Most traditional gardeners have a strong affection for their tillers. There is nothing so satisfying as tilling up those weeds and seeing a field of thick black earth. Unfortunately no matter how much you till, those weeds come back! Of course they do! There is all that lovely black earth for them to dig their roots into!
Traditional gardening teaches that by tilling your soil you are bringing the nutrients in the soil to the surface so that the plants that you have planted can access it more easily and grow better. Unfortunately the weeds can access the nutrients better as well! And not only that but the nutrients are no longer tied up with the soil structure and they can easily be washed away with the rain or blown away in the wind. No wonder traditional gardeners have to add more fertilizer year after year! They are tilling away the health of their soil.
Well if you can't till, what can you do?!?!?!?!?
You can sheet mulch! Sheet mulching involves layering various types of organic mulch (compost, manure,...) and a weed supressing layer (newspaper, cardboard, old sheets,...) with a carbon based layer (straw, hay,...) to mimic the forest floor. If you go back to the forest idea it all makes sense. Forests don't have black earth below their flourishing trees. Forests have thick layers of mulch at the base of their trees. Mulch consisting of leaf litter, animal droppings, rotting dead trees, mushrooms, dead insects,....the list could be endless. All these things gather together to provide the forest with a number of functions. The leaf litter provides a humus-type cover to keep rain water from evaporating, leaving the soil underneath cool and damp, the organisms in the mulch die and the parts of their bodies return to the soil adding nutrients. Different molds, bacterias, and fungi break down the different parts of the mulch adding nutrients to the soil.
By using sheet mulch on your garden you are taking advantage of all those beneficial functions. The sheet mulch supresses the weeds, keeps the soil moist and returns nutrients to the soil. You don't even need to till up your grass, if that is where you are building your garden. Just sheet much right on top. The insects, earthworms and microorganisms will crawl right up from the existing soil and convert those mulch layers into nutrient rich soil.
We have embraced the sheet mulch idea and have transformed a large portion of a our front yard into what looks like a straw carpet. It may not be "pretty" to a traditional gardener but we are excited about it.
Following the suggestions in "Gaia's Garden" by Toby Hemenway we made the following sheet mulch lasagna: (Watering between each step to make sure it was all moist.)
1) turkey manure
2) newsprint
3) straw
4) compost
5) straw
We have done this in the fall so that when the spring comes around we will be able to plant right into our sheet mulch and have a successful garden!
Here you see us putting down the compost:
