In Iowa: My no-till ambitions

It would have been easy to forsake my plan to adopt no-till cultivation of my garden once I learned that doing so would not appreciably increase my harvest of State Fair-quality produce.

It would have been easier still after one of the world's foremost conservationists recently told me that, even though he practices no-till on his 2,200 acres of cropland, he still tills his garden.

But I, like Tina Turner in her famous 'Proud Mary” spoken intro, 'never ever do anything nice and easy.” It's probably my Sauer blood, as my late father used to say, that makes me willful.

So this spring, despite the implicit advice of Wellman farmer Steve Berger and despite my personal aversion to change and additional work, I intend to leave my eight-horsepower Troy-Bilt rear-tine tiller, the faithful machine upon which I have depended for bountiful harvests for 30 years, in the shed.

Well, not quite. As I can't convert my entire one-third-acre garden to no till in a single season, I will continue to till the half that won't make the transition until next year.

Mulch is my limiting factor. When you stop tilling, you need lots of mulch to suppress weed growth, and I have only enough composted leaves, grass, weeds, garden crop refuse and kitchen scraps to cover half of it.

While no-till farmers typically control their weeds with herbicide, I, being reluctant to spray poison near my intended food, have always manually removed my pigweed, lambsquarters, chickweed, velvetleaf and purslane, by tilling, hoeing or hand-pulling.

My dad once told me that if I were diligent about removing all weeds every year I eventually would become weed free. I now know, while I was pulling weeds, he was pulling my leg.

For one thing, I'm less diligent than willful, which he probably knew. For another, weeds are tremendous survivalists, capable not only of producing seeds that will sprout after 25 years in the subsoil darkness when a tiller finally brings them to light, but also of disguising themselves as the plants you are trying to grow and of massive germinations in late summer, when harvest leaves little time for weed control.

With the Troy-Bilt, I always felt that no matter how far behind the weeds I fell, I could always catch up. While I won't have that luxury this year, I do have one thing going for me - I actually like pulling weeds.

There is something deeply satisfying about applying just the right amount of pressure to a stem so that the roots come out intact.

There is something equally satisfying about dumping several five-gallon pails of freshly pulled, not-yet-gone-to-seed weeds into the compost pile and knowing that in six months they will be going back onto the garden as something closely resembling freshly manufactured soil.

And pulling weeds may be the ultimate mind-relaxing, low-impact physical activity that makes gardening so appealing to so many. For me, it is what I suppose transcendental meditation might be like.

My no-till rewards will not be commensurate with my increased effort.

Because my low-lying garden suffers run-on rather than runoff, I will not improve upon my already negligible soil erosion and loss of nutrients. Because of the four tons of compost I have been applying each of the past 30 years, my soil hardly can become more fertile.

What I do hope to restore is the soil's natural structure.

Rather than till my compost into the soil, which has destroyed the habitat for earthworms and beneficial fungi and bacteria, I will apply it to the surface and let it become part of the soil gradually, from the top down, as nature intended.

When, after a heavy rain, the night crawlers again couple atop my garden on a mid-May midnight, I will know I have succeeded.