Okay... yer going to stir up a bees nest in here! There's the adamant no-tillers who feel that you upset the balance of the soil, then there's people who live in god awful clay, for whom that won't work, I know, I've tried many ways and no-till just wouldn't work on my hard pan. Maybe in 10 years, but then, so would tilling. Our ancestors tilled for eons.... worked for them. :o)

Our ancestors tilled for eons.... worked for them. :o)

And now, for example, Missouri's top soil is located in the gulf coast of Lousiana in a place called the delta.

If tilling is all it's cracked up to be, how can ranchers can go decade after decade without tilling or plowing but still improve their soil every year, but plow farmers have to plow? It's so late I'll try to summarize a couple examples I'm aware of.

1 and 2. A couple guys I met run cattle in central Texas (Fredericksburg and Mason, TX). They don't fertilize, kill insects, kill weeds, water, or fertilize, but their properties support more cattle by a factor of 2 than their neighbors. They certainly don't plow or till. They rely on Mother Nature for everything except minerals for the cattle. The owners provide mineral in the form of seaweed and calcium. Other than that, nothing is added. The cattle graze on the tallest grass in either county.

3. A cotton farmer in the Texas Panhandle does not till his crop at the end of the year. Furthermore he uses no fertilizer, herbicide, insecticide, or fungicide. All he sprays is molasses at a rate of one gallon per acre, four times a season. The result is his cotton stayed growing so long into the droughts that he sold off all his irrigation equipment and no longer pays for water (remember this is West Texas). Now his cotton production is slightly less than his neighbors' but his costs are so much lower, he still takes more to the bank than his neighbors. The difference is his soil has not been plowed. An analysis of his soil showed the identical fertility to his neighbors' without using fertilizer. But what is really different about the two fields is our no-till cotton guy has a lot more fungus in his soil. It is the fungi that provide tilth and will actually go out and get the water buried seep in the soil. They bring it back for the cotton plants without extra watering.

I'm linking to a free online book that I found interesting.

Here is a link that might be useful: The Ploughman's Folly, by Edward Faulkner

Besides the manure what else, if anything, are you adding to the soil? If nothing besides the manure is added and you till every year you are really beating that soil and doing nothing to improve it. If there is no plow sole present yet it soon will be. By tilling each year you are mixing in way to much air which stimulates the soil bacteria to digest the manure leaving little or nothing for the future. Although tilling may be necessary to make a grass land into a garden bed (even that is in serious doubt today) after that initial breaking if enough organic matter is mixed in the soil and then the soil is properly mulched and more organic matter is added every year there is no need to till again.

:o) Dchall, that's very true.... though I wasn't referring to large scale farming... I don't think my little garden plot will end up in the bay area. Lots of things I don't like about large scale farming... like pesticides and fertilizers ending up in the water shed. But I also know, if you go to California, which is one of the bread baskets of the nation, and you look around, on all the untilled soil, there ain't much growing on it. Even trees are rare, except where humans put them.... it's hardpan. It needs a lot of help. Well anyway, it works for me.... Some people feel that hydroponics is the way to go, and THAT seems unnatural to me, but it works for them....

We bought a tiller 4 years ago to start our garden. i have a wide bed clay garden. The first year it was in rows. we added one bag of wal-mart manure per 25 foot row. It did pretty good. That fall we covered it with 18 pick up loads of grass clippings and horse manure and tilled it in. The garden was made into beds that year. i still used the tiller to work the beds. The tiller broke down last fall. I put all the amendments on the top of the beds and left them there. I don't really want to pay to have the machine repaired So I am working the beds by hand this spring. They are so nice and soft, take only a few minutes to work each. (they are 4x25 foot) And the worms are huge. This has been my ambition since I started my garden any way. So we will have the tiller repaired and sell it. As far as I am concered it has done it's job.

rahma: I don't like roto-tillers because they chop up earthworms and the invisible strands of fungal hyphae that inhabit good soil. Furthermore, a hardpan develops at the lower level of the blade tip, which prevents plant roots from developing downwards naturally and robs them of lower groundwater.

