I think the "best practice" is, to a large degree, driven by regional or local conditions.

When I lived in MI I was a big fan of organic lawn, organic landscape, and organic gardening. The annual growing season lasted about 4-5 months. The soil was sandy loam on top of glacial till sand/gravel. When installing new permanent landscape we used local MI "black dirt" as a topsoil - a sandy loam with a good natural organic material content. About my only weeds were of the annual type - pull, mulch, and go. Mulching was an annual event with native hardwood mulch. Some decent compost was all that was needed for ongoing plant nutrition. The lawn was easily kept pristine with twice a a year organic feedings and mulch mowing. Cultivation was limited to the veg garden, where I was a big cultivator between un-walled raised beds, and mulch over the plantings. In that situation I became a big fan of weekly shallow cultivations -- ~ 1/2 inch. The principle was get natural weed seeds to germinate, then disrupt them. Worked great. After about four years I had hardly a weed in sight , year-to-year.

Fast forward -- move to TX, and find myself living on some incredible calcerous clay. A rototiller wont turn this stuff. Cultivation? Ha! Can't be done. A cross section profile shows ~ 1" of an organic O layer if the area has been heavily covered under mulch, or if turf has been mulch mowed for several years. Anything less and there is no O layer (I have personally seen a cleared previously mulched area lose the entirety of its O layer in one year). Our growing season lasts a full 12 months. The problem weeds are perennial, and if you try mechanical removal, they only come back in greater numbers (purple nutsedge is a persistent problem). Then there is Bermuda grass - it finds its way into everything, and spreads like a wildfire. Mulching heavily won't deter either, and anything other than cedar only lasts about 5-6 months, tops. If you want a perennial landscape that is even remotely neat, it pretty much requires some use of herbicide. With our temps and humidity our soil food web remains quite alive and healthy - it will quickly devour about anything with carbon you put in even this wretched soil. Organic lawn treatments serve only to feed the microbes and atmosphere, with little making it through to the turf grass target.

So my take is you do what best fits the situation. There is no one-size fits all given the vast diversity of soils and environments.

This post was edited by TXEB on Wed, May 22, 13 at 22:46

I think the "best practice" is, to a large degree, driven by regional or local conditions.

Yes, this is so true! I owned a lovely organic gardening book a few years back, written by a Texan author, that had been recommended by my uncle in Texas. Unfortunately, while interesting, the specific suggestions were just too strongly biased by the author's climate and I didn't get much value from the book. :(

Still though, my main questions should be fairly objective. Are the feeder roots of shrubs going to be significantly disturbed if I'm cultivating the 1/2" of soil above them? And is the fungal dominance and associated benefits of my soil going to deteriorate if I'm regularly destroying fungal hyphae with my hoe?

I find myself growing addicted to the soothing daily routine of hoeing all the beds...so maybe that's my answer, the garden is clearly giving back to me, if it is delivering those zen moments!

None of us are completely no till. If you plant seeds you need to till soil to get them into the soil. If you plant seedlings you need to till the soil to get them in. If you pull a "weed" out by the roots you till that soil. Tilling means disturbing the soil whether by a trowel, hand cultivator, garden fork, garden spade, hoe, shovel, rototiller, or mouldboard plow. Some types of tilling are more gentle and do not seriously disrupt the Soil Food Web as much as others. If what you are doing does not chop earthworms in half it probably does not do much harm to the smaller members of the SFW.
Tilth refers to the physical condition of your soil.

"None of us are completely no till. If you plant seeds you need to till soil to get them into the soil. If you plant seedlings you need to till the soil to get them in. If you pull a "weed" out by the roots you till that soil. Tilling means disturbing the soil whether by a trowel, hand cultivator, garden fork, garden spade, hoe, shovel, rototiller, or mouldboard plow."

Finally we have you on record, Kimm, despite your refusal to respond to this very point made in your various "no-till" threads in the past. IOW, there is no such thing as no till. One wonders why you refused to acknowledge this obvious fact before, but oh well.

Alison, the super-shallow assiduous cultivation that you are describing is best case scenario. Few gardeners are able to do it. Even in my home garden I don't stay on top of things quite to that extent. Though since I have much the same soil conditions that TX describes from MI, the weed problem is not severe. A four-foot tall dock can often be pulled by hand.

