ECHOGardening

HintsSeries

NoTillGardening
By Martin Price, Ph.D.
Copyright by ECHO, Inc. 2009

ECHOs First No-Till Garden. I first read of this simple no-till gardening method
in Organic Gardening magazine in 1981. The article was called "Tossing an Instant
Garden." My reaction was that there must be something wrong with anything so easy
or everyone would be using it.
ECHOs first intern, Elise Tripp, and I decided to
give this method a try when we prepared one of
the first ECHO gardens. We chose an area of
healthy lawn. By the end of the day .it was a
vegetable garden. It was never plowed, cultivated, spaded or hoed. It was a great success and
was in continuous production for several years,
until ECHO needed that spot for another project.
The basic concept is simple. Keep the entire garden covered year-found with a thick layer of
mulch. Initial preparation of your garden will
involve some special steps that will not be necessary in subsequent seasons, unless you fall behind
and weeds take over.
An avid gardener in New England, Ruth Stout,
first popularized this No-Till method in her book
No Work Gardening, published by Rodale Press.
Every spring she had to delay her garden until her husband, a farmer, found time to
leave the fields long enough to get the garden plowed. One year, early in the spring,
while getting the garden ready for plowing, she moved a small stack of hay that had
been there for several months. Where the hay had been the ground was bare--there
was no need to plow. From that time on, her garden had at least a 6-inch layer of
mulch year-round. At the appropriate seasons she simply removed the mulch where
plants were to be located and planted. She no longer had to wait to have it plowed.
As the mulch slowly decayed, it turned
into compost. The garden became more fertile each year without the work of making a compost pile. And weeding took less effort.
No-Till gardening is even more relevant to urban and suburban gardeners today.
There is no need to buy or rent a rototiller or do a lot of digging to prepare the
ground. Some communities will no longer haul yard waste to the landfill, yet even a
modest garden can accommodate all the grass clippings from your own yard and
probably your neighbor's yard as well.
The First Season. Initial preparation of a garden at a new site will involve some
steps that will not be necessary in subsequent seasons, unless you fall behind and
weeds take over.

Begin by collecting a pile of newspapers

well in advance of the day you will make the
garden. If the area is in lawn or weeds, mow
closely with a lawn mower. Cover the area
with three to five sheets of newspapers
placed so that there is considerable overlap
at the edges. Then place the mulch on top of
the layer of newspaper.
Work in small areas at a time because you
never know when a sudden gust of wind
can disrupt the layer of newspapers. Be
sure to choose a day without much wind
so that the newspapers will stay in place.
For mulch, we use either wood chips that
are given to us by the power company or a
landscaping company, or grass clippings.
You could experiment with other materials that may be available to you such as
hay, straw, tall-cut grass, leaves, pine needles (we had expected problems from
pine needle acidity, but they never materialized), and others.
The grass and weeds below the newspapers will have difficulty pushing
their way up through the layers of
newspapers and the thick layer of
mulch.
How Thick Should The Mulch Be?
You will observe that the farther a
weed must grow through the mulch
before it reaches light, the weaker it
will be and hence easier to pull. If you
make the mulch too shallow you will have a lot more work to do hand-pulling the
weeds.
There is no hard-and-fast rule for how
thick the mulch should be. Some materials
will need to be placed deeper than others.
In general, light, fluffy materials like straw
or new grass clippings must be piled higher
than dense materials like wood chips. As a
starting point, use six inches of fluffy grass
clippings or straw or old leaves or perhaps
three inches of (denser) wood chips. As
you can imagine, if you have to purchase
wood chips by the bag the garden could
become expensive. See what you can find that is either recycled or inexpensive.

The weeds or grass underneath the newspaper will still be very much alive for
a few weeks. Then many, hopefully most, will die from the lack of sunlight
and will eventually turn into compost. Other plants will likely manage to push
their way through the layers of newspapers. Some of those that do will not
manage to push through the mulch. You will need to hand-pull weeds that do
emerge on top of the mulch. I have found that they are easier to pull than one
might expect because they are long and tender and you may be able to pull
them from the ground, If they break off near the ground they may not have
enough energy to make it through the mulch a second time.
Pull the mulch away from the spots where you want
your vegetables or flowers, exposing the newspaper. Place a small mound of fertile soil or a commercial potting mix on top of the newspaper and
place the seed or transplant in the mound. If you
want to plant a row of closely-spaced vegetables,
make a narrow row of soil or potting mix at least 1
inch thick on top of the newspaper. Now move
some of the mulch back against the mound or ridge.
Also, put a very thin layer of mulch on top of the
planting soil so that it will prevent drying.
There is a big difference between the ability of the
above-ground part of a plant to grow up through the
layers of newspapers and the ability of the roots to
penetrate down trough them. The plant's roots will soon grow out of the
planting dirt and grow through the wet (you will of course need to water the
garden if it does not rain) newspaper. Larger transplants do surprisingly well
when simply planted into the sod through a hole cut in the paper. Pull the
mulch back up around the stem as much as possible.
Subsequent Seasons The newspaper procedure is for the first season only.
Before the first season is over, you will find that the newspaper and the sod
have decayed and turned into compost. Additional compost is slowly formed
season by season as the mulch itself decays and is replaced.
If you keep a layer of mulch
about six inches thick over the
established garden, the soil
beneath will be ready to plant
whenever you wish. To plant a
row of beans, for example, just
push the mulch aside to expose
the ground where you want to
plant the seeds. Underneath
you will find beautiful organic

matter waiting for your seeds.

