwise, the course will be moved indoors with a view of the gardens, in polytunnels and a wide ranging slide show.

Covered topics will include:

clearing grass and weeds in different ways, with an emphasis on mulching rather than digging

keeping soil clean of weeds - a prerequisite to having time for creative work

different composts/manures and how to use them on different crops

different ways of making compost and using compost/manure of different qualities

sowing and propagation - in modules (greenhouse) or direct in the soil

seasonality and timing of sowings for strong, healthy growth

influences of the moon

uses of fleece and mesh to speed growth and protect from insects

understanding slugs and how to lessen them

best ways to pick crops and at what stage, especially salads

advice on polytunnels - size to use, orientation, what to grow in them

advice on fruit, especially apples in the new orchard

The course runs from 10:30am - 4pm.

Price includes refreshments and lunch of Lower Farm salad, cheese, home-milled bread and cider.

Testimonials:

‘Thanks very much and I feel very inspired. Your system is the most comprehensive development of a no-till principle for British conditions that I know of. Patrick Whitefield’

‘Charles I just wanted to write and thank you for the excellent day at Lower Farm. Your holistic and respectful approach rang very true and although a relative newcomer to growing veg I actually found this an advantage as your revolutionary techniques made complete sense. Angus Hill’

I grew up on the family’s dairy farm in Shepton Montague, with no interest in cows, and was encouraged by my parents to look elsewhere for a career. Yet after graduating from Cambridge University with a geography degree in 1980, I felt a pull back to the land. After a year of working for the Argyll Hotel on Iona in the Inner Hebrides, where home grown organic vegetables were an important part of the menu (and still are), wind permitting, I decided to have a go at commercial organic vegetable growing in an old orchard on the farm.

Over the next eight years I kept taking in more land and built up a large market garden, selling both locally in boxes and through a market stall, as well as to shops in Bristol, Bath and London. In 1991 I lived in an isolated French watermill, then spent some time creating a market garden in deepest rural Zambia, before settling on a forty acre Gascon farm of terrible soil in 1992 from where I married Susie. Two children and five years later we decided to return to Somerset and a new chapter began.

In 2003 I was encouraged by a local retailer, Bill the Butcher in Bruton, to grow and compose salad bags. I also developed new and reliable ways of continually cropping plants such as lettuce. Increasing interest in my garden, its produce and my methods have led to many articles for various magazines and lectures including one to the RHS in Tokyo, a book on vegetable growing which appeared in March 2007, and a second one on salad leaves in spring 2008. I am often consulted for advice on creating, maintaining and improving vegetable gardens and allotments. Come on a day course at Lower Farm - it is a good first step, to see what is possible - and to learn from my mistakes!