How does no till work

[SueCT]

Can I do no till if I walk on my garden? In order to get the most plants in, I always plant in kind of a grid pattern staggering each row, plants about 2.5 feet apart. I was thinking about it, but planned on just using the little mantis on the surface to spread the compost I had dumped in the garden in the fall. Then I could't get the tiller to keep running. Those 2 stroke engines can be a pain in the butt. So I spread it out the old fashioned way with shovel and rake. While I was doing that I noticed tons of worms. Like I dug up little nests of worms, all tangled together. I don't want to kill a lot worms that are good for the soil.

I always read that if you only dug a whole large enough for the plant it wouldn't spread out its roots, that compacted soil would be like putting it in a pot, it would only grow around in the area of orginal hole. Now maybe a garden isn't like digging a 12" hole in the grass and putting it in there, but is it really just as good as nice loose soil?

I was thinking I would just pitch fork the immediate area I was going to put the plant in and hope the worms would do the rest, lol.

So is there really more to this no till idea than I think? Should I till up the entire garden at least on the surface say 6-12 inches for initial planting or just break it up with the pitch fork first, or just do nothing but dig a hole big enough for the solo cup sized root ball and put the mulch down?

[AlittleSalt]

Going no till is a process that takes time - even years. I did think of going no till myself, but that's when I found out that my soil has RKN and Fusarium Wilt in it - so I quit researching it. This video explains no till pretty well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZErovOnP8QI

Others here use no till and can explain it better.

[PNW_D]

I find Charles Dowding's no dig videos inspiring ...... and you can walk on your garden

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB1...mhwah7q0O2WJBg

[BigVanVader]

No till is a misnomer, but I've done no till for years. They keys for me are keeping the soil covered almost always. 2x a year I add about 6 inches of organic matter to the whole garden, rake in in a little, and recover with either plastic or weed cloth depending on crop. I dont walk on my rows, but I doubt it matters. The worms love the loose soil and dark warmth the cover provides. No weeds, no erosion, no soil microbe destruction.

[Worth1]

Somewhere in this forum I have a no till thing going on.
All I did was scrape off the horesherb and plant the tomatoes as anyone would do.
The roots spread out everywhere.
Yes you can walk along the plants with no harm.

[seaeagle]

I guess it depends on your definition of no-till. There is a true no-till garden. I have one. I only dig holes for planting big enough to plant.


Every year in the spring a thick layer of maple leaves, mostly maple. There is a small amount of oak in there. Followed by a nice thick layer of pine needles to hold the leaves down. This is also when I apply the wood ash.


For the cover crop I think Hairy Vetch is best. It reseeds itself every year. Hairy Vetch will not germinate in hot weather.By the time the leaves and pine needles have broken down enough in the fall and winter the Hairy Vetch seeds from the previous spring spring will germinate in the cooler temperatures and will die and fall over make more mulch when it gets hot. Plus it is a nitrogen fixer.


The trees grow best int he forest. This is basically the same principle and it works.

[maxjohnson]

Some people will try to make it more complicated than it is, it's just basically try to till as little and most importantly adding organic matters back to the soil. If the soil is hard, personally I would till it once to mix in compost or organic matters. Also I don't mind disturbing the first 2-3 inches of the soil surface.

I did Back to Eden gardening in Florida for a few years by mulching heavily with woodchips, by the third year the soil is so rich I didn't have to fertilize at all to grow tomatoes and the water holding capacity is good that I rarely have to water the kales at in 95*F+ heat.

However, it doesn't prevent root knot nematodes. Also if you have woody materials and dead plant matters, roly poly and milipedes will live there which acts as composter. They will also chew the stem of transplanted seedlings, but they don't seem to chew the stem of sown seeds. So a better way is to do it like Charles Dowding, which is to only use compost as mulch, and keep the garden clean of all dead plant materials.

The image below is millipede poops.

[SueCT]

My garden has been well amended with large amounts of compost to the point that when I had a soil analysis done, they said the % organic matter was too high. I added plain soil to try to correct it and my plants never did as well again. Last year i had another load of compost dumped on the garden in the fall and never got it spread out, so there is now another 4-6" of compost on top, with tons of worms. So it isnt hard, compacted, never used soil. It just isn't nice and loose and fluffy. If I did till it, even 6 inches deep, it would kill a lot of the worms. They would get cut up. So I think I am going to try to just loosen it up by hand for this year and see what happens. In addition to the compost, I add Mainely Mulch chopped Hay and Straw as a mulch and that breaks down each year and gets reapplied the next, as well. I just have always tilled about 8-12 down and planted into very loose, fluffy soil.

I posted again, because i thought I had never submitted this so please disregard the other thread.

[SueCT]

Well, I remember before I had a tiller, when I was young, had just bought my house and had plenty of energy. I read that you should double dig, so I double dug my flower beds, added peat and pearlite, and put in my flowers. Now 20+ years later, everything still grows wonderfully in those beds and I never do anything except dig a whole big enough to plant. I never tilled it, but I also rarely walk on it. Now my veggie garden has been tilled to work in compost and broken down straw and hay mulch every year until this one. This time the compost was put in in the fall instead of the spring and not tilled. There is no need to do the whole cardbord and cover thing to get it ready because it has already been being used for quite a few years and liberally ammended with organic material. The soil is as I learned from the above two videos, firm, not compacted. I rarely water because it holds moisture very well. I rarely weed, because with the straw mulch and the compost layer under it, I get very few weeds. So I think my garden might take well to being no till pretty quickly. I planted all my tomatoes tonight, with just a pitchfork turning and breaking up the compost I was planting in. I had not yet watched the videos, so I didn't know even that was probabaly unnecessary. So we will see how it goes. I really need lots of tomatoes this year because I haven't canned any in a couple of years, putting them all into sauce. Now I have good reserves of sauce in the freezer, and have used up most of my canned tomatoes. I hope to replenish those if i get good enough crops at one time. 16 plants in 8 x 12 ft garden so its pretty densely planted. Plants two feet apart in one direction and 3 feet apart in the other and staggered. Really more like 12-13 plants in that space since 3 are cherries that I plant along the wall of the raised bed and they just grow over the wall and onto the grass and don't get staked or crowd the other plants. I think I might have to spray this year, so i keep foliar diseases down. The more room I have for air to circulate around each plant the less likely I am to spray. Thanks for your help, everyone. i enjoyed the videos, also. Now cross your fingers for a good, productive year for all of us.

[AlittleSalt]

I miss working in the dirt. You know your garden better than anyone else does