We use the word No-Till because it is analogous to the commercial system of
farming where herbicides are used just before planting, then seeds are planted
directly into unplowed sod. However, this No-Till gardening is a more organic
method, using no herbicides.
Advantages and some disadvantages of the No-Till System
(l) Gardens can be started anywhere that there is suitable soil, without the
need to plow or spade. You can plant in areas that would be difficult to plow,
such as around dead trees or in rocky soil. Grasses and other weeds are better
controlled than if the ground had been cultivated like traditional gardens.
(2) There is much, much less work involved controlling weeds. But a No-Till
garden is NOT a no-work garden! Weeds will occasionally come up through
the mulch and can then quickly become established. Remember that plants,
including weeds that germinate in the mulch, can easily send roots down into
the ground. If you allow that weed to go to seed, you will soon have many,
many more weeds just like it to deal with. If you do not spend some time
weeding, you may soon have a patch of weeds that thrive on the nutrients their
roots are finding. It is harder to pull weeds than to hoe them. So this is only a
work saver if you are determined to pull the occasional weed as soon as you
see it. Sometimes I have had to start from scratch with newspaper and new
mulch because I did not keep up with the weeding.
(3) You spend a lot of time gathering and placing the mulch periodically
around the plants. As the mulch decomposes you will need to keep replacing
it. This method could accurately be called a no-till, permanent mulch garden.
(3) Less water is needed for irrigation and rainwater will not evaporate as
quickly. The soil will remain moist much longer because the mulch protects it
from the drying effects of both sun and wind.
(4) The soil is kept cooler. This can be a disadvantage, however, for colder
areas or early spring gardens in temperate areas. Plan ahead, especially early
in the season when low soil temperatures are most likely to be a problem.
Rake back the mulch in the area selected for early plantings to allow the sun to
strike the soil directly. The soil under the mulch, in an established No-Till
garden, should be dark in color and warm up in several days.
(5) Soil moisture and temperature are more uniform, an advantage for most
plants.
(6) Nematodes, a serious problem in southern Florida, will be kept under some

degree of control, but probably not be eliminated. The soil conditions found
under the mulch layer are much less suited to nematode growth than, for
example, the hot, dry sand found in our area. Furthermore, some fungi found
in the decaying organic matter will kill nematodes. Using normal gardening
techniques, it is almost impossible to grow nematode-susceptible vegetables
in the same plot for more than one season in South Florida without either a
lot of mulch and actively decaying organic matter or the heavy use of chemicals to control them.
(7) Most weeds can be left in the sun to dry and then buried in small piles in
the mulch. You might still need for a small compost pile to dispose of thickstemmed or diseased plants or weeds. If you would like to use a somewhat
more traditional compost pile but plant in it the day you make the pile, see
ECHOs Gardening Hint booklet, "Hill Culture".
(8) When the mulch decays, it is automatically compost and is already in
place! This is sometimes called sheet composting. Earthworms will soon
help carry organic matter down into the soil.
(9) Yard waste can immediately be put to use in the garden. Grass clippings
and leaves make great mulch. For some of you, the local landfill will not
accept yard waste.
(10) Soil erosion on sloping land should be less of a problem.
(11) Although it is hard to imagine this being a problem in normal gardening
use, it should be mentioned that a very thick, dense layer of mulch can prevent air from entering the soil. We asked a company that mowed for condominiums to dump their grass clippings at ECHO. The site we selected was
near the base of three pine trees. Soon grass piles were 4 feet high and several feet wide. Within a few months the trees were dead.
Some Additional Considerations
If you wish to use completely organic methods, remember that you have a
mulched garden but not a composted one until at least one season has passed
and the mulch has had time to decay. We periodically add a fertilizer with
complete micronutrients to our garden. Either fertilizer or manure is necessary in our sandy soil and high rainfall, at least the first year or so until a
significant organic layer is in place under the mulch.
At ECHO we have not had problems with acidity in spite of all the wood
chips or even pine needles that we use. If this becomes a problem, you
would need to use lime.
We have had no unusual problems with insects or other pests. There is always the possibility that in your area there will be some pest that will find

the mulch an ideal home and may give you problems.

People often ask if inks on the newspaper will add toxic heavy metals. We
have researched this. From what we have read, it seems that U.S. printers
no longer use inks which contain these metals. Since such a small amount
of newspapers are used per square foot, and that only once, we consider
newspaper ink to be perfectly harmless.
Will nitrogen deficiency be a problem? At first thought you might think so
because of all the un-decomposed organic matter you are adding. As you
may know, incorporating into the soil fresh organic matter with a lot of
carbon and little nitrogen can actually harm plant growth the first season.
The reason is that microorganisms use up all available nitrogen in the process of decaying the fresh material. This nitrogen will become available
again later when the microorganisms die, but it presents a short-term problem. The No-Till garden does not have this problem because the mulch is
not incorporated into the soil. All of the decay is taking place aboveground. Microorganisms growing in the mulch are unlikely to be able to
remove nitrogen from the soil below, where the roots of the plants are
growing. Once the mulch is decomposed it is incorporated slowly into the
soil by leaching or by mechanical mixing during the planting process and
by earthworms and contributes to the soil fertility.
Conclusion I believe that the No-Till, permanent mulch gardening method
may give you better gardens with less work. Some ECHO visitors who
could no longer garden because their health prevents the heavy work of
soil preparation are now gardening with the No-Till method. But as with
nearly everything that we suggest, it is presented as an idea with which you
can experiment under your conditions. Only you can evaluate its potential
for your area.
We are always interested to learn of your successes or problems with ideas
you get from ECHO. So let us hear from you. We probably will not have
time to send a personal response, but you can be sure we will eagerly read
your comments and add your experience to our own body of knowledge.
Maybe you can even send us a picture of your No-Till garden.