Doing Less (Without Descending Into Chaos)

[CultivatingEntropy (Ashley W.)]

A prominent… facet? adjacent piece? of adaptation gardening seems to be growing with minimal input and minimal labor. I’m coming down off of years of high input, high labor systems and feel like I’m constantly un-learning many things I’ve absorbed over the past few years. I am so interested in hearing how you all are managing your gardens in order to make things easier, while also not losing control of them to weeds.

I’m particularly curious about those of you who have walked the till/no-till line and have switched from one to the other. I see a lot of posts of people tilling. I’ve been indoctrinated over the past few years that no-till is the only way. I’ve seen some great benefits since going no-till with permanent beds and paths, but it’s not all sunshine and roses and I’m looking out at my 4000sq ft garden with so so many paths that now need gobs of wood chips layered on them once again, and I find myself questioning if this is the best way. 8-10 man hours of woodchip laying every spring does not feel like low effort.

I would love to hear how you all are choosing to manage your gardens in the pursuit of minimal input and minimal labor, and what is working for you and what hasn’t. Pictures please!

[CultivatingEntropy (Ashley W.)]

These pictures sum up my current garden system. Wood chip paths, beds that I mulch thickly (more thickly this year than in these pictures from last year) with straw and shredded leaves and terminated cover crops. I live in Delaware, East Coast USA, 7B and our summers tend to be hot and muggy. Pretty comparable to coastal VA/NC.

Pros:
Minimal weeds (except where the woodchips are well broken down and need to be replenished… which is all over right now)
Very little watering needed
No bed set up or tilling… I just move back the mulch and plant
Volunteer plants are fun!

Cons:
Must source wood chips; not truly self-sustainable
Must collect and shred and pile leaves every fall
Last year’s straw had heads and I stupidly said nothing and used it anyway… and now I am spending my life pulling up volunteer rye grass literally everywhere, all the time
8-10 man hours spreading wood chips every year
Limited flexibility with garden layout (especially because I have drip tape buried in most beds… which I rarely use now that I mulch)
Slugs are definitely a struggle. I am using iron phosphate sparingly to manage but wish I didn’t have to.

[suffling (Spencer Suffling)]

I appreciate this discussion! This is definitely one of the ideas that got me interested in adaptation gardening. As a market farmer, it’s clear that high-input and high-labor are the norm and are a problem! We have been experimenting with no-till systems for almost 10 years, and have been reaching a similar conclusion that no-till isn’t a blanket solution.

I think of mulching as just only one category of no-till approaches, and we also have some issues with mulches. In our area it’s hard to source affordable, quality mulches, and they also seem to encourage slugs in the cool + damp season. Replenishment and weeds have also been an issue sometimes. Still lots of labor as well. You could consider growing your own plants to use as mulches! Grasses/grains/cover crops, or things like borage, phacelia, comfrey, etc. Chop and drop, garden of eden, ruth stout method are the key words for some of those approaches.

Tarping or occultation is perhaps the most popular no-till strategy among market farmers. It usually involves mowing or clearing and then leaving a thick (black) tarp in place for several weeks or months to break down weeds and roots. Less time is needed in warm or hot conditions. In warm areas growers also have luck solarizing using clear tarps. In the right conditions it only takes a few days to kill existing plant matter. However these approaches can be hard on soil life and might be best followed with some quality compost or cover crops.

Some growers like Soil Food Web folks/Elaine Ingham advocate for looking to “cover plants” (different from traditional cover crops) or permanent/perennial cover crop that feed soil and co-exist with cash crops. The issue is there’s not much agreement on which plants are best for this purpose. You can find lists online of plant candidates people have considered.

One final idea are winter-kill cover crops. Not sure if it gets quite cold enough in your area in the winter, but there are a range of cover crops that can be planted in summer/early fall, will grow until a hard frost, at which point they die and start to mulch in place. Soghum-sudangrass is a common species used for this but there are others.

A final thought is that maybe conditions will improve after a bit more mulching and you won’t need to continue adding so much each year. There is one theory that annual weeds disappear when they are no longer needed, as the soil ecosystem reaches a higher succession toward high-fungal, forest-like conditions. Or maybe there is some workable route where you don’t reapply mulch and begin managing weeds in some other way.

[MarkReed]

I ditched the rototiller almost twenty years ago. My soil has improved greatly, and gardening is much easier than it used to be. Maybe for first three or four years it was hard to keep weeds out but as the soil loosened deeper down weeds became easy to manage. It takes maybe fifteen minutes to clear a 4 x 50 planting bed just by pulling up the bigger weeds. I drop them in the paths and later after my vegetables are growing, I scrape the weeds back in the bed as mulch and fertilizer.