Be that as it may, it doesn't answer the question of how to handle horse manure, which is precious as gold. I would compost it, and apply it one year later by spreading 1/2" and raking it into the top 3" to 4" of the soil. In composting large quantities of horse manure you might want to consider making a windrow and adding lots of dead leaves. If your scale is very large, you might need loan of a front-end loader to mix and turn the compost.

Regards, Peter.

If you are a no-till person, do you still turn the soil by hand when you plant?

What's the difference between turning by hand and tilling? In both cases you are breaking soil, adding air, working in organic matter. Is it just a question of degree?

If you layer OM after the growing season, do you work it in in the spring or just plant directly into it?

Patty,

I am a "no till" person.

Partly out of necessity (double carpal tunnel problems) but mainly because, when looking for a better way, I discovered that I like it so much better.

When I plant, I disturb the soil in the most minimum way possible. With the exception of digging the potatoes, the soil in my garden rarely, if ever, gets turned over or disturbed.

The major difference between mechanical tilling and hand tilling, in my mind, is indeed one of degree. I don't see that hand tilling would be detrimental to the soil structure in the way that roto tilling would be.

I layer on the OM (compost and manure generally) in the fall and then again in the spring. I top it off with a layer of hay or straw to cover the OM. I usually don't work it in at all. I let the earthworms do that for me.

My garden is 3500 SF of space which is divided up into 4x8 raised beds and larger border beds.

Now that I don't till I have much more time to do the things that I really want to be doing in the garden.

My earthworm population has soared now that I don't chop them up into bits every spring.

rahma, I do the manure thing in great quantity myself. Like your husband, I enjoy tilling. I have a 15 year old Troybuilt Pony. I let it idle for a few minutes on the edge of the garden and set the tines to cut no deeper than 2".
Earthworms dive for the depths and I incorporate the 3-4" of manure into that top level. Then I plant my cover crops into something other than just pure manure.
Right now, I have Austrian Field Peas and Rye (very dense) over 2' tall on my garden areas not planted to early crops. Two weeks before planting an area to the intended veggie, I knock it down with the tiller (again, no deeper than 2"). I'll do this a couple of times before planting. After I plant I mulch with shredded leaves throughout the season, and leave the spent plants in place except okra, corn and tomato vines that I shred and drop back in place before covering with manure again.
My earthworms seem to be incredibly healthy, prolific, and smart enough to dodge the tiller. Crops are good, and I do love using my big boy toys.

Patty asked...
If you are a no-till person, do you still turn the soil by hand when you plant?

No. You either drill the seed in or you dig the smallest hole needed to plant your starter plants.

What's the difference between turning by hand and tilling? In both cases you are breaking soil, adding air, working in organic matter. Is it just a question of degree?

Not much but those are not the only choices. If you don't till, then you also don't dig, double dig, spade, fork, plow, lift, work in, scratch in, break in, or any other euphemism for tilling.

If you layer OM after the growing season, do you work it in in the spring or just plant directly into it?

Plant directly into it. The cotton farmer I mentioned above mows his cotton plants down after harvest and leaves the mowed remains on the surface as a mulch until he comes back to replant. He uses a drill to replant so there is virtually no disturbance of the soil regarding aeration, breaking the soil, or working in organic material. It doesn't happen.

heathen, what you describe may not be hardpan, just ill managed soil. The only way to cure real hardpan is to mix in adequate amounts of organic matter, so if hardpan is present and it is not being changed by the addition of organic matter then not enough OM is being added. Numerous studies show that plowing, mechanical tilling, will contribute to the formation of hardpan, as well as the soils chemistry and continuous tilling will create its own problem, plow sole.

Well, This hardpan was created by my BF bringing in "topsoil" which is just a few degrees from hard clay. Then just forgetting about it, letting it bake in the 105degree sun, and sit under water in the winter. When I first dug it up, there were NO worms... none. I had to water and water it to dig it. Now, after adding compost for a few years, it's getting a nice healthy crop of wormies. I mulch and compost... and it is starting to be a bug heaven. Works for me.

