No-dig vegetable beds

It sounded like a good idea to me -- growing vegetables without digging!

In fact, it's the method recommended by the Royal Horticultural Society in their books on organic gardening. Not really having the slightest idea about vegetable growing when we arrived here, we decided it wouldn't harm to try this relatively new idea. We started by simply digging rectangular beds of appropriate size -- we chose 1.2m wide by 4.0m long -- and that's what we grew most of this summer's produce in. But I wanted to build edged or raised beds in the end, as also recommended in our various gardening books.

The large number of tiles taken off our old roof seemed to cry out for a use -- particularly the slightly damaged ones. I thought I'd see if they will work as edging for the beds. The picture shows the prototype.

Conveniently, the tiles are 40cm long. That means I can build a bed with 26 tiles -- 10 along each side and 3 at each end. I set out leveling strings to mark the bed borders, dug into the soil to about half the depth of a tile, and set the tiles on edge (holding them temporarily in place with stones, clods of soil, or anything else I could find around the outside). Our terraces slope slightly, so keeping the beds level means that one end is set deeper into the ground than the other; because the tiles are not that large (20cm in that direction), this type of raised bed will only tolerate a very slight ground gradient.

I didn't want to create anything too permanent -- after all we may want to abandon the beds after the trial period -- but on the other hand I don't want the tiles moving too readily. So to fix them in place, I dry-mixed cement (4 shovels full), sand (4-6 shovels full) and soil (about 6 shovels full) to backfill to a depth of a few centimeters around the outside of the bed. After covering the cement mix with soil to restore ground level, I watered it gently to dampen the cement-soil. After a few days, and a little rain, the tiles seem to be reasonably well fixed in place.

We expect to end up with around 16 beds altogether. That ties in well with the approximately 400 damaged tiles we have, so I may have to go into a kind of mass production! However, with some beds in use all the time, the reality is that I won't be able to build them all at once. But I hope to get them built gradually as time and opportunity permits.