Our No-Till Experience: The First Years

When we decided to take up owning a farm, we really had very little plant knowledge. Even less about how to work the land or make money in farming. Waht we did have though, was a good idea of how to work and a sure faith in our ability to learn what we needed to do. We decided early on that we wanted to grow organic. But had little idea of what that would mean. 

The "conventional" idea in organic gardening is to till rows, fertilize the dirt with stuff that comes in bags, plants seeds, harvest produce. When the plants finished in Fall we cut off the plants and start it all over the next Spring. Most large farms do this sort of thing and you pay a bit extra in the store or farmer's market. What could be easier?

Our first picking in 2018

As it turned out, organic gardening wasn't quite the same thing as planting things in the back yard. We bought tools to till the soil, and bags of "organic" fertilizers too. We mixed the stuff together in neat rows and planted "organic seeds". In our first year we did pretty well, but the tally at the end of the season proved that our lettuce would cost about eight dollars a head, tomatoes around a buck each. We spent most of the season pulling weeds and harvesting root crops proved to be very hard work since our soils were also very hard. 

If we were going to make a dollar in farming we felt sure that we needed another way to get the job done. I bought some books on market gardening to try and find out how people made a living.Each of these books shared much the same idea. Replace bagged fertilizers with compost. 

Composting works by turning dead plant matter into really dead plant matter by rotting it out intentionally in big piles, turning it occasionally to give the microbes that break down plant matter some air.  Beyond this microbial  processing stuff there is the fungal processing, which completes the cycle by turning the really dead organic matter, into dead-dead-dead nutrients that plant roots can use right away. Once the compost has been in the dirt for a while plants can use the nutrients found in the compost to make new plants.  But composting alone didn't really do much for our gardens. We piled up the compost, tilled it into the soil, and planted the rows. The weeds loved it. But crop plants were slow and unsteady, produced very little, and wasted another year, while wearing our hands out pulling weeds. 

In the end we decided that composting weeds was mostly a net-zero gain. The plant matter we used to make our compost came from the same ground we were putting the compost into. We were taking out one measure of weeds, then cooking it down before putting the same measure back into the ground.  Any nutrition we got out in produce took part of that measure out without adding anything to the soil. 

The next logical step was to bring some inexpensive horse manure in and boost the nutrition of our compost piles.  But this really didn't add much to the soil and was really quite expensive after paying for the trucking. We figure it would take about eight years to get where we wanted to go, at about two hundred dollars a truck load, ten truckloads a year. Adding manure was more effective, but too slow and much too expensive.  We still needed to find a way to grow things, and not the sort that simply gives up, we kept looking for a better way. 

There were some setbacks in 2019
This one nearly killed me.

On one helpful YouTube lesson I learned of the Ruth Stout method for growing in "deep tilth". The idea is to use imported straw, the stuff we often used to make slippery clay walkways navigable in Winter rains, as a medium for growing plants.  

Laying down a thick layer of straw on the soil late in fall, when it is cheap and available then, in Spring, planting directly into this straw layer, right on top of the soil seemed a good possibility. We thought it might work. We found the cost of straw to be as much as buying trucks of horse manure to build the soils and we were running low on cash. 

After talking to our local Ag. Agent Ann was invited to a class on Cover Cropping. The class was not very helpful, but a door prize she recieved during this class was. The book was on Composting theory and practices. The book was a good base of soil knowledge, even if it solved none of our immediate problems. But it did make mention of something that did work . . .

We found another way to go in "No-till" farming.  The person(s) most involved in this movement made a video and this was the clue we'd been looking for; a way forward. . .

2022 Was our first year
of no-till farming

No-till gardening uses "free" resources to do what the Ruth Stout gardening method does. Instead of using straw, we would use Fall leaves to create deep tilth. Instead of composting weeds, we would compost Fall leaves, which had fewer weed seeds and better nutrition. And using hardwood leaves as a mulch would take light away from the weed seeds so they wouldn't grow as well. 

Since my previous business had been in landscape maintenance it occurred to me that every year, in Fall, I would bring truckloads of leaf debris to a local landscape and rock supplier and then pay to dump the stuff. The Supplier which took my leaves would load them into bigger trucks and then pay to give it to a Composter. 

 So why not cut out the Composter guy and have the Landscape Supplier's leaves dumped on our long gravel driveway instead?

No till means not disturbing the ground
once you set things in motion.

We got right on it by asking the landscap supplier to dump the good stuff here. In the first year we took in about fif cubic yards of leaves and I got busy loading about six inches of raw leaves onto our existing planting beds to spend the Winter as a mulch. I would till this mulch into the ground in Spring and see how it went. I piled up the leaves I didn't put on our rows in long high rows, and spent the Winter learning about what I would do with the new information. One of those things involved protecting the soil in Winter, something I had not considered before. 