I don't think no till works all that well unless you wide bed garden. It is just better not to walk where you grow your plants. I would go ahead and spread your manure and till it one more time. Make your garden into passive wide beds. 3-4 foot wide with the material from the pathes thrown up on the beds. Go ahead and plant your garden then mulch after the plants are established and the ground is warm,
Then this fall put what ever compost you make this summer on the beds only. You could put some more straw mulch and or manure over that too if you can get it. Then next spring you pull back the mulch and plant with out tilling. You will be suprised how soft your soil will be and how easy your job is to grow veggies.

Hard pan is created in soil by a chemical reaction and will most often be a rusty red color and will be several inches below the surface and mostly in wet soils. I've never seen hard pan on the surface, although there might be a first time for that.

so i think what some people are saying is that, if you put down something on top of the beds in the fall, like chopped leaves, or horse manure, or even just straw, the soil underneath is adequate to plant in, directly and without loosening, in the spring? (i don't have clay, but pretty good soil.) is this true? i use a broadfork every spring, mostly because eliot coleman says to aerate the soil once a year, and i generally respect what he writes. but i'd rather not do the work if loosening is not necessary!

okay... Kim, if hardpan is a technical term for something else, I was using it for soil that when dry, is as hard as cement.... a little red, the clay around here is a wee bit red. When dry, I can barely ding it with a shovel when jumping on it. It's as hard as a pan. :o)

Egg.... try googling "no till" and see what you get. I am SO JEALOUS that your soil is so good!

Everbodys soil is different, for my clay hard pack soil it took 3 years of machine and hand incorporating organic material , so that I don't think I will need to dig my garden anymore. But I think if I had tryed to use no dig the first year I would have been wasting my time and seed.

I agree with the general sentiment that I think veggiecanner has expressed - that tilling (or turning) soil can be a very useful step at the beginning of establishing a garden (for the purpose of initially incorporating organic matter), but that it can be abandoned in favor of no-till methods thereafter.

People tend to cite Ruth Stout as the inspiration for no till gardening. But she tilled for MANY years before she began maintaining her gardens in a no-till manner.

I think there is a HUGE amount to be gained from the insights of the no-till folks. I think knowing what the microherd can do is vital, and that tilling is very much overused (not just in farming, but in gardening as well). And I always appreciate Dchall's knowledge and links to research.

But I also believe that no one set of methods will meet everyone's needs - we start out with different kinds of soil, and have different goals, and different constraints of other sorts (time, resources, tolerance for untidiness, et cetera).

When I've tried to start a new garden bed with no till methods, I've failed. The organic material sits on top of the soil for years, with no apparent change to the soil beneath (it is a gluey yellow clay, with little or no worm activity in areas I haven't amended). But once I've established a bed (manually digging in lots of organic material: leaves, grass clippings, compost, and feedstocks like alfalfa and cornmeal), I've been very successful using no till methods to maintain it (soil no longer cracks as it dries after rain, water is absorbed well, seems to drain fine, lots of worms).

I still believe that there are soils that never need to be tilled. And maybe even that MY soil could have been made garden-worthy without tilling if I'd been more patient (if I'd used cover crops differently, for example). But a one-time digging in of organic stuff saved me years of patience. And I only have a few square feet to cultivate, so the cost in terms of labor was minimal. I might well have made different choices in different circumstances.

- Lisa

it's weird -- i've been gardening for 24 years, and i've rarely had any pest or disease problems. i've attributed this to the fact that i've followed good advice from good garden writers. i've been using no chemicals, mulching and adding compost, forking loose the soil every spring and clearing the dead stuff every fall or early spring. my soil looks quite good. but it never looks AS GOOD as i think it should. i have to admit, the best soil i ever saw in my garden has been after i've belatedly picked up some mulch from the year before. this is where i've found the gorgeous, dark, crumbly stuff that worms must have worked. then what do i do? i fork it, invariably mixing the top couple of inches in the process. when i go to plant, it doesn't look as good anymore. maybe my missing link is NOT to fork or till. i'm going to leave the top layer on top this year, thanks to what i've been reading here. i'm excited to see what will happen. if results are good, i'll feel pretty silly that i've gone more by what i've been reading in books than by what i've been observing in my own garden!

