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Originally Posted by Tom Atillo
My feeling is that I have seen "no till" work well but only in soil that is already good to go. If you have crappy soil......you will need to amend and till to get it to the stage where "no till" will work. Once at that stage.........all you need is a little compost each season and good growing practice such as rotation and removing dead plants promptly. When done right....this method can save a lot of work and produce a bumper crop!
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Quote:
Originally Posted by halleone
Pretty much what I have been thinking, too. Next year half my garden will be planted in green manure/cover crops the entire season, and the other half will be our vegetables, heavily mulched with some of the cuttings of the cover crops. And to help with loosening the soil, I have purchased a fabulous looking broadfork - I guess tomorrow I will find out just how fabulous it is!
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I lived in Georgia for 9+ years on hard clay. For part of the garden, I turned it over with a shovel by hand and added amendments. The clay was so hard, I had to water it first to be able to get the shovel in. When I made the garden larger, I decided that this was just too, too much work on hard Georgia clay! So I just killed the Bermuda grass, put down newspaper, and put a thick layer of wheat straw over it. Did not loosen the soil at all. The plants did very well even the first year - clay can hold a lot of nutrients due to its particle structure. This was then the only area I grew tomatoes for maybe 5 years. I grew the best tomatoes there than I have anywhere else, and many of the plants grew amazingly tall (over the support that I needed an upturned bucket to reach to top of, then cascading down again, and I'm 5' 9"). When I left, the soils was black as night with worms galore. Granted, I put the waste from our little chicken coop on it two or three times (in the fall). I hated to leave that little patch behind, and to this day, I miss growing tomatoes on Georgia clay!