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garden:cultivate:lotill

Low-till gardening

Not no dig

No dig or low till is one approach to gardening. This type depends on some sort of mulch to suppress weeds. This isn't the low till I'm talking about.

Here in the Pacific Northwest mulch beds are the best incubators for slugs and wood lice. I have enough pressure from these without building comfy places for them to live and reproduce.

Low till gardening

When I took over a neglected vegetable garden it had been plowed up (root-tilled) by a tractor just about every year. This repeatedly churned up the top layer of soil while the weight of the tractor compacted the soil below.

The vegetables had eight inches of loose soil over hardpan. Plant roots couldn’t penetrate the hardpan to grow to their full depth and take advantage of nutrients and water in lower levels of the soil. That loose soil didn't have much organic matter and it was lacking in basic plant nutrients, especially those water soluble ones that were dispersed by the abundant winter rains here in the Pacific Northwest.

I needed to supply more water, fertilizer and compost than I liked, and crops weren't consistent.

Right away I thought about how I could loosen the soil to a deeper level and make it more fertile. I began planting cover crops (as a green manure) and set up limited walkways.

I learned more over time and came to realize the importance of creating a permanent, natural structure to the soil in which all the micro organisms could prosper, not to mention earth worms.

I was moving toward gardening with a minimum of tilling that relies on keeping soil uncompacted and undisturbed so that it holds water well and shelters earthworms and nourishes micro-organisms that aerate and enrich the soil and convert some minerals to forms plants can readily use.

Now instead of turning my soil I just dig shallow seed furrows or make holes to set seedlings out. This saves me a lot of time and back pain. I see fewer insect pests and no more weeds than I did when I dug my beds. And the earthworm population keeps growing.

To keep untilled soil loose and fertile I have to keep from stepping in it, add compost on top regularly, and protect exposed soil with mulch and cover crops [link to cover crop article]. These keep soil from washing away in rainstorms or com-pacting due to repeated freezing and thawing over winter. Deep-rooted cover crops loosen the soil and bring up nutrients to a level where vegetables can access them. Decomposing mulch and cover crops add organic matter to the bed or the compost pile.

Rationale for low-till gardening

Not-digging, on the other hand, preserves the natural integrity of the soil. Not-digging improves soil health, and also protects against erosion, improves both the quality of garden plants and the environment.

Cultivation disturbs soil life, causes soil compaction, exposes and depletes nutrients, and kills micro-organisms. The natural cohesion of soil particles is disturbed so that erosion is more likely. The broad spectrum nutrients lost to cultivation are usually replaced by only the essential nutrients in commercial fertilizers.

Read more

In the soil

Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I plant my seeds into the soil (not a bale of straw or mulch). I control weeds by slicing, dicing and minimal digging.

In the soil I cannot help but do some tilling to eliminate weeds, but this tilling is with weeding tool or diamond hoe. However, I attempt to preserve a healthy soil structure without digging deeply.

I work on making garden soils healthy, fertile, and friable. I plant cover crops as green manure and add locally cured compost.

Forget the rototiller

So I resort to rototilling only when it is truly necessary. As I learn I find fewer needs for the tiller.

garden/cultivate/lotill.txt · Last modified: 2014/07/23 21:00 by davidbac