No Till questions

[dickiebird]

I don't know why people have such disdain for tilling, mine has never been a problem of any sort.
I tilled my entire garden Sat in about 1 hour, 100' X 200'.

THANX RICH

 

[seedcorn]

It's about soil tilth. Working the soil will cost u that. But if what u gain is more valuable, till away

I till to start with clean slate, then mulch with straw to conserve moisture and control weeds.

 

[journey11]

Looks like they had the same considerations on the design as you did, Steve. There doesn't appear to be any bolts on top of their bar, from what I can see. You'd want it smooth, since your foot (and your own weight) is doing most of the work.

Loosening and aerating the soil with a broadfork still isn't the same as tilling. Tilling completely pulverizes the soil. With a turning fork or broadfork you aren't moving or rearranging the soil strata by much. The fungi and such wouldn't be killed and would resume what they were doing. You are not supposed to leave the soil bare at any point for this to work. There has to be vegetation or mulch on it at all times. For what you take out in harvest, you need to replace with organic matter...mulch, compost, etc. The whole point is that by not disturbing the soil's microscopic ecosystem, you will have more balance and end up doing LESS spraying for bugs and disease (which move in quickly when balance is disrupted and take advantage). You want to encourage beneficials. The soil would be more full of life...living things. I am not opposed to tilling either and usually do. It is nice to have a "clean slate". But other than an earthworm here or there, that soil is pretty dead. Not like what you'd observe in a spade-ful of earth from a forest floor.

 

[seedcorn]

You will find that with no till, you may fight more diseases since the pathogens are carried over in the dead plant tissue. If you are always growing cover crops, you will have to kill them somehow otherwise they become a weed. When they are breaking down, they will tie up nutrients. With a cover crop, you are sowing your own "weeds". Not-till fights more perennial weeds, less annual weeds. Again, not trying to stop anyone from this practice, just pointing out challenges.

Not to get into word war, but what we are talking about is. Minimum till not no-till.

 

[so lucky]

I think in my garden, whatever is lost in tilling would be worth it if I could get rid of the roots from the nearest tree that invade my garden from one season to the next. Yesterday, I was using the garden fork, and with every attempt to turn the soil, I would have to stop and cut roots with a knife. That involved getting down on my knees, sawing away at a tenacious root or pulling like crazy to pull the darned things out. No wonder my back and hips hurt after "gardening"! If I had used a tiller to run through that row even once, I wouldn't have had that problem, I think.

 

[hoodat]

I like the forks but can't use them. My soil has too many rocks that are just the right size to jam between the tines.

 

[digitS']

There are roots and then there are roots. I don't pretend to know much about all of them . . .

I do know that I've gardened near ponderosa pines and don't have much trouble with their roots in the garden. There is a ponderosa and also a larch and a grand fir almost close enuf for me to touch the trunks while standing in the shady corner garden. I have little trouble with any of their roots. I guess they've gone down, down, down.

The blue spruce at the edge of the little veggie garden are a different story!! I go along the outside bed with the shovel and slice thru them at least once a year. Just to the edge of the bed and . . . it doesn't help a lot because they seem to grow back quickly. But then again, that bed is to the north of those spruce and they grow taller every year.

I'm not sure that the tiller really would be best with tree roots. The tines aren't as sharp as a shovel and might just spin them a little.

Steve

 

[so lucky]

I guess if I had been using my noggin, I would have been using the shovel rather than the fork. You're right, Steve, the shovel probably would have cut through the roots, if I had jumped on it pretty hard each time. No more energy expended than the way I did it with the fork, and probably much more satisfying. Cut the living daylights out of those pesky buggers!
The offending tree is a beautiful elm, with a trunk about 22" across. It's worth having it there, most of the time. We also have bluebirds nesting in the house on it again this year.
I guess I'll just continue trimming back the roots that proliferate 3" under the ground surface. We all have our crosses to bear!

 

[ducks4you]

I'd like to use radishes as a cover crop this Fall. One company got me interested in icicle radishes bc they have 8 inch roots and hold the soil.
You know we have lost SO much gardening knowledge in a just a few generations.

 

[journey11]

Cover crops need timed out so they don't go to seed. On my garden, which I have been tilling, I mow my buckwheat shortly after it flowers (so my bees get a chance to hit it first), but before it goes to seed. It's a tender annual...so it's done doing it's thing after that and frost will finish it off pretty quickly. Radishes are a very good one too, Ducks4you.

Deep rooted annual grasses you'd probably only want to use when first establishing a no-till plot, because I'd hate to have to pull them up otherwise and they are better tilled under (mow, then till.) It's recommended to double-dig the bed first, but on a big garden, I'd probably get someone to disk it for me. There's some prep work to do to get the soil up to par before you stop tilling it, if you are going to get good results. Then after that you work on continually adding layers of mulch and let it break down slowly.

At planting time, you scrape back enough to get a row of seeds in or place seedlings. Planting diverse types of veggies and rotating them is part of heading off disease problems. Of course you would remove diseased plant material too. A lot of the problems you point out are only problems depending on how you handle them, Seedcorn. You'd want to remove and then compost your healthy plant material and reapply it later as a mulch. When I cover crop my garden now, I till it under and let it breakdown. But since you're not going to be tilling, you're going to have to work with it from a different approach.

The basic idea though, is to disturb the soil as little as possible and not do anything to compact it and keep it covered. I wouldn't have the manpower myself to maintain this on a huge scale. This would be good for a home garden though. But yeah, all literal terminology aside, particularly with your root crops, you are going to be moving that soil some.