No-Till Gardening

© Deborah Turton

No-till gardening is a way to garden without tilling. It allows your soil to stabilize and maintain a healthy biodiversity. Tilling disrupts your soil's natural patterns and can cause erosion, loss of organic matter, and soil compression.

You can transform your tilled garden into a no-till garden simply by marking off garden beds. You don't have to raise these beds. Leave enough room around them for your paths. Then, walk in your paths, and stay out of your garden beds. It helps if you have edging around your beds to keep grass out of the beds. I use rocks as an edging material.

If you are just starting a garden, you can place cardboard or at least ten sheets of newspaper directly over your grass and cover with mulch. Then cut holes in the paper, dig a hole in the soil and place your plant directly into this hole. The grass will be smothered under the mulch and break down, providing a source of nutrients for your plant. The paper prevents the grass from growing up through the mulch. If you want to plant seeds, dig out the grass and roots and fill the area with compost or soil and plant your seeds.

The following season, you can plant your transplants and your seeds in your beds without tilling. You can add amendments to the surface under a mulch or add them to the hole in which you are planting. The soil creatures will mix the amendments into your soil. In the fall, you can use a cover crop, cover the soil with leaves, or plant a winter crop like turnips or kale. Just don't leave your soil bare.

Controlling weeds with no-till is easy. I spend less than one hour/week controlling weeds - including laying mulch. I have so few weeds, I simply pull them as I'm doing other garden activities.

First:

Place your plants close together. This shades out the weeds. Generally place your plants the minimum distance needed in a row, but use this distance in all directions. So if your peppers need to be placed 12-18" apart in rows 3' apart, place your plants 12" apart. You'll have 4 plants in 4 sq ft.

Second:

Use mulch. I can't emphasize this enough. Mulch smothers weeds while feeding your plants. Luckily, no-till gardens use less mulch because of the small growing area. The time you spend laying mulch once is much less than the time you'd spend pulling weeds all summer.

Third:

Because you now have permanent paths, the grass seeds and roots found in your paths won't be spread to your garden beds. Tilling paths with grass and weeds spreads the weed seeds and weed root pieces throughout your garden. By skipping the tilling, you skip spreading many weeds to your garden beds. Any unwanted seeds that land on your mulch will have a harder time germinating, and you can easily pull up the seedlings.
 

- Deborah Turton

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 © Copyright Deborah Turton

The author is an organic gardener and writer who's

worked with a variety of environmental groups.

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