Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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Compost in Place with No-Till Gardening
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Written by Jane Sickon
Photography by Jim Kennedy

Many of us who garden are quite familiar with the concept of raised bed
gardening - particularly those of us who have dirt that glows red with
clay. We're also extremely familiar with composting - we have compost piles
or bins hidden out of sight, full of leaves, grass clippings and the
vegetable scraps from our kitchens. We wait, if somewhat impatiently, for
that stuff to turn into the "black gold" we then spread on our gardens and
cover with shredded bark or other mulch we must truck in to our gardens.

But there is another way. This way puts to an end the annual process of
tilling our garden plots! What's this you say? No more wrestling with that
bucking machine or breaking our backs as we till our plots with hand tools?
How can this be?

It's developer, Ruth Stout (1884-1980) called it "no dig, no work" although
even exponents of her methods, like Pat Ruggiero and Howard Markham of
Fluvanna, admit there is no gardening without work - this method just
involves less backbreaking work than most. It's a method based on nature's
own way, the "no-till" or "permanent mulch" method, and it's amazingly
simply.

"Think about it," Pat challenges. "Think about how the leaves fall from the
trees and land at their bases. Nobody comes to rake them up. They just stay
there and decay - and they begin to feed the trees, those big, healthy
trees. No one fertilizes them. No one cleans away the leaves and makes the
forest floor neat and tidy but the trees flourish."

Pat and Howard both grew up in farming communities but had worked and lived
most of their lives in Northern Virginia. They knew they wanted to retire
to a place where they could garden and when they saw this seven acre
property in Fluvanna, with its south facing slope, they knew this was it.

"We became very interested in no-till gardening shortly after we started
gardening here," Pat explains. "We tilled the beds the first year, and
again the second year, but no more - we just pull the mulch aside, plant,
and pull the mulch back again." And, indeed, the mulch is never removed -
it is simply added to and over-planted with cover crops in the off-season.

"Our favorite cover crops are bearded oats, field peas and hairy vetch,"
reveals Pat. "We broadcast the seeds, take the rake and tamp the mulch that
is in place so the seeds to settle in, and let them grow." The oats and
peas come up almost immediately and they grow and flourish until the frost
kills them. The vetch grows a little but it's the oats and peas that take
over the "resting" beds during the fall. When they die, Pat and Howard do
not pull the cover crops up by their roots. The plants will simply fall
over by themselves and there they will remain. In the early spring the
vetch takes over and grows until the couple is ready to plant their food
crops. Then the vetch is cut down to act as mulch and eventually it, too,
composts in place.

Even when their vegetable crops are finished, the plant remains are
composted in place. Pat says that when it comes to the corn stalks, Howard
will use the chipper/shredder and grind the stalks down before returning
them to the plot where the corn had grown. "You could just throw the whole
stalks on the ground and they would eventually turn into compost but
they're awkward to work around. It's easier just to break them up and give
them a head start," she says

"No-till gardening is based on improving the soil," Pat explains. "We keep
the soil covered with organic matter. Soil microorganisms (the "microherd"
as they're affectionately known among some organic gardeners) feed on the
organic matter, mixing it into the soil, and eventually the soil changes.
That's how Nature tills the soil. Because vegetable plants have a high
nutrient requirement, we also add our own finished compost at planting
time. Depending on the vegetable, we might add 1/2" compost over the whole
bed, or we might just add a shovelful in each planting spot."

Pat is a Master Gardener with the Virginia Extension Service's Master
Gardening Program and notes that there's usually a new Master Gardening
class starting every year in late January. She recommends it for anyone who
wants to learn more about gardening. (Contact your local extension service
for more details.)

"Soil is built from the top down," she continues. "Nature tills the soil
that way and that's part of the philosophy of no-till gardening. We compost
in place, perhaps adding a little more compost here and there, and the
microorganisms in the soil, the microherd, feed on the compost, dragging
some if it down with them, leaving behind their castings, and eventually
the soil changes."

The soil in the vegetable beds has changed greatly in the seven years since
they came to garden here. As Pat pulls away a small circle of matted hay
and other decaying cover to show off some of her ready to harvest potatoes,
she easily shoves her hand nearly wrist deep with little effort. The soil
is beautiful, dark loam - the kind of soil that even Martha Stewart would
envy.

"Two of the principles of no-till gardening are to make sure that there is
always something for the microherd in the soil to eat," Pat explains as the
teaching side of her comes out. "The plants don't access the hay and cover
crops directly. The microherd does and it's their waste that the plants
eat. No-till gardeners always make sure that there is something for those
organisms to eat so that the plants will always have something to eat. The
second principle is that the organic material that composts in place,
eventually breaks down and changes the texture of the soil for the better,
which makes it easier for the plant roots to develop and take in
nourishment." It definitely appears that their gardening method is working
well for their garden.

"We started planting from the very first year, of course," Pat says. "The
crops were okay. We started with the hay (spoiled hay was a favorite mulch
of Ruth Stout, the method's founder) and compost and cover crops. "But it
was somewhere about the fourth year that the garden took on a new vigor -
we just saw this really big change in the fourth year. This is the seventh
year now and we think the garden has made another big advance this year."

The no-till gardening method has another benefit that the couple enjoys.
According to Pat, it's only the northern most vegetable beds, those at the
top of the hill, that must be watered every week or so. "The lower beds
don't seem to need the extra water," she says. "The thatch of mulch holds
in the moisture that the plants need and we don't need to water the lower
beds very often. It's really a big benefit of the no-till philosophy."

The additional compost that is applied to the beds in early spring comes
from their property. Leaving the leaves that fall beneath the trees on the
property to feed the trees from which they come, Howard takes the leaves
that blow onto the grassy areas of lawn, along with grass clippings and
chipped branches that have fallen or are groomed from the surrounding
bushes and trees and he composts them behind the couple's berry bushes on
the northwest side of their property. The compost is used solely in the
vegetable garden and not on any of the many beautiful perennial beds that
surround the property. "We use the no-till method with them, too," Pat
states, "but they have to rough it on their own, compared to the vegetable
beds."

If the condition of Pat's and Howard's perennial beds is based on roughing
it, then their vegetable beds are nothing short of a five-star restaurant
for plants and there's not a tiller, man or machine, in sight.

August 2007
Published by The Charlottesville Daily Progress