Thanks so much for your comments, Mary, Dollybelle, and Chris.
Dollybelle, thanks for your interest in no-till gardening. We raise all our own vegetables organically, in a large garden plot. Two things originally attracted my wife and me to the concept of no-till. One, obviously, is not having to spend the time and energy tilling our sizable garden. The other is that we could simply walk out to the garden and start planting. No other prep work and no raking.
Before we started (about 20 years ago), we researched the concept and liked what we found:
• Untilled soil has a complex network of fungal fibers called "mycorrhizae." They connect to the roots of vegetables and provide a higher absorptive capacity for water and mineral nutrients. Tilling the soil destroys this network. Obviously, folks have been tilling the soil for millennia, so breaking up the fiber network is not directly harmful to plants. But leaving the network intact makes plants more resilient. They have a survival advantage when stressed by insects, disease, or drought.
• The natural cohesion of soil particles is disturbed, making erosion more likely.
• Some soil nutrients are also lost due to cultivation. That means they must be replaced by chemical fertilizers, which all too often end up in our groundwater, rivers, and streams. One of the consequences of this runoff is eutrophication (the presence of excessive nutrients which can threaten the habitats of aquatic animals and wild life by depleting oxygen in the water).
We have been amazed at the vigor of some of our vegetables, especially tomatoes. Last year we had an ordinary tomato plant (Better Boy), bought at an Earl May Nursery, that produced over 100 tomatoes!
You may be wondering what we do when we need to plant seeds instead of plants. We lay out a row of compost and sow directly into it. All the nutrients are there to give the seedlings a healthy, vigorous start in life. We have never had to buy "innoculants" in order to get a good pea harvest. When we plant plants, we dig the hole a bit deeper than one normally would and backfill with compost.
No-till works with all but those soils that have major amounts of clay in them. To employ no-till under those circumstances, one would have to amend the soil heavily with coarse sand and coarse organic matter. The worst mistake in amending such soil is to do it with sand only. You will end up with something akin to concrete.
Hope this helps. If you have questions, please ask.
I have always loved to walk & just this past 6-8 months with our lives topsy turvy from moving & planning to build & getting our old house ready to go on the market, I kind of fell out of the habit of my daily walk. I vow to get back to it forthwith.
