No-Till Gardening?
By Karina | March 15, 2010
I’m entering into Spring Number 1 in my new home, which means the first year to get a real start on planting a garden from scratch. Last year when we were cleaning up the yard (I moved here just too late for setting seeds, but just in time for the annual “oh we didn’t rake leaves last year and we have to clean out everything so the new grass has a chance to grow” effort. [note we are looking forward to this effort again this year, having not done a good job with leaves last fall.] So, the general ideal last year was we would pitch all of the yard waste back into the far back corner of the yard – the area where we will eventually plan a garden of some sort, and where we will be building our compost bin this spring. This area is on top of a rock outcropping and while I haven’t dug down to actually check, I am guessing there’s not much topsoil back there either. And the general plan was we would just pitch all that stuff back there, let it decay on it’s own for a couple of years, and then till it under and plant an awesome garden with berries and herbs and tomatoes. I was hoping to amend the thin soil covering the rock outcropping back there with even more delicious organic matter, and to avoid bagging and transporting all our lawn waste to the town compost. (Though there are lots of largish tree limbs back there, too, which will have to be addressed somehow. They can’t be tilled under!)
However, lately I’ve been reading and hearing more and more about no-till agriculture. On a commercial level, no-till farming – where the old crops are left in place, not tilled or moved around, and new crops are planted directly in with the old stubble – has been shown to reduce carbon releases from the soil. That’s right: it turns out that agriculture is a greenhouse gas producing industry not because of pesticides and fertilizers (though these don’t help!) or the machinery used, but because the act of stirring the soil as you till it releases carbon into the atmosphere. From the NPR article linked:
“That reflects the past century of plowing and such. We’ve seen the organic carbon content of the field go from 5 percent to about 3 percent.”
It may not seem like much, but it means that over the past 100 years, every acre of this field has vented about 50 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That’s about as much as eight average cars pump out in a year.
Of course, there are billions of acres of farmland around the globe. Rattan Lal, a soil scientist at Ohio State University, has traveled the world to study those fields, trying to calculate how much carbon farmers have unleashed.
“From time immemorial when world agriculture began, we have lost roughly 140 billion tons of carbon from trees and soil,” he said to an audience on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. Over half of that, almost 80 billions tons, is from the soil alone. In fact, up until the late 1950s, plowing had released more carbon dioxide into the air than all the burning of coal and oil in history.
Which of course makes me start to wonder: how can I prevent this carbon release at home? An article about this last year hints on how to start no-till gardening at home:
“The first year is the hardest for no-till practitioners. The ground must be cleared of debris, weeds and other obstructions before nutrient-rich compost and protective mulch can be used.
“Initially, some digging of perennial roots may be required,” said Charles Dowding, a commercial gardener and author of “Organic Gardening the Natural No-Dig Way” (Green Books, 2007). “If the soil is full of durable perennial weeds, a long-term (smothering) mulch for a year is worthwhile. It becomes much easier thereafter.”
Also many of the on-line resources I read say that no-till gardening is great at home, but only as long as no one walks on the garden beds. We don’t have garden beds yet, we just have giant piles of leaves and grasses and the odd volunteer pumpkin (we chucked our halloween pumpkin guts back there too) and tree limbs.
There are a couple of good resources on how to get started at home here and here, but you know, I’m a little nervous about this whole situation. I want to clean up the back yard over the next few months (well, I don’t *want to,* but I am going to) and I really am not sure the best situation. Should I just leave everything in place as best as I can, dealing only with the really big stuff and roping off a big area to become my new no-till area?
Or tell me straight: we are talking about a teensy tiny piece of my yard here, and honestly, I’d only be plowing it up once to get the garden started, after which I’d use more hands-on methods like direct hoeing where needed only. Am I being reactionary and alarmist here?
I am turning to you!
Are there any no-till practitioners out there? Garden commandos? What would you recommend I do with my back yard organic debris heap?
