How To Open Up and Improve Your Soil With No-Till Gardening

The secret to any productive garden is a focus on making your soil the best it can be. So in this video, I'm going to show you what I do to every bed in my garden twice a year to have a very bountiful garden. 15 beds down and this last one to go as I prep these beds for my summer plants. And I wanted to make sure that I showed you my process of what I do to get these beds ready. And I change them out twice a year. So in between the cool to warm season and the warm back to the cool season, I take this opportunity to work the soil. So the first thing I do is after I empty out all the old plants, I just check out the overall lay of the land here. And in this case, I have a few weeds and that's to be expected. But with the leaf mulch that I use, most of that has broken down to improve the soil, which is great. And overall, there's not much to do here other than just clean out some of these weeds. And for that, I use my favorite weeding tool. This goes by a few names, scuffle hoe, winged weeder, diamond hoe, whatever you want to call it. It's still one of my favorite weeding tools. Absolutely. It's got a sharp blade all the way around it. And I love the long handle with a pistol grip. And then I just go ahead and slide it along the surface and I can just take those weeds out. It is so easy and it really is. I would call it fun, actually, when you see results like that. So I just slide the blade along the soil surface, take out those weeds. I'm not going into the soil because I don't want to disrupt the soil any more than I have to. But this is the first step is to get these few weeds out of here. I like that it's got this sharp tip on it because it allows me to get right into the corner of my raised beds, which would otherwise be kind of an awkward place to put a tool. But because of that tip, I can get right in there and take those out. OK, weeding is done. Now, the next thing I do is prepare my soil for the top dressing. So I use some of my own homemade compost, along with some store-bought compost that I get when I don't have enough of my own, which is more often than not the case. And at this point, I like to just top dress. But at the same time, I want to open up the soil for more air and water infiltration. Now, one option that a lot of people choose at this point is to use their little tiller or maybe a big tiller. But I don't till here. I don't like to do that for a number of reasons. Tilling disrupts the soil in an adverse way. First of all, it will mix the ingredients into the existing soil. So that top dress soil into the existing soil, but only to the point as far down as the tines will go. And then you're creating a new layer underneath that's not as porous or pervious as it was before you put the tiller in there. Plus, you're burning up lots of organic matter and nitrogen, and you're slicing through those earthworms, and you're just disrupting the soil food web in a severe way. So I just choose not to use my tiller here. But at the same time, if I do want to infiltrate a little bit, I'll use what's called a broad fork. And let me show you that. So this is a broad fork. It's a classic tool used by many organic gardeners to loosen up hard soil. And basically, you can tell with these thick tines, you're going to drop that into the soil and pull back. And that's going to just open up the soil just enough. That's all I want it to do. It creates some airspace. And then when I come in with the new compost and top dress, some of that's going to go down into those holes. But this is minimally invasive, and I like that. It does what it needs to do without disrupting the soil any more than necessary. So my process for this is, in my case, I stand up on the ledge of this bed, and then I just work my way down. And in a minute, I'm done. It's a very simple process. Now, you could do this from ground level. But for now, I'm still able to get up here from the ledge. And so that's what I choose to do. And it's just a matter of dropping it into the soil. And the weight of these tines really gets the tines down there as far as I need to go. Now, the nice thing about this tool, it does have that broad area for your foot. So if you did need a little help in getting it into the soil, that's the beauty of having this broad space right here. You can just push it down with your foot, and then you rock it. And you could rock it back and forth. But I have great soil, so I don't need to do that. More than anything else, I'm just opening up a little airspace and opportunity for that top dress compost to get into those holes. And so the combination of the broad fork and the top dressing is what I call broad dressing. I don't mind saying I attribute a lot of the success of my bed and the garden productivity to the quality of the soil. And that has everything to do with the compost and the fact that I top dress these beds twice a year. And so I go through a lot of compost. I make as much as I can, but I use more than I have. So I've got the last of my compost here, for now anyway, and I'll add one bushel of this and then two bushels of what I buy. I've found a high-quality source of composted soil that I amend, and it works nicely together. I've been using it for years. So that's the combination for me when I need the best of both. So the first thing is to get this mulch into the beds. Okay, so this is like my favorite part. Maybe it takes me back to my childhood on the beach where I would just run my fingers through the sand. But I'm a long way from the beach right now, but this is even better. And that is just mixing this together lightly across the surface. And that also is allowing some of this compost to get into those holes from the broadfork. But it's just integrating these two compost mixes together and lightly working its way onto the soil surface as I smooth it out, just to create kind of a nice level planting bed. And again, I'm not using any tools here. This doesn't have to be perfect. The pursuit of perfection with gardening is a waste of time. You just want to do the best you can. The compost that I'm using is leaves that had been breaking down since the fall. I didn't shred them as heavily this time. So they're not quite fully broken down yet, but they're good enough. And now that they're into this mix, they'll finish breaking down very quickly. This is literally money in the bank. This is the deposit. This is like money going into your bank account and earning a really great rate of return. All this organic matter going into the existing soil is just going to make the existing soil better and supercharge it with all the good fungi and bacteria in this compost and the earthworms and the eggs of the earthworms. This is the secret. It's just focusing on building great soil and doing that a couple times a year if you can.