Charles Dowding

Henry the others from Stuttgart University trials for blight resistance are Resi, Dorada and Primavera. All small fruits, all good.

from my garden zone 8b we filmed this in mid autumn, to show the results of summer plantings.
My favourite is spinach "Medania" sown 10th August which crops through autumn, then goes semi-dormant in winter cold (we stay above 14-18F) before cropping heavily in spring, until flowering in June.
The are of garden filmed here is 16 feet square and almost everything you see was sown July & August, after harvests of onions, salads, zucchini etc.

Thanks Neil

Thanks Redhawk and hey Karen, dense soil is good, as long as there are tiny crevices and passageways for roots.
Roots don't need motorways.
Also roots team up symbiotically with mycorrhizal fungi, so small we cannot see them. Although those fungi are broken by tillage.
If your clay grows strong weeds, it's fine.

Understanding whether soil is truly "compact", is made made more difficult because tillage, to break up soil, is so general.
Gardeners and farmers have been led to believe that soil needs to be loose for seeds and plants to establish. Yet this is untrue. Roots love firm soil.

Steph and I are asked a lot about "compact soil" and the answer depends on whether your soil is really and truly compact, or firm.
Compact soil is dense, smelly (sulphur!), sometimes grey and rusty orange in colour. Fortunately this is a relatively rare occurrence, usually caused by heavy machines, in wet conditions. Or by excessive cultivation which knocks out all natural soil structure, and kills soil life.

Firm soil is normal and good. Soil is hard in dry weather, but there is a matrix of structure from not being cultivated. I am currently planting into hard soil, but with a soft surface of compost.
Incidentally you can walk on no dig beds! The structure created by soil life is firm and stable.

Maintaining a surface mulch of organic matter is the pathway to open, aerated yet firm soil. Don't worry if you soil feels hard. As long as you feed the soil life, from above in nature's way, your plants will grow.

Stacy's question is one I am often asked, and compost is the mulch that works best here, for not harbouring slugs yet feeding and protecting soil too. In particular when you want to grow annual vegetables. For perennials such as rhubarb and asparagus, rougher mulches are possible.
Another aspect is that beds with sides of old wood harbour slugs, best take them down.

Just now it is hot and dry, unusual for us, and I have mulched a few plants with rough grass (no seeds!), until the autumn when I shall remove it after harvests of squash and celeriac.

In 2013 I took over a plot with bindweed of both types, the tall hedge bindweed with lovely white flowers, and the low field bindweed with small pink flowers.
Both were prolific in some areas, and are now almost gone.

In year one, the crucial first year, I mulched heavily to exclude new growth of light, with (in different places, to see) any of cardboard, compost and polythene.
Also I pulled any new growth before it reached even medium size.
This eventually starved the parent roots below: they have limited resources to survive, if new leaves cannot photosynthesise.

But you have to keep on it in the first year or two, to gain free time after that! I know it's worth it as I see only a few shoots now, and they are quick to remove.

I have good results every year with mulches of compost. Especially when the compost is say 8-12 months old and of decent quality, not too many sticky lumps.
I am zone 8/9, mild winters and damp, slugs proliferate.
So early sowings of carrots fail unless the mulch is compost, which does not give them hiding places.
Every year I sow mid March and success rate is around 95%.

Seed quality is another factor: best results this year from Bingenheim's biodynamic seeds, in Germany.

In dry, hot climates you can mulch between established rows with say hay, but I fond that by that stage, the growing leaves are shading soil.
This aubject is covered (sic) in our new book, on other threads here.

This is a fascinating topic.
Ruth Stout in 1950s USA was a great pioneer.
Her husband was a farmer and gave her spoiled hay, so she dared simply to lay it on her veg garden and forget the tillage part. It worked a dream, and she made it popular with a book "No Work Gardening"!!
In 1982 I came across her book and copied her method in Somerset, UK.
Result: slugs!
But she does not mention them - her winters are so cold, they all died.
So in the 1980s I developed the method of compost mulching in my 7 acre market garden. This had also been practised by 1940s pioneers of compost in the early days of the UK Soil Association. Arthur Guest in Yorkshire was a proponent and published a great booklet on no dig in 1949, but I think he must have died soon after as no more was heard of him.

And there's the rub: no dig has been around a long time, but never 'wins out'. Until now, thanks in part to mechanised composting making more available, and the internet making unconventional ideas more accessible.
In comparison, the mainstream tend to favour "traditional ways".

We can help people find new and time saving methods, for healthy growth and more success.

Fodder radish as we call it is a good plan, however it does reduce your cropping time this year. Your season is short Daniel, but brassica plants are good because they survive the first frosts of autumn, until the radish dies below about -6C.

In 1999 I improved an area of compacted clay, which cropped poorly in year one, by mulching with well of half decomposed horse manure, and no forking. Composts and manures feed soil life more quickly than undecomposed materials (the chop and drop), so in damp climates I find it better to compost materials then add them decomposed. Yes it's more work but you are increasing soil life more quickly. And have less slugs.

Another consideration is how much land to crop. Larger areas that are short of mulch are more work than smaller areas of well fed soil.