[[Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stawarz/ / CC BY-ND 2.0]]
Topics: Home | 8 Comments »
As you know, I have no answers for you. But I am really, really looking forward to your summertime dinner party! :)
i’m not expert, by any stretch of the imagination but … here’s some things i’ve learned from my gardner husband:
you have to treat your garden & soil with care,
you need the right mix of this & that for things to grow big & happy,
“double digging” improves vegetable growth/production (and it’s a great workout too!) – it also doesn’t kill all the good worms like using a machine does,
crop rotation matters,
crop placement matters (something about not planting your potatoes next to your tomatoes).
wouldn’t the little bit of carbon released be offset by the huge vegetables that you will grow?
anyway, like i said, i’m no expert … i just try to remember all the fun things my husbands rants on about. ;)
One of the biggest reasons for farmers on a large scale in the Canadian praries to go no till is actually water. It was interesting to learn about the carbon aspect, but the for many it is a water issue. If you don’t turn the soil you retain more water and in the praries water is precious. But there are some draw backs on the farm. the first 3-yrs sees a HUGE increase in mice and the like. You are not disturbing the nests so there is more. This of course does work its way up the food chain so things will balance out over time.
But this is big stuff compaired to you and a shovel/pitch fork.
Personally I would not go no till at the start. Mostly because of the weed factor. If you work on getting the soil ready and plant little to nothing this year, but truely work on those weeds with roots in China you could then think no-till for the next year. As you don’t know what you have yet, vs what kind of soil you will need I wouldn’t rush it.
Also your harvest is usually going to be a low to no till affair. That is unless you take out the rotatiller in the fall. We never dug up the whole garden with harvest.
As Cat said.. rotation is important and soil quality is key. Get your soil tested and see what you have before you get to worried about what to do with it.
I am not an expert, but I have utilized no-till gardening techniques for several years in the past using raised beds or boxed beds. For the raised beds, I cleared the debris and tilled it initially when I added compost, manure, and peat. This was done with three 40 x 50 ft plots. After the beds were made, I continued to keep 4-6 inches of mulch on top of the bed to keep the the soil from being packed down or overheating of the soil (this actually extended the growing season of my cold weather veggies by tricking the plant that it was not as hot outside as it was). The mulch (weed cloth can be used in conjunction) keeps weed growth down and creates less worry about hand removal. For box beds and a great resource, I would recommend a the Youtube channel of GardenGirltv…
Best of luck,
Dale
if you’re planning to do the garden in a couple of years, I’d go for lasagna gardening, which is a version of no till. you will want to clear the rocks and the branches though, but you basically layer newspapers (smothers weeds), organic matter, and let it sit.
I can only speak from my own experience and it may be different for others but I”m a no-till convert. Previously, double-digging and tilling were disastrous in my garden. I thought this might be a way to overcome my heavy clay soil but I was wrong. The earth rebels and gradually puts everything back where it was. And the top six inches of soil are key. Dig deeper, bringing up deeper soil layers, and the system is seriously disrupted. My own experience indicates that it’s best to leave things alone as much as possible.
I agree with Jen: lasagna gardening is the way to go. If you’re impatient, raised beds are also an option. I use them where the ground is sloped and the rain was robbing topsoil.
The best method I have found is to use trial and error. Make some tests of what you would like to plant, another thing to do is to get your soil analysed to see what its make up is and then compare it to the requirements of your plants .
I am in my second year of no till gardening on thin soil over rock. I am really seeing the benefits, and the garden is getting easier to plant and care for. The year before planting, I put everything cleaned from the stalls, paddocks and pens into the garden area covering the entire area with about 10 inches of compostable material and let it rest for that year. The first time I planted did require a little shallow digging to remove some stubborn roots and surface rocks, but the power of composting and worms had created a nice, if shallow planting medium that fed us for months. I alternate the rows in spring and fall: one is planted, one is layered thick and heavy with 6 month old compost materials from the barn and the hay left on the ground & straw /manure from the pens and stalls. So one row is composting and used as a path, while one is in production. I can just shift the mulch over, exposing new fresh soil and plant, pick up the drip system and shift it over and that is it. No till gardening took a year to get going, but I have a really nice garden now, full of worms and filling up with rich, fine soil that gets better and better.