Spring is a time for hope

Every Winter the rains wouldcome, each high speed drop hitting some soil we had carefully made, breaking it into their constituent parts and leaving a pure layer of light clay on top. Once the sun came out this layer would dry to a hard cover. And before planting I had to go out and till the top layer making the ground suitable for planting. The leaf debris I had put out on our rows was now rotting out in the gardens and protecting it against soil erosion. The protection of our beds meant last year's soil never broke down in Winter. In Spring the weed seeds which fell everywhere in the late Summer were buried under inches of light denying leaves and failed to germinate. But this wasn't all there was to  the benefits in the first year.


Having six inches of worm food on top of the garden rows not only preserved the structure of the soil we built last year, it helped removed many of the insect pests that eat plants too.  The dead-dead stuff is protected from the rains an cold, so the microbes and fungi, which grow just below the layer where worms do their work, had plenty to digest into plant growing nutrients.

The whole thing becomes a system of life where the leaves feed the worms, which feed the microbes,  which feeds the fungi, which carry nutrients and water to the roots of plants, which produce the food, which feeds us.. We had to build Our Produce Stand to get rid of the excess produce this new no-till system created in the first year.  Our gardens began producing in overdrive. But this is only the theoretical end of the beginning.

The best melon I've ever eaten
came from a no-till hill.

The produce, no longer having to work with expensive bag fertilizers, which retard the natural growth of fungi and soil animals, is grown in soils which don't tend to dry out so easily for lack of places for the water to hide. The leaf mulch protects the soils from the heat as much as it did the rains and cold.  At night water rises from the ground in the slow evaporative process which happens in Summer. So water comes toward the surface at night and lasts all day long. Watering the rows was no longer a daily thing, instead we watered only when the plants looked like they needed it. The food produced from the plants that grew in the good earth had better water content, so it lasts better on the shelf and doesn't need refrigeration to stay fresh. 

The nutrient rich soils gave the plants all they needed to produce fruits and vegetable with higher than average sugar and vitamin content, making them sweeter as well as juicier. But better produce isn't free forever. Nothing is free in nature. But we are getting closer to it.

Objects may be more plentiful
than they appear.

The rows can still be improved going forward through the coming years. We bought a "broadfork" to keep the soils down to to the bottom of the fungi layer loose so rootsand worms can work easily. By pushing our heavy broadfork deep into the soils we add open spaces, which speeds things up without disturbing the microbes, bacteria, and fungi. But, while this makes things go faster, it also digests the leaf debris down much faster.  So as part of what we do in this no-till system is to recharge our growing spaces by adding more leaf compost between every planting. 

Our first year's no-till expirement was fantastic. We didn't solve all of our farming problems in that first year, but we did learn enough to change the entire farm over to no-till in the nest year. And since then I have learned so much about how soils work which will bring us more planting success as we go from year to year. 

Some of the things we had learned in our early going remains good practices now.  We still leave the old roots in the dirt by cutting off the greenery. The roots die off and become water channels for those plants which follow after without disturbing the soil.  The roots compost in the soil and feed the worms which makes clumping soil, which feed the next thing and so forth.

We still cut off plantsand compost the remains, but this releases the Soil Nitrogen plants need to grow new plants. So we add a bit of blood meal to the soil to help replace the nitrogen. The bigger the greenery, the more nitrogen you need. 

A bit of black mulch to
raise soil temperatures.

We add more organic compost to the top of the rows to replenish the worm food.  If your soil tests say you need calcium, you throw some bone meal on at this step too. Worms will process whatever is left in the dirt, eventually running out of food and moving on. We like fat worms that stick around. So we put about an inch of leaf compost on top of each row between plantings, stirring it into the topmost layer.

It is said that a general rule in bed flipping is to consider how much greenery you take off as about the same weight as the compost you put on. But since we are relatively new to this we are overdoing it a bit. Some say it takes about twenty five gallons of compost to replenish a fifty foot row, but I think they are just guessing.  We add more than this to our rows because it is early on in our soil building process, but it might take less. I'll add a bit about soil testing for soil organic matter to this blog later on, but if you put a cup of your row soil into three cups of water in a jar you can tell how much organic soil matter there is relative to the clays and other stuff pretty easily.  

We plant directly through the new leaf debris or let things work through the Winter for planting in the Spring. And the circle is closed, the cycle continues.

Rows already flipped,

Weeds will slowly disappear in this system, or are very easy to pull since the soils are so light.  A bit of diligence is a good idea to get them out of the garden.  Eventually weeding will take less time than watering, which won't take much time at all. 

I hope this article explains things sufficiently to get you going in no-till, if you wish to go. Most people are not planting an acre and a half in vegetables and fruits, so they can use leaves from the tree out front of the house or down the block. But no matter the size I can attest to this system being really good in the first year and sustainable forever. The product being better in quality and quantity without a lot of petroleum distillates in your food is what we need more of too. 

We are in this to win this, so we will keep doing what we do. I can't see how this system can fail, though I am sure I will find some way to make it do so at some point. But I am told this is fairly idiot proof, so time will tell.

And it gets better every year.