Small-Scale No-Till Gardening Basics: The Ultimate Guide to Soil, #2
By Anna Hess
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About this ebook
Grow twice the fruits and vegetables in half the space on the farm, in the backyard, or even in your window!
Have you noticed the extraordinary flavors and yields emanating from even a small garden when the soil is just right? If you've ever been envious of your neighbor's dirt or just curious about homesteading, then The Ultimate Guide to Soil is the perfect fit for you.
This second volume in the series walks new and experienced gardeners through turning a good garden into a great garden using no-till gardening techniques. Learn to create a vegetable plot from scratch with no heavy machinery. Deal with common soil problems like waterlogging, excessive drainage, compaction, and urban subsoil. Then take your skill set to the next level with labor-saving techniques like solarization and spot kill mulches. Finally, the last chapter in this ebook expands your reach beyond the traditional garden and into containers and aquaponics.
With an emphasis on simple techniques suitable for the backyard gardener, The Ultimate Guide to Soil gives you the real dirt on good soil. Maybe next year your neighbor will be envious of you!
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Book preview
Small-Scale No-Till Gardening Basics - Anna Hess
Small-Scale No-Till
Gardening Basics:
The Real Dirt on Cultivating Crops, Compost, and a Healthier Home
Volume 2 in The Ultimate Guide to Soil
by Anna Hess
Copyright © 2016 by Anna Hess
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Visit my blog at www.waldeneffect.org or read more about my books at www.wetknee.com.
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: Two Ways to Start a No-Till Garden From Scratch
Kill mulches
Tilling up a no-till bed
Chapter 2: Correcting Soil Problems As You Build New Beds
Too wet or too dry
Other common soil issues
Chapter 3: Solarization
Faster, easier ways to start a new no-till bed
Solarization basics
Clear plastic versus black plastic
Chapter 4: No-till Garden Management
Weed control in a no-till garden
Growing vegetables in poor soil
No-till tools
Chapter 5: Beyond the In-Earth Garden
Containers
Aquaponics
About the Author
Other Books You May Enjoy
Introduction
This part of our garden was once home to such poor soil that even cover crops failed to thrive. But years of no-till management were sufficient to turn the plot into a vibrant growing zone. In 2015, the area pictured produced a dozen large cabbages, five bushels of tomatoes, a bushel of sweet potatoes, and 225 pounds of butternut squash. Not bad for soggy soil with all of the topsoil eroded away.
As you've probably already gathered if you read volume one in this series, one of the primary interests of a soil-friendly gardener should be organic-matter levels. In my case, that obsession inevitably led me toward no-till gardening.
What's the big deal with no-till? One study followed twenty-three years of growing successive crops of chemically fertilized corn with no soil-building in between, with half the fields using traditional tillage and the other half using no-till technology. The scientists found that—even without the benefit of organic amendments like compost and mulch—the no-till fields contained six times as much organic matter at the end of the study compared to the conventionally plowed fields. You can think of that result as the worst-case scenario of no-till gardening, since you'll hopefully be using compost, mulch, and cover crops to boost your organic-matter levels in addition to no-till strategies. Wouldn't it be interesting to see how the combination of organic fertilization with no-till methodology could exponentially increase the benefits of ever-increasing organic-matter levels?
No-till farming can sometimes sound like magic, but the results make sense once you realize you're turning back the clock on the negative effects of plowing. The trouble is that both plowing and tilling lower organic-matter levels dramatically, in part because excessive aeration burns through the banked organic matter in record time. Other studies have shown that tilling breaks down soil structure and removes biopores; that tilling lowers