Don't Dig It

There are lots of arguments for not tilling soil around that old house.

By Lee Reich

	Hand tools that work just below the surface, when used regularly on small weeds, eliminate the need for tilling. Left to right, a collinear weeder, a winged weeder, and a scuffle hoe. Illustration Courtesy of Rob Leanna

The little house on our home property saw more colorful days in the 1920s, when it was a speakeasy catering to the likes of Strawberry Joe, a gangster who hobnobbed with another member of the local fraternity, Legs Diamond. Rumor has it that Joe and a cachØ of money are buried somewhere in the hills behind the house.

Refurbished and rented as a one bedroom cozy cottage, the old house is now thankfully home to less colorful characters. Nonetheless, we thought its grounds needed some dressing up-a small flower garden appropriate to a small cottage and not too demanding of care. In the 1920s as today, the usual way to put in such a garden would be to thoroughly till up an area, wait a couple of weeks, then thoroughly till again and plant.

This traditional approach has a few problems. First of all, the soil around old houses often contains lead from paint applied decades ago that over the years either flaked or was scraped off the siding. Short of excavating and replacing the soil, the best way to deal with this lead is to limit exposure by keeping it immobilized: Leave the soil undisturbed. Second, tilling any soil charges it with air, burning up humus, which, besides its many benefits to plants, also further immobilizes lead. Third, tilling the soil exposes dormant weed seeds, abundant in every soil, to light and air-just what they need to sprout. Also, from a design and plant-heritage standpoint, you may want to expand your display garden into an area containing heirloom shrubs or bulbs that you don't want to disturb. One more reason for not turning over the soil is simply to avoid the time and effort it takes.

My first step for the cottage garden was to kill grass in areas where I wanted either plantings or paths. The most convenient way is to cover the ground with paper, which starves vegetation for light. Newspaper is most readily available; four sheets' thickness is usually adequate. To prevent the paper from blowing and to make it possible for roots of garden plants to immediately grow into and through the paper, you need to thoroughly wet it as you put it down. Because grass will find its way through any openings, be sure to overlap piles of sheets. (This is a one-time affair; the paper will decompose and add a bit of humus to the soil.)

Now that the grass was on its way to plant heaven, the next step was to cover the unsightly paper (and provide a planting medium) with some weed-free organic material (see below).

One good reason people usually till soils is to aerate them, offsetting compaction from the feet of humans and pets, wheelbarrows, and the wheels of wagons and garden carts. There's no reason to till if you avoid traffic on planted areas, which you can do by laying out your garden-to-be with permanently designated areas for walking and others for planting.

Varying that weed-free organic material laid on top of the paper is one way to designate such areas. For the cottage's garden, I used wood chips for the path and compost for the beds. Another option would be to cover the whole area with one material, then lay down stepping stones for walking. (Paths also contribute to the year-round design effect.)

That's all there was to getting the soil ready for immediate planting. Because I chose compost for the beds, seeds and small transplants could be snuggled right into it. If you use wood chips or some other coarse material, employ a few handfuls of weed-free compost as an initial root run. Young roots will grow into the compost, then into the wetted paper and the underlying soil. You can set larger plants-perennials or shrubs-into the ground by digging a hole through the newspaper and into the soil beneath, just deep and wide enough to accommodate the root ball.

Besides starting off with fewer weed problems, this system of putting in a garden is satisfyingly quick. If you use larger potted plants, the effect is one of an instant garden.

Care after that first year has been similarly quick and easy. With no need to till or spade, all I need to do is replenish mulching materials whenever they thin out. Mulch is not only more aesthetically pleasing than bare soil, but helps protect it from drying sun and eroding rain and discourage weeds. You only need an inch or two, and it usually lasts about a year.

You may also need fertilizer or limestone, depending on what kind of mulch you're using and what plants you're growing.

Nutrient-rich mulches (see chart page 44) offset some or all fertilizer needs. This would be especially true for wildflowers and other plants that perform best in lean soils. Most herbs, such as the caraway thyme and the 'Autumn Joy' sedums I planted in front of the cottage, thrive in such soils, as does the potentilla shrub I planted there. Demanding the richest soils are most vegetable plants and more formal flowers such as delphinium and monkshood, but even these will do fine with annual dressings of compost. My paths get a layer of wood chips whenever the old one begins to wear thin.

Although keeping my never-tilled soil covered with a thin, weed-free mulch layer has prevented most weed problems, occasional weeds do need to be routed out. I pull them roots and all, trying to disrupt the soil as little as possible. I coax out weeds such as burdock or dandelion, which have thick, deep taproots, by sliding a shovel or trowel into the ground next to the taproot and levering up while pulling the tops. I dispense with colonies of small weeds using a hoe with a sharp blade that sits parallel to the surface of the ground, and sliding it back and forth just beneath the soil surface. The winged weeder, collinear hoe, and scuffle hoe are three such tools. Most important, though, is to look over the garden regularly for weeds, large or small.

I like to think that the new garden around the old cottage is so low maintenance that if Strawberry Joe could see the old speakeasy today, even he might volunteer to pull the occasional weed.

Lee Reich is a New Paltz, New York, gardener whose books include Weedless Gardening, (Workman Publishing) and Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden (Timber Press).

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