Do your gardening but DON'T dig says B&Q as it's bad for environment

Do your gardening but DON’T dig says B&Q as the chain warns it is bad for the environment and unnecessary hard work

• B&Q said method of digging to prepare flower beds should be a thing of the past 

Digging your garden is bad for the environment and unnecessary hard work, according to B&Q.

In what may seem surprising advice for a chain which sells a lot of garden spades, it says the method should become a thing of the past.

Tim Clapp, head of product range at Kingfisher, the parent company of B&Q and Screwfix, said when he learned horticulture, back-breaking ‘double digging’ was taught as the way to prepare flower and vegetable beds.

Instead of doing this to aerate soil and suppress weeds, ‘no-dig’ gardening simply involves spreading compost on the surface once or twice a year and letting worms, bacteria and soil fungi mix it in with the earth.

The movement has been inspired by British gardener Charles Dowding, who has written books since the 1980s urging gardeners to stop digging and instead let the soil regenerate naturally. 

Digging your garden is bad for the environment and unnecessary hard work, according to B&Q. In what may seem surprising advice for a chain which sells a lot of garden spades, it says the method should become a thing of the past (file image)

B&Q, which has more than 300 stores across Britain and Ireland, said it wanted to ‘bring no-dig gardening to the masses’.

Speaking at an event at the chain’s test nursery in Fareham, Hampshire, Mr Clapp said: ‘[Digging] is the old way of doing things. What today we’re here to say actually, that is quite hard work. 

‘And there is, we believe, an alternative way to doing that and for that we have to thank of Charles Dowding and his methods.’

Digging damages bacteria and fungi in the soil, Mr Clapp said, as well as causing carbon buried in the soil to form the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide when exposed to air. 

‘Carbon is like the glue within the soil. And the higher the carbon is, the better it is. But of course by digging it, we’re exposing that carbon to oxygen within there, and that turns into CO2.’

Mr Clapp added: ‘With the no-dig system, you can actually start to put the carbon back into the soil and it’s a really nice thing that we can do.’

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