Down and Dirty
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Do you have to bust your soil biome with tilling? Shutterstock
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20 NORTH COAST JOURNAL • Thursday, April 5, 2018 • northcoastjournal.com
To Till or No-till?
A big question for your small garden By Blake Richard
downanddirty@northcoastjournal.com
W
hether you have a flower pot on a windowsill or your whole yard turned garden wonderland, growing flowers and vegetables is easy. Plants want to grow. But when starting a garden of any size, like when you start any new project, there are choices to be made. One of these choices is how to prepare your soil. Maybe you’re just going to fill containers with potting soil. This works fine and seems to be ever popular. But remember that potting soil isn’t necessary to have a great garden. Gardens and farms were great before potting soil became popular in the mid 1900s. But if you are going to prepare an old-fashioned garden spot right in the actual soil, there are, in general, two different approaches: till and no-till. With the classic home garden, you till up the soil when the moisture is right, of course, to a nice looking, clean seedbed with either shovels, hoes or a walk-behind or tractor-mounted implement, such as a rototiller, disc or plow. You might
incorporate compost, fertilizers or lime. Sometimes you put down fertilizer while planting. Walkways go in between rows or raised or flat beds for dense, bed-wide plantings. This is the way that gardeners, for the most part, have laid out gardens for generations and centuries. But ever since the Dust Bowl, more and more evidence has implicated tillage as destructive of soil quality. Tillage oxidizes organic matter, decreases earthworm populations and aggregate stability, all important parameters of a soil’s health. The soil biome is complex and amazing. We’re only just beginning to understand the interactions between the organic and inorganic components of the soil, fungi, bacteria, mycorrhizae and soil animals, such as earthworms, and they are proving more fantastic than science fiction. Tillage, obviously, is disruptive to this soil biome. At this point, there’s hardly a farmer or gardener that doesn’t view tillage as, at best, a necessary evil. And for this reason, among others, the concept of no-till farming and gardening is very trendy. Interestingly, it is large scale conven-