Force of habit

An ad for Sunsweet prunes I saw years ago has stuck in my mind ever since. It showed a snooty-looking young man saying, “I breakfast on prunes because Dad breakfasted on prunes.” That pretty well describes the rationale for a lot of our gardening practices. 

Trees usually don't need staking, but it's a tradition

    I recently told a garden club why I’ve switched to no-till methods for my vegetables and annuals. Organic no-till agriculture is a well-established technique that avoids disrupting the rhizosphere, the top few inches of soil where most of the biological activity happens.

The rhizosphere

 

It enables farmers to benefit from the work of soil organisms that, if undisturbed, convert organic material into nutrients that crop plants can use. In home gardens, not tilling saves a lot of work; you can skip the sore back that used to result from turning the soil in spring with a spade or Rototiller. It also allows sequestered carbon to stay in the soil, helping to combat climate change (For a practical guide to the many benefits of no-till methods, see Lee Reich’s Weedless Gardening).

    On this occasion, one of the garden club members “attending” my talk on Zoom firmly rejected the idea of not tilling. “We don’t do that,” she said. She was certain that rain and snow pack down soil, and it needs fluffing up before planting can be undertaken.

 

Managing to thrive in a no-till bed

 
    Her reaction mostly shows that I’d failed to explain no-till gardening convincingly in this attenuated online format. But I thought I also detected a whiff of “Dad breakfasted on prunes.” A lot of the things we do automatically in our gardens were passed down from our parents or gardening mentors. 

People think trees need winter jackets. They don't.

Other techniques became part of the ambient conventional wisdom when garden writers recommended them over decades without scientific confirmation. These practices are so familiar to us that we don’t even notice we’re doing them, let alone examine the reasons behind them.

    I have no trouble resisting the impulse to turn over the vegetable bed with my spade before planting. I’m all too happy to have a reason to forego that annual ritual. But what about pulling up weeds? That’s where I have to fight long-established reflexes.

 
    A true no-till gardener doesn’t uproot weeds, because doing so disrupts the networks that underground organisms have worked to create. And decomposing roots nourish soil and make channels for water, air and nutrients to flow through. What I should be doing is cutting the weeds off at ground level, leaving the roots in the soil. If they resprout, like dandelions, I should lever them out with minimal soil disturbance. It’s hard, though. It takes work to build new habits.

It's best to pry dandelions up without digging-photo Sunasce007

    That encounter with the garden club skeptic made me realize that I’m advocating evidence-based gardening. I believe that science should be our guide. Sometimes science confirms the wisdom of traditional methods, showing that they were better for the environment than newer approaches premised on overuse of chemical fertilizer, herbicides, and pesticides. In the case of tilling the garden, though, Dad had it wrong.

 

My insectary bed is a no-till area