Tilling is demonized for a variety of reasons – but is it truly evil? If not… in what circumstances is it appropriate?
Emotions run high when tilling is mentioned. On the one side you’ll find the “traditional” gardener, rototilling his row garden in the spring, or the farmer with the big acreage outside town… on the other side, you’ll find everyone from that hippie down the street to Ruth Stout and Robert Kourik.
It’s evident that tilling the ground works well for vegetable gardening. John Jeavons’ method of double-dug biointensive gardening is a form of hand tilling. Steve Solomon also endorses digging… and Dick Reymond, author of The Joy Of Gardening loves, loves, loves his Troybilt tiller. (Of course… I also think he had an endorsement deal. D’oh!)
The problem is: there’s no end-all way to garden. No fifth element joining together all knowledge into one Unified Field Theory of vegetative Nirvana.
There is you. Your land. Your tools. Seeds, sunshine, water and nutrients, all operating in a vastly complicated ecosystem, much of which is imperceptible due to its minute size.
It just makes you want to tear off your clothes and throw yourself on your knees in the mud, screaming upwards at the broken skies through a torrent of rain, looking for meaning in all the pain and emptiness of unknowing, doesn’t it?
Maybe that’s just me.
Tilling is one of those gray areas. There are good reasons to do it and good reasons not to. Let’s look at the bad… then the good.
Why Tilling Is Bad
The soil is filled with a vast web of interrelating organisms. This is called “icky.”
Just kidding. It’s called “the vast web of interrelating organisms.” (If you’re interesting in exploring this web and how it can help your gardening, the book Teaming With Microbes is a good place to start. Click the link to read my review.)
Tilling disrupts and inverts the soil. It tears apart the delicate fungal strands running through the ground, both buries and unearths bacteria, and wreaks havoc on the structure of vulnerable soils. Beyond that, it can create a “hardpan” under some circumstances. This means that below the nice fluffy part… you’ve compacted the next layer down, sometimes to such an extent that roots cannot reach down deep for water and nutrients. Even worse… if you till around growing plants to get rid of weeds, you can do a lot of damage to their roots.
Another problem: Nature is modest and rarely appears unclad in a healthy ecosystem. She clothes herself with plants, grasses, moss and trees… drapes her form in falling autumn leaves…. and wraps her curves in the soft debris and mycellium of the forest floor.
Bare soil is anathema. The ecosystem was created to hoard seeds which germinate under times of stress.
When you till, you turn up thousands of seeds that have been lying stored in the soil’s “seed bank.” If you don’t start your crops quickly, the ground you tilled will rapidly be covered in new growth. If the soil is rich, you might see nettles. If you live in a hot humid climate with sandy soils, you might end up with shepherd’s needle. If the soil is poor, you might get some nitrogen fixers like black medic or clover. And if the soil is compacted, you could get deep-rooted plants like chicory, dandelions or thistle. These plants arrive to “fix” the damage the tiller has done and move the ecosystem forwards to a higher level of complexity. No-till gardeners will brag about their deep mulches and how they “barely have to weed.” That’s because without soil disruption and inversion, most seeds simply remain dormant beneath the ground… rather than growing up in between your tomatoes. If you till and keep the ground bare between your plants, you’ll have to keep on hoeing throughout the growing season or you’ll suffer reduced or nonexistent yields.
There’s no doubt about it: tilling tears things up, kills off a lot of microorganisms, can pack the soil and leads to wonderful crops of weeds.
So… it’s really bad, right?
Not so fast!
Why Tilling Is Good
Now here’s the part that will make that hippie down the street mad at me. I’m going to tell you why tilling can also be a good practice in some circumstances.
Imagine you need to feed a lot of people quickly. Are you going to be able to gather enough mulch or plant a cover crop and scythe it down in time?
No. You need to plant right now… so you borrow a tractor or get a tiller and go to town. In an afternoon you can prepare a large planting space. This is where tilling really shines… it’s fast.
When it comes to feeding people, I’m totally okay with throwing microorganisms under the bus. Tilling and planting a quarter-acre in a day is quite possible. Try doing that with mulch! Forget it. The outside inputs required become ridiculous if you go large-scale with most no-till gardening methods. If you do like Paul Gautschi, the Back to Eden guy, and make friends with a tree company, great. But for most of us… that’s a hard row to not hoe.
No-till advocates will point to the Dust Bowl and talk about how much soil and organic matter is lost when you till – and they’re correct. If you keep turning the ground over and over again, you will see a loss of humus and a decrease in soil structure. That’s why tilling needs to be linked with “green manuring” the ground. If you grow buckwheat, legumes, cereal rye and other cover crops and till them under to add organic matter back to the ground, you’ll be able to repair the damage you’ve done and increase soil fertility at the same time.
There’s a right and wrong way to till, but there’s no reason why tilling can’t be added to your gardening toolkit. I can respect being a purist (I am when it comes to debt and soda – I won’t touch either of them), but is a time for everything.
Even evil things, like tilling.
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