I do it 2x a year As soon as the frost gets out of the ground
and before the worms wake up. and in the fall, after the 3rd frost and the worms go deep to kick up over wintering insects for the birds, A between the rows till kills worms and plant roots

I live in an area with predominantly heavy clay soil. Our neighbors across the street own a very nice little John Deere PTO tractor. They regularly till up any area they plan to plant with grass or gardens. They do this out of habit rather than knowledge.

We have eleven acres (only about an acre planted), and our tilling equipment consists of a mattock, a glaser bio fork, and a few garden trowels. Needless to say, we do less tilling! Our property used to be an abandoned farmhouse, so the grounds are a mess of long-established weeds. I till when first planting a new garden out of necessity to disrupt the weeds. Many of the weeds are the deep taprooted kind, such as curly dock and dandelions, indicative of the clay soil. These weeds also help break up the clay, though. I also do a lot of mulching using corrogated cardboard and thick piles of newspaper covered by compost to "break ground" on new garden areas. Most of the soil is now pretty nice stuff.

We were out gardening this week (we have numerous vegetable and themed perennial gardens) and the neighbors asked if we could check out their soil and recommend what kind of fertilizers they should add. Most of what they planted just seemed to die. I doubted the problem was fertility, so I took my "soil test tool," the mattock. I took a test swing in a few different areas of the property. Almost all of it was compacted clay. No evidence of earthworms and very little organic matter. I suggested the only thing they should do would be to add compost and peat on top of it and plant into that.

I'd like to bring the neighbors over and take them to different areas of our property to "feel" what the soil is like. Maybe get them to till appropriately rather than by default. Maybe try a bit of cover cropping, too! Much of their grounds are sloping, so it's especially important not to leave that stuff bare. I think that over the years the tilling plus the sloping grounds and occasional torrential rains have left them with just that hard crust of clay.

kimmsr said,
Hard pan is created in soil by a chemical reaction and will most often be a rusty red color and will be several inches below the surface and mostly in wet soils. I've never seen hard pan on the surface, although there might be a first time for that.

I'm probably going to confuse the issue, if not run screamingly away from the topic altogether, but in the Texas Panhandle they have an area called the Caprock. Millions of years ago there must have been a pounding rain that lasted for, oh, millions of years (???). The result is a surface feature called caprock where the top couple of yards is as solid as rock but is really more like sandstone. Geologists have determined the caprock was formed by the never ending pounding of rain drops. Where the rivers have eroded through the caprock, broad canyons have formed as the softer soil under the caprock washes away.

More recently some ranchers have come to realize that they are developing a significant soil cap in the places where they do not have grass growing. They think the cattle have compacted the soil, but just the opposite is true. The cattle leave those areas alone because nothing grows there. If the rancher would locate his water trough, mineral salts (salt lick), shade cover, or a hay bale in those areas, they would find the hoof activity and manure would allow the seeds, insects, and microbes to restore the capped soil in less than a season.

Back to kimmsr: a homeowner will hardly ever see soil capping. You have to go looking for it to find it.

FWIW

I had to deal with hardpan, where my home is located a contractor removed everting on top, I was left with about 1/4" of loam and subsoil packed with rocks, A pick ax, a shovel and a strainer is what I had to use to make a garden

Use what is practical & expedient; We were compelled to utilize a good tiller to get the very compact soil broken up initially & to mix in organic matter. Now will turn compost etc. in with a fork. On a larger scale machinery may be necessary. Also it is my understanding that it is a proven fact that compost, manure etc. may lose up to 50% of its value if not turned under within 24hrs of application. Power eqpt. enables us to get more accomplished, if it isn't neccessary, we try to avoid it.