Urban Gardening with No Dig - Guide 1 on Foundations

This is the first guide in the series of the Urban Gardening with No Dig. 

Guide 1 - Foundations with Design and Healthy Soil

This 20-page guide is the perfect place to start your urban gardening with the foundational steps to set you up for success - just the right depth of information to provide the core principles on how to set up right.

We start with your goals, garden design considerations and delve into establishing healthy soil. At the end of the guide, we translate all learnings into a ‘recipe’ in how you can build your own vegetable garden in one day. With this, you can sow or transplant your plants right away, and start growing your own food immediately.

What is included?

Laying Foundations

Urban gardening can often feel like a balancing act between making the most of a limited space and squeezing an entire growing season into just a few short months. While the process is inherently experimental, understanding the foundational elements can significantly enhance your success – and, more importantly, enjoyment. It all begins with what you would like to achieve.

Design your Garden Layout 

Garden layout is the first step to get the most out of your space. By carefully considering factors like sunlight, accessibility, and aesthetics, you can create a functional and beautiful garden—avoiding pitfalls resulting in poor vegetable location, diseases, and pests. A well-designed garden should meet your practical needs and be a space to relax and experiment.

Establishing Healthy Soil

One of the main challenges for new growers is keeping their plants healthy. It’s disheartening to see all the effort, time, and money go to waste, even though it’s an opportunity to learn. Over the years, I’ve come across a few methods to maintain plant health. However, the best and simplest way to grow healthy plants is to start with healthy soil. And what helps for that? No-Dig Gardening.

Recipe: Build your first vegetable garden bed

This recipe is perfect for beginning your urban gardening journey using the No-Dig method, particularly in small spaces. Follow simple steps to create your first vegetable garden bed, setting the stage for a healthy and productive garden.

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Who are we?

Our gardening journey began in our urban garden with a single vegetable garden bed. We were fueled to eat healthy, delicious, and fresh home-grown vegetables but wanted to start small. The results were so impressive that within a year, our humble bed had multiplied to eight, transforming our backyard into a thriving, semi-self-sufficient garden. This new-found passion sparked the birth of Backyard Goodness: Empower our communities to grow their own food.

Over the last few years, we have continued to expand our urban gardening knowledge, experimenting with different styles and techniques, diving deep into healthy soil, and growing all year round in an urban setting. No Dig method has consistently proven successful and has become a technique we love and highly evangelize.

As an urban grower we have also experienced challenges with weather, diseases, pests but also questions around how we can further improve our skills to grow more, and grow smart. We wanted to figure out ways that we could enjoy gardening, alongside our full-time job. This resulted in trials and experiments on how we could use the same space but spend less time to grow more food all year round.

Our Urban Gardening Guide with No Dig is the result of our experiments to share with our community to start smoothly and save time. In order to better address where you are in your gardening journey, we have packaged our knowledge into two parts. 

Please check above the content of Guide 1. 

Guide 2  focuses on 'Grow More & Grow Smart with Sowing & Transplanting techniques'.  This guide focuses on more advanced techniques, such as multi-sowing, succession sowing, companion planting and interplanting. This gives you the tools to create an urban garden with limited space to grow more food with less effort. Once you have set up your garden and ready to maximize your space, it is time to check out this guide!

We are excited that you want to start your own urban garden, and hope that this guide will inspire you to further experiment and enjoy your gardening with delicious harvests!