I have always tilled my gardens thoroughly. I've always had access to equipment to do this, so it's never really been a question before. This year, though, because I'm switching the garden over to almost entirely raised beds, I ran into a little dilemma. There's no way I can get a garden tractor and tiller into the raised beds without destroying the frame and compacting the soil until it resembles concrete. I have a smaller front tine tiller too, but it needs carburetor work and I just don't feel like doing that while there's still snow on the ground.
So instead, I decided I was just going to no-till. Except that I had planned to till, so the garden is full of holes from digging last fall, and generally not in any condition to seed directly. Now, there are huge benefits to no till gardening. The extensive network of fungi and populations of beneficial bacteria in the soil remain undisturbed in no-till gardening. To make a fairly long story short, this leads to healthier soil and better growth and production. Except for me, it's just not realistic this year.
Ok, I said, well if I can't till and I can't no-till, I'll just build the beds, add amendments and rake it together. I figured it'd be clumpy and uneven, but manageable. I picked up a new hand cultivator and steel rake, and prepared for backbreaking work busting clumps and digging out old roots and grass clumps that grew late last fall.
Boy was I ever surprised. This is a little embarrassing to say, but I've been tilling and using other gas powered equipment to cultivate for so long, that I haven't ever really tried doing it by hand. I pulled out the grass and root clumps using the hand cultivator, gave it a little scratch on the top inch or so of soil to level it off, and raked it smooth. I did a 100 sq. foot bed in less than 10 minutes. Then I scattered finished compost over the bed, and raked that into the top inch of soil very gently. In 15 minutes, I was done with the first bed. I plan on having seven beds like that this year. Even if the other beds take just as long, that's less than two hours of work to prepare 700 square feet of garden bed. That's less time than it takes to put the tiller on the tractor, check the oil, fill it with gas, lube the tiller chain, and check the hydro fluid, not to mention actually tilling.
The other huge surprise was that the soil is nearly perfect. Without the 400 pound tractor driving on it, there's no compaction. I'm starting to think that most of the work the tiller does is to break up the clumps caused by driving the tractor on the garden. And, I didn't spend a penny on gas to do it.
To till? No thanks. Maybe never again. To no-till? Maybe, but it'll have to wait till next year. For now, I'm somewhere in between, just enjoying my discovery that doing something the hard way isn't always the hard way.
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