Celebrity gardener Monty Don says digging can do more harm than good. But after 20 years of moving his soil and growing fine produce, John Sheard is not convinced by the expert’s advice

A month ago I wrote a good news column about the benefits to mental health of living in or visiting the countryside, a finding proved by a massive poll carried out by Natural England and the Forestry Commission.

This beneficial effect was felt too by regular gardeners, so the survey found.

So why is it, at one of the key periods in the gardening calendar, when I am poring over my seed catalogues to plan next year’s vegetables, have I been driven to the edge of a nervous breakdown by advice from a green-fingered TV celebrity whose palatial grounds make my allotment look like a window box?

For just as I start on he massive task of digging over my plot (thankfully with help from my family) a month or so later than normal thanks to the wettest October this century and a painful attack of sciatica, the BBC’s Monty Don has announced that I am wasting my time.

Even worse, the presenter of Gardeners’ World has written in his newspaper column that not only am I wasting my time, I could actually have been damaging my soil by going through this arduous autumn/winter schedule for the past 20 odd years. I could have been in my cosy local just round the corner instead.

Monty, whose TV garden fills me full of envy, admits in his column that, like me, he has for many years believed that digging over to expose your soil to the winter frosts and snow puts plant-loving nitrogen into the plot as well as killing the exposed roots of weeds and wiping out hundreds of our despised enemies, the slugs.

No so now, says Monty: “Recently, I have become persuaded by overwhelming evidence that digging does more harm than good and should be kept to an absolute minimum.”

And to twist the fork in the foot (one of the many injuries I have sustained in this so-called peaceful pursuit) he adds: “We dramatically under-estimate the way that a living, healthy soil can look after itself and digging can often destroy soil structure just as easily as it can help it.”

Now I do not know the source of these findings but I assume they come from some horticultural expert to which Mr Don has access but my views on the role of experts have been jaundiced over the years. And when it comes to maintaining a healthy soil, I feel that I have done my bit over two decades following advice passed on from generation to generation for centuries.

For those two decades, every bit of green household waste food has gone into my compost bins, along with egg shells and peel from spuds, oranges and bananas, plus dead material from my wife’s bountiful flowers and shrubs (we have a strict division of labour: I do the veg, Val does the pretty bits).

And even when the weeds took over more than they should (they loved the hot summer and the wet autumn) following my sciatica, the soil underneath has remained the consistency of a crumbly Christmas cake, alive with earth worms and other creepy crawlies.

This is how it should be, I always thought, until the nice Mr Don came along with his bombshell. And that is far from being the only bit of news this digging/non-digging season. Things could get even worse for someone like me, who has always looked upon the allotment as a haven of peace and quiet away from the modern world of the web, the mobile pone, Twitter and Facebook.

The BBC are planning a knock-out gardening show based on the format of the Great British Bake-off (I think that’s what it is called) in which contestants will be asked to grow veg in competition with each other so that they can be sneered at and humiliated by other so-called experts.

Whether or not such a show will ever get on air I doubt: you can’t grow a carrot in the couple of hours like you can bake a cake and the opportunities for cheating are almost endless: a village garden show is one of the most competitive environments I have ever experienced and this would be a thousand times worse.

On the other hand, yet another survey casts great doubt on the future of this wonderful hobby: two thirds of 1,000 young adults told researchers that they would not take up gardening because they did not like being outdoors in the cold and wet.

So it might happen after all that Monty Don’s latest advice could be a boon to amateur horticulture. If we can take the hard labour of digging out of the veg plot, perhaps the iPod generation could be persuaded to switch off their screens, get off their backsides and get out into the garden.

Fresh air, exercise and better mental health: what more could you want?