No Till Gardening

[Wifezilla]

I gave up on tilling a few years ago. Tilling just caused noxious weed outbreaks and was more trouble than it was worth. Then I discovered the Ruth Stout gardening method.

"My no-work gardening method is simply to keep a thick mulch of any vegetable matter that rots on both my vegetable and flower garden all year round. As it decays and enriches the soil, I add more. The labor-saving part of my system is that I never plow, spade, sow a cover crop, harrow, hoe, cultivate, weed, water or spray. I use just one fertilizer (cottonseed or soybean meal), and I don't go through that tortuous business of building a compost pile.

I beg everyone to start with a mulch 8 inches deep; otherwise, weeds may come through, and it would be a pity to be discouraged at the very start."
http://www.motherearthnews.com/Organic-Gardening/2004-02-01/Ruth-Stouts-System.aspx

Then there is lasagna gardening...same basic concept but different details...
"Lasagna gardening is a no-dig, no-till organic gardening method that results in rich, fluffy soil with very little work from the gardener. The name "lasagna gardening" has nothing to do with what you'll be growing in this garden. It refers to the method of building the garden, which is, essentially, adding layers of organic materials that will cook down over time, resulting in rich, fluffy soil that will help your plants thrive. Also known as sheet composting, lasagna gardening is great for the environment, because you're using your yard and kitchen waste and essentially composting it in place to make a new garden. "

I have taken several areas that were just lawn and had them producing the same season without renting a rototiller or breaking my back trying to turn dirt by hand. I DID use a postholer to get some really deep holes for my tomatoes, but the area around it was mulch only.

Deep mulch doesn't totally eliminate weeds, but the few that do pop up are super simple to pull up. The roots are in the loose mulch so a quick tug and you get the whole plant.

I will never go back to tilling.

 

[tortoise]

We till in compost and fertilizer at the beginning of the year. We are starting to establish better soil. We started out with a sandbox! We mulch with grass clippings, etc. We only had about 3" deep this year, but we have had the results. I plan to expand our garden again next year. It will start to be a challenge to find enough mulch!

 

[Wifezilla]

I have a constant supply of mulch due to the ducks. Poopy duck bedding makes a GREAT mulch and fertilizer.

 

[Henrietta23]

My father "discovered" Ruth Stout in the 70s when he had converted almost our entire backyard into an enormous vegetable garden. When he found out she lived in CT he decided to stalk her. Well, not really, but he did pile us into the car one day and drive up to Redding. As I recall we found her home and drove by a few times but never saw her so we turned around and went home.....

Gotta love that subtitle!!

 

[patandchickens]

I am no-till by upbringing and personal history; however, living now on land with an inexhaustible population of deep-brittle-rooted perennial weeds (especially canada thistle and perennial sow thistle, but also twitchgrass and various others) I have learned the limits of no-till-and-mulch. Every few years I have to dig over my veg beds to remove perennial weeds' roots, as they CANNOT be weeded out fully nor does mulch suppress them all that well. These things will come up thru multiple layers of cardboard with further mulch on top of it, I kid you not. And because they're all thru the lawn, they continually reinvade.

The flowerbeds are all perennials, and between vigilant weeding and heavy summer/fall/winter mulching and the fact that my plants are mostly too closely crowded together , it keeps the weeds there under fair control. Also most of the flowerbeds are not in areas of the property that have much sow-thistle in the lawn, so they don't get reinvaded nearly so fast as the veg gardens.

I do think there is QUITE A LOT to be said for tilling (with a tiller, or with a digging fork) a NEW bed, just once, to accellerate loosening the soil and to get out the worst of the perennial weed roots and to give things a head start on mixing amendments in. Anyhow on clayey compacted soil. If my lawn was on perfect garden loam I would probably not feel as strongly about it but under existing conditions, while I can and do sometimes get pretty decent soil quality just by a few years' total mulching-out of an area before planting it, it is way way faster to do a bit of digging or tillering first, just the once, to prepare the bed for initial planting.

JME,

Pat

 

[Wifezilla]

Where or not no till works for you is going to depend a lot on current soil conditions and the local invasive weed. In Colorado, tilling creates a perfect opening for bindweed and puncture vine to take over.

A common mistake I see with no till gardening is not enough mulch. Ruth Stout talks about 8" or more. My friend Ann put down only 3" and in less than 2 weeks her new garden beds were overrun.

 

[Boogity]

You suggest 8" of mulch on top of our existing garden. Do you realize how much mulch that would be?

Garden #1 = 120 ft. long x 60 ft. wide x 8" deep mulch = ~4800 cu. ft. of mulch (or 177 cu. yd.). Easily 16 full dump truck loads. My chickens would not poop that much in 100 years . Even if we mixed all the chicken poo and all the compost we generate it would take years to build up that much.

Today's farmers can do no-till or shallow-till because they blow all of the "waste" from the combine back onto the fields as organic mulch AND they use obscene amounts of glyphosate (roundup) to control the weeds.

I would love to try the no-till method but it does not seem practical. I hope you guys can convince me otherwise. Something I probably could do is to use the "crawl before I walk method" and try a smaller area in my garden and learn from that area how to do it.

Boy oh boy! It sure would be nice to avoid all the back breaking work in the garden. Tilling (and sometimes plowing), planting, and weeding really wears me out. But then I would just sit around and grow old, wouldn't I.

 

[MyKidLuvsGreenEgz]

I would LOVE to not have to till our place, but like Boogity pointed out, it would be very expensive to bring in LOTS of ton trucks of mulch to cover the place. I was hoping to put nut and fruit trees in the outer edges of our property, fruit bushes and brambles inside of them, and THEN veggie beds but without a perimeter fence, the next door neighbors just run over everything with their ATV or horse.

We have sand for soil. Any hole I dig for trees, etc. is pretty deep and wide. Then I line with newspaper. Sprinkle a little polymer (that expands and holds water to slowly release) then goat pen muck then the tree, surround with potting soil, put a tree skirt around it, water regularly, then a few weeks down the road find tire marks around it.

We do have a bindweed problem here but my goats seem to like it. Just can't seem to pull enough to keep it under control.

Wish there was another way we could no-till gardening without the 8" of mulch.

 

[Lady Henevere]

I'm trying no-till too, and as the weather heats up I'm wondering how the deep mulch works with watering. It would seem that the soil would stay pretty moist below the mulch, but it also seems that it would be near-impossible to get water down through the mulch if needed. I could always rake it back and spot-water, but I'm wondering whether anyone else has experiences with this in a dry climate. Thanks.

As for the larger plots of land, I think cover crops are used for the biomass rather than trucking in mulch.
http://www.rodaleinstitute.org/choosing_the_best_cover_crops
http://www.rodaleinstitute.org/organic_no-till_for_vegetable_production

 

[Wifezilla]

Since I added a few beds every year for a couple of years it wasn't a big burden bringing in loads of mulch. If you are going from zero to huge garden, yeah, I can see this would be an issue.