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3 Ways to Start a No-Till Garden: Organic Gardening With Less Effort
We all intuitively know what rich soil looks like: it’s that chocolatey brown, soft loamy, well-drained, slightly clumpy, wormed-filled earth that we imagine beneath the garden of Eden. It is the “black gold” that once covered the prairies and valleys of the Midwest. Unfortunately, most of it has been degraded or lost completely due to poor farming practices: namely, tillage.
On the bright side, soil is being revitalized in gardens and on farms across the world through organic no-till methods. If you want to grow a garden of rich healthy soil and thriving plants with less effort, less weeds, and no machinery, then no-till gardening is perfect for you!
Our Tillage Disaster
I remember when we set out to build our very first garden. We were clueless.
It was a nearly concrete-like clay plot in the backyard of our homestead rental in Oregon. We rented a walk-behind rear-tine tiller from the local hardware store because we thought that was the logical first step for any beginning gardener.
When we went to rev it up, the tines almost bounced off of the clay because it was so damn hard! But we wrestled and wrangled the thing until it finally cracked through (in the process, destroying any remaining life in that soil… or…
