I am Charles Dowding
I’m from a farming family, and it’s been a journey of decades to find new ways of growing the soil more naturally. I feel fortunate to have lived well and learnt a lot. I want to share that with you and others.
The main focus of my adult life has been to grow healthy and health-giving food. Now that there is more interest in that, I am developing the teaching side of what I do to reach out more widely, while continuing to run a small market and teaching garden in Somerset, UK, close to where I was born.
I was conventional as a teenager, not questioning the world I saw. Then, in 1979, aged 20, I awoke to an awareness of nutrition and its links to food production. I had recently become a vegetarian and that led me to explore organic gardening. And the soil.
facts about
charles
My mission is to share evidence-based understandings that help gardeners to:
Grow more, from fewer resources, in less time.
The core method I have developed is no dig. It enables us to grow more food from less input.
No dig requires less compost than if you dig, for the same amount of harvest. We see this on my trial beds, from which I have recorded harvests every year since 2007. We find that even a smaller disturbance of forking the soil, as opposed to digging, reduces growth.
I share this knowledge worldwide and I’d like you to share it with friends, neighbours, and online. We can help ourselves and the planet at the same time.
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