What Is A No-Till Garden? (And How Do You Benefit From Doing Less Work?)
Sometimes doing less really does get you more
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I don’t know about you, but when I was growing up gardening was equated to back-bending, and often back-breaking work. Every spring, about this time of year, my Dad would break out the shovels and hand them to us to start digging the garden. It was both a happy and dreadful thing.
The joy of spring, and the food that would soon be growing in the garden, for sure motivated us to get out there and help. But the digging and shoveling - yeah, not so much.
In so many ways, we are still pre-conditioned to believe that gardening comes with a LOT of hard work. We are bombarded with images of huge tractors tilling up vast acres. Advertisements for home-scale tilling machines litter spring gardening media. And shovels of every size and purpose often greet you at the door each spring at the garden center.
But does gardening have to include digging? Maybe less than you think.
What is tilling?
Tilling is the term we use to describe digging up the soil. This can be done with a wide variety of tools from the hand-tool variety like shovels and pickaxes to the powered versions in which gas engines (or tractor PTOs) turn blades that chew up the soil.
Tilling can serve a useful purpose. Conceptually, it breaks up the soil surface, churns around materials, breaks up cover crops or crop residue, chops up weeds, and can create a cleared and leveled surface for replanting.
But all this chopping and churning comes at a BIG price of soil health.
Because along with the cover crops, plant residuals and weeds, the living soil community is getting chopped and churned as well with devastating results. Cut up, pulled apart and exposed to the sun, many of the micro- and macro-soil organisms die, setting back soil fertility by months or even years.
And while this newly turned soil lays bare waiting for the next crop to sprout and grow, it is exposed to wind and rain and sun that can result in top soil loss, erosion, leaching or drying out (depending on the weather being too wet or too hot).
What is no-till gardening?
There is a different way. Just as it sounds, a no-till garden is created without tilling - that means little to no churning and digging of the soil.
Instead of the annual garden till or dig, no-till gardens have annual additions of compost and mulch, building the soil up instead of tearing it down through mixing and churning.
If you are starting a no-till garden from scratch, there may be good reasons to till the area you plan to garden and then never till again. For example, removing a hard surface crust or a hardpan that exists just below the surface can be good reasons to till first. And sometimes it is faster to till an area to redistribute soil if there are a lot of lumps and humps that interfere with a good garden design for the area.
In most cases, however, no-till can pretty much begin anywhere and from whatever your starting conditions may be.
The most common no-till method looks like this:
Lay out your garden bed design.
Cover the garden beds with cardboard or other thick compostable materials that will form a barrier to weeds and weed seeds underneath it.
Cover the cardboard with a big layer of finished compost.
Cover the finished compost with a layer of mulch.
Plant through the mulch.
Cardboard -Finished Compost - Mulch
Compost vs Mulch?
If you are starting a no-till garden this spring and want to plant it right away, then it is ESSENTIAL that you create the beds with FINISHED COMPOST.
Finished compost means that all the original organic materials that went into the compost pile at the start have completely broken down and you are looking at soil and not pieces of organic matter.
This is critically important because if the compost is NOT finished, then the disturbance created when you move the compost into the bed adds a lot of oxygen which can cause the unfinished bits to start breaking down again, releasing heat that will kill your new seeds or transplants. (This also happens when you turn a compost pile to mix it and restart the heating and composting process).
Mulch is often just one component of what you might put into a compost pile. That could be straw, leaves, wood chips or other materials. The purpose of mulch is to cover the soil, protecting it from the wind, sun and rain while the new plants begin to grow and cover the soil in living plants. Mulch also suppresses weed growth.
There is an alternative way to start a no-till garden, but that typically has to happen in the fall, or in a spring bed that you won’t be planting until much later. You can build your no-till garden by creating an active compost pile right in place in the garden bed. You would still lay down your cardboard or barrier materials, but then you would layer in the composting materials thickly, and top that all off with mulch. The compost will actively break down, and sink down over time, to create a layer of soil in which you can plant. Just remember that unfinished compost pieces might reactivate if you dig a lot during planting, so the goal remains to work in finished compost. It’s just in the case, you created the pile in place instead of moving it from somewhere else.
What are the benefits of a no-till garden?
1. Less Work!
Hands (and shovels) down the number one reason to go no-till is to end the back-breaking labor of gardening. Once the beds are created, you rarely have to shovel intensely again.
2. Protecting the living soil
There is no life or health on our planet possible without living soil. The places in our world that are devastatingly bare are like that because soil micro- and macro-organisms cannot live there.
When you stop tilling, you stop the annual destruction of soil life. And the more we come to research and understand how plants interact with living soil, the more we can appreciate the way in which living soil keeps life on our planet living too.
Acting on the Healthy Soils Healthy Life Message (Here’s What You Need To Know)
On some level, we all know that we are connected to other life on the planet. For instance, if animals around us suddenly start dying, we know we are also in trouble. Maybe there is a toxic chemical spill? Maybe there is a build-up of toxins in the water? We share the same air, the same water, and often the same foods as other animals around us. If one species starts dying off then chances are that others will follow, and that “other” could mean us.
3. Less soil disturbance for less erosion
No-till systems allow soils to become rich and mature and increase in depth over time. This complex soil structure improves water penetration into the soil, enhances water retention, and minimizes erosion.
Maintaining living plant cover over soil (or mulching to prevent bare soil exposure) is key to restoring ecosystems around the world. You can read more about the importance of controlling erosion in The Great Green Wall of Africa story (click here).
4. Minimized weeding
We often deem some plants weeds (even though many of them can be medicinally and nutritionally valuable) because these plants produces thousands of seeds which can remain viable in the soil.
When the soil is churned up every year, a new batch of weed seeds makes it to the surface, gets exposed to moisture and sunshine, and starts to grow. But in a no-till system, that weed “seed bank” is suppressed under layers of compost and mulch. While some weeds may grow on the surface, the historic weed seed bank is contained. Fewer weeds also means less work!
5. Nutrient dense food
The creation of no-till beds typically supports the generation of nutrient dense foods from our gardens. Because the soil improves, year over year through increasing soil organism complexity and diversity, the plants that grow in rich living soil have access to more of the minerals they need to thrive. Healthy soil creates healthy plants that creates healthy you and me!
Micronutrient Deficiencies: What happens when healthy food becomes less healthy?
Eating more fruits and vegetables, while decreasing the amount of ultra-processed food in our diets, is key to a long and healthy life. But what happens when these “healthy and nutritious” foods, like fresh fruits and vegetables, are themselves deficient of the micronutrients that humans need to be healthy?
Ease and joy in the garden
It can seem counterintuitive at first to think that doing less work in the garden can be better for you. But when it comes to the till vs no-till debate, no-till comes out the winner for creating health soils, that in turn produce healthy food for us to eat.
And certainly for anyone with mobility issues, no till methods can offer a gateway back into gardening again.
Gardening is a way to connect ourselves back into nature. By growing even a small amount of your own food, you get to experience the taste and nutrition of whole delicious unadulterated food. Few things are more deeply satisfying to our ancient human brains than that.
Happy gardening!
Here’s what’s coming up in future newsletters:
Ways to create garden refugia (safe havens) for creatures big and small
How healthy plants provide their own pest management strategies
What exactly are weeds anyway
This is tempting. Much like a no knead bread. There are many ways. ❤️