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I have had the ugly compost bins made from wooden pallets, the worm bins, the big mounds and piles in the back yard, the huge round hog wire bins and so on.. I've turned with pitchforks, concerned myself about heat, moisture and all the elements of cooking perfect compost and here is my personal and honest assessment of it all.. Compost bins aren't pretty and the textbook cooking compost method takes too much work, too much time and leaves me with too little product to ever make it worth my while..
After reading Lasagna gardening and seeing how the most perfect compost in nature is made by slow and gradual decomposition of leaves underneath a canopy of trees, my philosophy has shifted to a "feed the soil, not your compost bin" mentality. I compost in place and let the gradual decay of organic matter feed the teaming microorganisms and worms. The heat created in a compost pile is energy transferred and lost to breaking down the organic matter to it's smallest form, instead of letting that energy transfer gradually and more usefully in your soil.
I'd much rather let nature do the work and I get all the rewards for it. All of the organic material that would have been added to a compost bin is now composted in place. Simple, easy, wonderful for the soil, great food for the beneficial organisms and your worms, easy on your back, less work, no worries about heating and right moisture contents. Compost happens whether you work real hard and baby your pile or lay it down on the soil and walk away. It happens better if you walk away, get out of the way and let nature do it's job all by itself.
For those who still don't want to believe... fine.. you keep that pile turned and fed while I go tend to my garden
Many of us who garden are quite familiar with the concept of raised bed gardening - particularly those of us who have dirt that glows red with clay. We're also extremely familiar with composting - we have compost piles or bins hidden out of sight, full of leaves, grass clippings and the vegetable scraps from our kitchens. We wait, if somewhat impatiently, for that stuff to turn into the "black gold" we then spread on our gardens and cover with shredded bark or other mulch we must truck in to our gardens.
But there is another way. This way puts to an end the annual process of tilling our garden plots! What's this you say? No more wrestling with that bucking machine or breaking our backs as we till our plots with hand tools? How can this be?
It's developer, Ruth Stout (1884-1980) called it "no dig, no work" although even exponents of her methods, like Pat Ruggiero and Howard Markham of Fluvanna, admit there is no gardening without work - this method just involves less backbreaking work than most. It's a method based on nature's own way, the "no-till" or "permanent mulch" method, and it's amazingly simply.
"Think about it," Pat challenges. "Think about how the leaves fall from the trees and land at their bases. Nobody comes to rake them up. They just stay there and decay - and they begin to feed the trees, those big, healthy trees. No one fertilizes them. No one cleans away the leaves and makes the forest floor neat and tidy but the trees flourish."
Pat and Howard both grew up in farming communities but had worked and lived most of their lives in Northern Virginia. They knew they wanted to retire to a place where they could garden and when they saw this seven acre property in Fluvanna, with its south facing slope, they knew this was it.
"We became very interested in no-till gardening shortly after we started gardening here," Pat explains. "We tilled the beds the first year, and again the second year, but no more - we just pull the mulch aside, plant, and pull the mulch back again." And, indeed, the mulch is never removed - it is simply added to and over-planted with cover crops in the off-season.
"Our favorite cover crops are bearded oats, field peas and hairy vetch," reveals Pat. "We broadcast the seeds, take the rake and tamp the mulch that is in place so the seeds to settle in, and let them grow." The oats and peas come up almost immediately and they grow and flourish until the frost kills them. The vetch grows a little but it's the oats and peas that take over the "resting" beds during the fall. When they die, Pat and Howard do not pull the cover crops up by their roots. The plants will simply fall over by themselves and there they will remain. In the early spring the vetch takes over and grows until the couple is ready to plant their food crops. Then the vetch is cut down to act as mulch and eventually it, too, composts in place.
Even when their vegetable crops are finished, the plant remains are composted in place. Pat says that when it comes to the corn stalks, Howard will use the chipper/shredder and grind the stalks down before returning them to the plot where the corn had grown. "You could just throw the whole stalks on the ground and they would eventually turn into compost but they're awkward to work around. It's easier just to break them up and give them a head start," she says
"No-till gardening is based on improving the soil," Pat explains. "We keep the soil covered with organic matter. Soil microorganisms (the "microherd" as they're affectionately known among some organic gardeners) feed on the organic matter, mixing it into the soil, and eventually the soil changes. That's how Nature tills the soil. Because vegetable plants have a high nutrient requirement, we also add our own finished compost at planting time. Depending on the vegetable, we might add 1/2" compost over the whole bed, or we might just add a shovelful in each planting spot."
Pat is a Master Gardener with the Virginia Extension Service's Master Gardening Program and notes that there's usually a new Master Gardening class starting every year in late January. She recommends it for anyone who wants to learn more about gardening. (Contact your local extension service for more details.)
"Soil is built from the top down," she continues. "Nature tills the soil that way and that's part of the philosophy of no-till gardening. We compost in place, perhaps adding a little more compost here and there, and the microorganisms in the soil, the microherd, feed on the compost, dragging some if it down with them, leaving behind their castings, and eventually the soil changes."
The soil in the vegetable beds has changed greatly in the seven years since they came to garden here. As Pat pulls away a small circle of matted hay and other decaying cover to show off some of her ready to harvest potatoes, she easily shoves her hand nearly wrist deep with little effort. The soil is beautiful, dark loam - the kind of soil that even Martha Stewart would envy.
"Two of the principles of no-till gardening are to make sure that there is always something for the microherd in the soil to eat," Pat explains as the teaching side of her comes out. "The plants don't access the hay and cover crops directly. The microherd does and it's their waste that the plants eat. No-till gardeners always make sure that there is something for those organisms to eat so that the plants will always have something to eat. The second principle is that the organic material that composts in place, eventually breaks down and changes the texture of the soil for the better, which makes it easier for the plant roots to develop and take in nourishment." It definitely appears that their gardening method is working well for their garden.
"We started planting from the very first year, of course," Pat says. "The crops were okay. We started with the hay (spoiled hay was a favorite mulch of Ruth Stout, the method's founder) and compost and cover crops. "But it was somewhere about the fourth year that the garden took on a new vigor - we just saw this really big change in the fourth year. This is the seventh year now and we think the garden has made another big advance this year."
The no-till gardening method has another benefit that the couple enjoys. According to Pat, it's only the northern most vegetable beds, those at the top of the hill, that must be watered every week or so. "The lower beds don't seem to need the extra water," she says. "The thatch of mulch holds in the moisture that the plants need and we don't need to water the lower beds very often. It's really a big benefit of the no-till philosophy."
The additional compost that is applied to the beds in early spring comes from their property. Leaving the leaves that fall beneath the trees on the property to feed the trees from which they come, Howard takes the leaves that blow onto the grassy areas of lawn, along with grass clippings and chipped branches that have fallen or are groomed from the surrounding bushes and trees and he composts them behind the couple's berry bushes on the northwest side of their property. The compost is used solely in the vegetable garden and not on any of the many beautiful perennial beds that surround the property. "We use the no-till method with them, too," Pat states, "but they have to rough it on their own, compared to the vegetable beds."
If the condition of Pat's and Howard's perennial beds is based on roughing it, then their vegetable beds are nothing short of a five-star restaurant for plants and there's not a tiller, man or machine, in sight.
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