My garden is approximately 1/4 of an acre or about 10,000 sq ft. I don’t worry if there is a weed here and there, there are lots of them in fact. Big-rooted weeds like thistles and dock till the soil for me, dandelions usually cover my paths. Creeping Charlie and purslane act as ground cover.

I guess people argue over what no-till is. If using hoes, rakes and occasionally a shovel is tilling, I do still do that, but I usually just use a hand trowel or even my fingers to plant. I do mulch some but not consistently, mostly the weeds both living and chopped or pulled along with some added leaves or grass clippings.

@suffling

Or maybe there is some workable route where you don’t reapply mulch and begin managing weeds in some other way

To me and it has worked very well where weeds both living and dead, spent vegetable plants, mulch, compost and fertilizer are all the same thing. I see no need to eliminate everything except what I purposely plant. I hate using wood chips as mulch. When I get some, I mix them up with some dirt and let them rot for two or three years.

I have encountered two drawbacks to this approach. One is it is harder for my feral crops such as dill, brassicas, sunflowers, carrots and others to spread and sprout. Too much of the ground is always under mulch layers or occupied by something else. I’m starting to leave some ground bare and scraping it up with the hoe or rake to bury the seeds and compensate for that. The second is an increase of little snails and flea beetles but I’m finding workarounds for them too.

[MamaRachael (Rachael)]

I watched a David the Good video on annuals yesterday, and he talks about how different things work in different places and at different times. I’m in Central Texas, the heart of Texas, and we have very persistent plants around here. They have to survive a just cold enough winter to kill anything tropical, and survive a hot, sometimes humid sometimes dry summer. Sopping wet from March to June, bone dry July to Sept.

I’ve found that doing the black plastic for 6ish weeks is my best option for my soil and area. My soil is a lot of black clay, though there is a fair bit of organic stuff in it. And the black plastic under our very intense sun, will kill most of what is growing there (though not all all, between trumpet vine, green briar, poison ivy and the balloon vine, there is plenty of life there still) and still seems to encourage the worm, bug, and fungal life. I get wood chips from local landscaping/ arborist companies. I’ve got a request on chipdrop.com, but there is a company that about every 6 months, so far, will bring me 3 or so loads; I think that’s about how often they work in my area. I like the wood chips as it brings in more fungal life, and I use them to mulch my beds and to bed the chickens. Of course, I’m all about doing what DTG does and chop and drop weeds and whatever as green mulch. And my beds seem to be doing better than in past years. I’m very much boot strapping it; I don’t have a ton of time to give to gardening nor much money.

Thus I’ve never really “tilled” b/c I can’t afford a roto-tiller and I don’t have a manual tiller. I have a shovel and a pitch fork and a hoe. And although I love playing in the dirt, I don’t have time to turn over big beds very often. I’d rather turn over my compost bin!

[UnicornEmily (Emily Martha Sorensen)]

I like to dig each spot exactly one time, to pull out all the rocks and perennial weed roots (which mostly means Siberian elms and bindweed). Then I add lots of organic material: dead branches, autumn leaves, kitchen scraps, whatever. I often throw in wine cap mushroom spawn, too (because mushrooms are tasty and take up no additional garden space). Then I return the soil to the hole and plant on top of it.

I am discovering that I need to keep the soil bare until the summer annuals have germinated, or else roly polies will eat all the germinating seeds. Once they’re safely up out of the soil, then I can add mulch. Winter annuals are generally fine with germinating under mulch, though, presumably because the roly polies are dormant for the winter. I prefer a mulch of wood chips, but if I don’t have those on hand, I’ll use whatever other organic materials happen to be available.

In theory, I only need to each spot dig once. In practice, I often dig again later to harvest root crops. Sometimes when I do that, I disturb the area massively because I decide to adjust where the berms and swales are because I have a better idea of how to arrange things for next year. Anytime I dig up the soil, I add new organic material to it before putting the soil back.

I’ve found the places where I don’t dig at all are the places where I get mushrooms. Those are also the places where the soil is softest and it’s easiest to pull out weeds.

So I totally recommend the no-till method; it just isn’t practical to be 100% about it if you’re going to plant root crops. And you have to pull back mulch and not just leave it year-round if you want to germinate summer annuals. And if your soil starts out with tons of massive rocks and/or tons of perennial weed roots, you are going to need to dig initially to remove them.

By the way, people clutch their pearls about wood chips in the soil causing nitrogen tie-up. Meh. In my opinion, nitrogen is a fully solved problem. Human urine is mostly urea, which is exactly the chemical that industrial agriculture is extracting from oil and then selling to you. (So stupid . . . ) If you’re worried about nitrogen tie-up, just dump kitchen scraps or urine in with the wood whenever you add it.

Or just don’t worry about it, and focus on mushroom spawn and nitrogen-fixers like legumes the first year. Nitrogen tie-up only lasts for one year, and fungal-dominated soil will get you mushrooms.