Yesterday I was hilling potatoes in my remote garden a bit belatedly. Overwintered weeds are thick and high between the rows, I have to pull them before I can hill. I drilled the potatoes in rows rather than plowing the whole patch precisely to lessen impact on soil life and to conserve moisture which is a concern with the very light soil. The flip side is the problem later with well-established weeds which have said thank you very much. It's no big deal with a small garden but with four hundred-foot rows of potatoes I think next year I'll just have to let the soil be exposed.

TX,it sounds like you're gardening 20 feet from heck. :-] You left out the tornadoes, hail, drought and stampedes of cattle. At least that's what we non-Texans imagine it must look like down there. Topped by an occasional oil gusher.

The emphasis on local conditions is a good thing in this forum. It's something you don't see on all the gardening shows on the tube, for example. If I had the soil that those Victory Garden people always seem to have...

Tox - where I am tornadoes are quite rare, as is hail. But drought - yep, got that; got hurricanes and tropical storms too. The oil guys are real good about keeping their stuff to themselves - too valuable to spill. Cattle could be a problem (I border an 8 sq mile cattle pasture), but they seem to respect the fence, at least so far. Coyotes leave gardens alone - they prefer small animals. Fire ants can be an issue, but usually not a problem in annual planting areas. I guess the good news is that so far the ferel hogs haven't made it any closer than ~ 15 miles.

Thanks, all!

Tilth refers to the physical condition of your soil.

Yes, I know, which is why I worried about the disconnect I was creating between the natural tilth of the underlying soil and the continual disruption of natural tilth formation, as I am regularly breaking up earthworm aeration, slug slime and fungal strands in the topmost layers of my soil. And yes, I've also wondered about the comparison with disrupting the soil by pulling weeds! Thanks for the reassurance. :)

pnbrown, I planted my potatoes in a clay soil I'm reforming, so I don't mind the inter-row weeds...when I pull them and add them to the soil I'm hilling, they provide much-needed organic matter. ;) I'm getting ready to put the summer garden in though and the patch that needs preparation is half easy to work (potatoes last year, and tilled this spring) and half rather backbreaking (beets and turnips last year were left to overwinter in case they were needed, but that meant their beds were left to grow powerful weeds and to compact somewhat.)

To your original question about cultivating and good or bad, my simple take would be that in permanent plantings cultivation should be minimized in favor of substantial mulching. I do favor seasonal "stirring" of the old mulch, staying out the soil, as new mulch additions are made. At some point, there will be weeds that need to be dealt with. Do what best suits your situation and preferences. However, in and around annual plantings I believe cultivation has benefits, if not overdone.

Today I used the rotary hoe on my BCS machine. Due to not getting with it earlier, I was having to knock down and partially incorporate 4 foot tall overwintered kale and various other weeds and crops (I'll have to go through and pull the big trash out by hand). It's quite a tool, the rotary hoe. I am sure it would not handle that gumbo clay, though.

BCS rotary hoe? Is that the one that is the Mantis knockoff?

No, far from it. The rotary hoe or plow, sometimes called, is an attachment for the BCS or Grillo two-wheel tractors. Think Gravely way updated.

BCS makes some very nice stuff, and I didn't think a man of your agricultural prowess would have anything but the biggest and best. I just never heard of a "rotary hoe" before. But then there are a lot of things I've never heard of (I live a sheltered life).

Ah yes, matchless prowess....I went from hand tools for years and total inability to restrict deer and a severe lack of fertility to a 13hp tractor, tiller and rotary plow, deer fence, and imported chicken manure in a moment.

What I learned is: that stuff works (and it's expensive - probably ten years of eating to pay it off). Keeping deer out is immeasurably better than having them eat your labor. If we can't be bothered to hunt deer then we have to pay money for tall fence. If we don't keep enough livestock to convert grass to manure then we have to pay money to import it. And after 15 years I was finally forced to admit that it is beyond my physical ability to cultivate a half-acre by hand. Not with my 50 year-old back and another occupation to do as well.

Ten years ago my former romantic self would have been really horrified by the BCS machine, but reality has intervened. The rotary plow, BTW, due to moving the soil horizontally rather than repeatedly up and over is supposed to be less disturbing to soil life.