Oldokie, until a few years ago I was a tiller. I live near Grove and found that I had to have a few raised beds each Spring because the rains made it too wet for me to plant in the ground when it was time for lettuce and spinach and sometimes even onions. After those 3 beds were full, I planted in-ground beds after tilling. My neighbors told me that my backyard had once been a garden, but when we moved here it was grass and grapevine, Virginia Creeper, and various other things had taken over the fences. I started small and just used a corner of the yard, but soon learned that I needed more space. When I first tilled and planted, it was so muddy when it rained, that it would pull my shoes off if I tried to walk across it.

We have a mushroom grower near us so we added truckloads of compost each year for a few years, and that helped with plant growth. We have a number of trees, and our neighbors have many more. One of my neighbors brings his leaves, and his neighbors leaves, and dumps them in my yard. He loves to do it because it takes 2 hours to burn each load that the huge leaf catcher picks up, but he can drive 5 min on the mower and dump them in my yard. As we have time, we move them to the garden. We like to do it in the Fall as they are delivered, but some years we are still moving leaves into the winter months. The first few years we tilled some of the leaves in, but soon realized that we could just put them on top and they would work as a mulch, break down like a forest floor, and hold on to lots of moisture. I am amazed at how much moisture is held in the soil under the leaf cover. I planted about 40 plants today and the ground was nice and damp everywhere I planted, but if the rain doesn't come tonight, I will have to water my raised beds. They have dried out, but the ground beds under the leaves have not.

We have a small flock of chickens, and I have been able to let them run in the garden for several years during the winter months, but I will not be doing that again since I have planted things that they will harm. I usually don't grow anything that would require a chemical treatment. I think I used a fungicide once, and some diatomaceous earth a time or two, but normally I don't use anything at all.

My husband and I have been gone a lot for the last two summers and didn't do much gardening here, so this year I am dealing with a grass problem in a few areas. Much of the garden has such deep mulch that it is doing fine, but I have a few problem sites that didn't have enough mulch. Mostly I have just used mushroom compost, leaves, and chicken and quail manure to improve the soil, and as much mulch as I could get my hands onto. As I could improve the soil, I would eliminate the tilling in that area. We tilled 3 rows to loosen the soil where we trenched out to plant potatoes and that is the only time we have used the tiller this year.

The hardest part of a no-till garden is making yourself stop thinking about how nice that soil looks when you have just tilled and are getting ready to plant. We just dig a planting hole with a small shovel and turn over the soil that now looks like black cottage cheese, and drop a plant or seed in.

do you pull the mulch back so you can plant seeds in the soil .I am looking to future now i mulch with 8 inches of mulch (fine ground from green site) and till in the winter and spring to improve the soil. Now one part where i plant plants (75 tomatoes and some peppers ) I want to just pull back mulch and plant..hoping this will help control the crabgrass other weeds
I noticed under mulch BIG grub worms will this cause a problem

I should have also said that we put down cardboard, then top it with leaves. If I am planting seed, I just pull back the mulch until the plants are large enough to be mulched, except for tomatoes. It really depends on the weather at the time I plant tomatoes, but this year I pulled back the mulch, planted the tomato plant in the ground with a PVC pipe around it. I pulled the mulch up around the PVC pipe rather than around the stem of the tomato. Some people do the same with gallon cans with the bottom cut out, but I just use pipe over and over again. Yesterday, I pulled back the mulch and planted peppers (no pipe), and I let the peppers grow until they are well established, then pull the mulch back around them. I plant peppers fairly close so they will soon shade the ground.

I don't know about the grubs, but would think that they could cause problems. I remember seeing grubs for a couple of years, but I see very few now, but I have night crawlers that look like small snakes, along with lots of smaller red worms. Worms will increase with the use of cardboard, and the worms will stay in the damp ground. Tilling chops up the worms that are near the surface. I have many, many worms in my garden as evidenced by every shovel of dirt we lift to put in a plant.

Why not try a portion of your garden as 'no-till' and compare the results.

I am going to no till next year thank you for the good information I help at a church food distribution site and will get there cardboard boxes to put under my mulch

I don't think those huge white grubs are harmful to our plants the same way that June bug and japanese beetle grubs can be. They are the larval form of very large ground beetles that eat lots of pests. I've never found a damaged plant in the same vicinity as those huge grubs. Half of my front garden is no-till this year and probably all of it will be next year. I've finally got organic matter worked deeply enough into the soil that I can let go of the need to rototill it into the soil. My back garden may become no-till this year because it is perpetually too wet to rototill anyhow. If I ever get the weeds out, maybe I'll plant something desirable in place of them. Right now it is a pond, which is hard to achieve on sloping land. You'd think all the water would just run downhill instead of ponding and puddling on sloping ground.

When i began getting sufficient mulch onto my no-till garden I discovered the night critters were more eager than ever to help themselves into the now-soft dirt to eat the grub worms. if you build it, the eco system will balance itself out with patience. I had a lot of room, so this didn't bother me, but if it were a small garden and the night critters were digging up my plants I might be sore about it.