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WARNING: DO TRY THIS AT HOME
No till gardens are a simple and natural way of vegetable gardening. Discover the reasons why this method of agriculture can help during a food crisis and help to heal the planet.
A typical
Sunday morning in
South
Africa - a gardener brandishing a four
pronged fork with the aim of hewing an area or earth in order to make a
vegetable garden. Unbeknownst to him, each time the hardened spikes of metal
pierce the sensitive earth and lever up clods of soil, valuable moisture is
lost and harmful greenhouse gasses are released into the atmosphere
contributing to the already impending global warming disaster. A prospect that
any garden enthusiast would be horrified with. The following article looks at
the theory and motivation behind No-Till Gardening as a solution to food
security and conserving our planet.
The fact is
that rising food prices and the world's food stores being their lowest in 35
years[i], food
security for the average household is under threat. Spiraling oil prices impact
on the cost of fertilizers and farming costs. To make matters worse, the global
scramble to secure fuel has lead many farmers worldwide, to abandon the quest
to produce food crops, and take up growing bio-fuel crops instead. When all is
said and done, growing your own vegetable garden not only makes sense, it may
be a necessity in the future.
The
question that remains is: "If I am going to grow my own vegetables, how can I
do it in an environmentally responsible manner and produce a healthy crop?"
Answers to this question are not new, nor is information scarce; with a little research
we discover terms such as Organic Gardening, Permaculture,
Door
Stop
Gardens and No-Till Gardens. No-Till Gardens,
which basically involve planting the seed without disturbing the topsoil, rest
on some very simple natural principles. Take some time to observe nature and
you will notice that in a healthy eco-system, there is very little disturbance
to the surface of the soil; below the soil it's a different matter - earth worms are churning, moles are tunneling
and there is a hive of bacterial activity (It is highly unlikely that you will
find armies of insects and small mammalian creatures wielding forks and hoes
breaking up the earth and planting seeds, unless of course you share Walt
Disney's highly unsavory habit of anthropomorphizing nature). This leads us to
a simple principle - if the soil is relatively undisturbed and healthy, we
should have a healthy environment to grow our plants, or more simply put, "healthy
soil = healthy plants"
Contrary to
this approach, modern agriculture and indeed conventional garden horticulture,
relies on the "tilling" or opening up of the topsoil surface layer. There are a
number of disadvantages to this approach. Firstly, when we open the soil, life
giving moisture is lost; considering that it takes about one liter of water to
produce one food calorie, it doesn't take a scientist to figure out that
coupled with global warming; sooner or later we are going to have a global water
problem[ii].
Topsoil and humus that has been disturbed also does a poor job at capturing
water run off in times of rain[iii],
this in turn increases our need for more water.
The second
reason that tilling is a poor method is that the microbes below the soil
produce a range of gasses as byproducts of the process of breaking down organic
matter. When we till, we unsettle the "carbon enriched" humus[iv]
and release greenhouse gasses including carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide[v]. Carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus are of
course components found in most fertilizers and so once again we are doing our
soil a disservice, and increasing our requirement for additional resources
which are already under threat.
No-Till
Gardening on the other hand, increases the soils ability to capture and retain
moisture, helps the soil to hold its natural gaseous fertilizers including
carbon, limits soil erosion, limits pollutants, requires less labour (constant
tilling by hand or machine is not required), and even encourages and entices friendly
animal life such as earthworms. In one study it was found that the local birds
preferred to nest around the No-Till farm lands as opposed to the tilled ones[vi].
We planted
our own No-Till Gardens by measuring out a space, cutting down the veld grass
and covering it with layers of newspaper or cardboard and then digging a trench
around the area. The soil from the trench was placed over the newspaper.
Compost was then introduced and we planted an array of winter vegetables and herbs.
Mulch in the form of veld cuttings was introduced to protect the soil and
seedlings from the harsh frosts that we experience. As an experiment we dug a conventional tilled
garden as a basis of comparison . (Note the large amount of weed cover pictured in this garden)
 While the
vegetables on both sides look good, we did notice that the weed cover in the no
till gardens was far less, and the No-Till garden grew faster. Note that the
gardens are covered with thorns due to a plague of
Labrador
diggers that are endemic to our garden. The last bounty of No-Till Gardening that
is worthy of mentioning, is the sense of fun and satisfaction gained from a day
in the garden and the very tangible and tasty results that our family and
immediate community is gaining.
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