How to Start a No-Till Garden from Scratch

Hey nerds, Farmer Jesse here. So today I want to talk about the many ways to start a no-till garden, and how to know which way is the right way for you. So let's do it. Is it safe to do a video with my shoes untied? Nah, it'll be fine. Okay, so I'm going to divide this video between raised bed gardens that you have to build from scratch, and in-ground gardens that you are building from, well, your yard or your pasture or whatever. But I want to just lay out some general rules on placement, because you may have picked a spot already, but if it's in a bad place, then you are about to waste a bunch of time, and possibly money, and possibly time again. Yeah. So let's not do that. But first I want to give a huge shout-out for the people who helped make today's video possible, Sow Right Seeds. Sow Right Seeds is an heirloom seed company that provides fresh, high-quality, open-pollinated seeds. They carry over 400 varieties of vegetables, flowers, herbs, microgreens, and cover crops for the home garden. The instructions on their packets have all the information you need to get started, such as when to plant your seeds and tips for growing. Sow Right Seeds has a great selection of classic and rare heirlooms, and are committed to providing the best quality seeds so that you can be successful. Check them out at sowrightseeds.com. Okay, so for garden placement, you need as much sun as you can possibly get. In fact, I'm running into this issue on our new farm, where it is three weeks behind our old farm in the spring because it's slightly north-facing, with more trees, and it just gets overall less sun. So the amount of sun your garden location has can make a huge difference, especially in the spring, but in overall production. The exception to that might be if you are in a hotter climate, where a little shade might be welcomed. But if you're in a neighborhood or have a lot of trees around you, and you're not in tropical or hot area, find the sunniest spot you possibly can to put your garden. You can always add shade artificially or with interplanting later on. You will also want the garden area as flat as possible. It is entirely possible to farm on a slope. We do it here in Kentucky. In fact, it's kind of like a mogul's course, which is fun. But it is entirely possible to farm on a slope. But slopes can also be quite a pain. So if you can avoid them, do so. If you can't, well, you may have to do some terracing, depending on the slope, or dig into the slope to place your raised beds. Essentially, you will want flat or relatively flat areas on which to grow food. We will save building terraces for its own video later, but there are plenty of guides out there, including, well, much of history, I guess, where people had to grow on whatever land wasn't being gobbled up by wealthy people who don't actually have a real use for it. Not a lot has changed, I guess. Also, you will probably want water access. It is very hard to grow food as intensively as I do without water, especially in drier climates. Dry farming requires a different strategy with more spacing between crops and a lot more thoughtfulness when planting and mulching and so on. Dry farming meaning just farming without irrigation, without much irrigation. So if you can have a water source, or build one, that's ideal. I also suggest putting gardens closer to your house. I'm kind of baffled by the trend of putting your garden several hundred feet away from your home. I get it, but put the darn thing in your front yard if you can. The further you put it away from your house, the less you will visit it, and the worse it will do. Full stop. If your concern is aesthetics, one, believe me, it is just as weird to see a random garden a few hundred feet away from a house than it is to have it right next to the house, but two, you can always just integrate your garden into your landscaping, especially on a small scale. Also, of course, here in the States, at least, call 311 before you build an in-ground garden. I don't know what that number is in Celsius for the rest of the world, but just don't dig up any power, water, or phone lines. That's a pro tip. Okay, so that's the basics of placement. Now, on to the actual gardens. So I'm going to start with in-ground growing. If you're interested in my thoughts on raised bed gardening, I will put those toward the end of this video. I know it's not exactly no-till, but it may be better in certain circumstances, or if you're on a small scale and you have a space that wouldn't be good for an in-ground garden, maybe a raised bed garden would fill in some of that space with some photosynthesis and tomatoes. So feel free to skip ahead if raised beds is all you have access to or desire to grow in. All right, let's go through this in three different ways to do in-ground gardens. A couple never-till approaches, some low-till and tillage approaches, and some of what we'll call other? And yes, I want to be clear, you can start a no-till garden with a small amount of tillage. And in fact, it might make the most sense depending on your context. But first, the never-till approaches are primarily meant for soils that are halfway decent or have reasonable but not rapid drainage. So for instance, with quickly draining sandy soils or heavily compacted and poorly draining clay soils, you may want to take a different approach depending on the amount of time you have to get started. The reason for that is with the never-till approaches, you may end up with a very poor performance in your first year. So if you have a few months before you need to plant or you don't care to have mediocre performance your first year, then here's a couple easy never-till methods for you. First, mow down whatever sod might be there and either place a tarp over top for several months or you can add a compostable weed barrier like cardboard or mulch paper. Once the grass is either gone or covered up, you can add several inches of good compost. This is called deep compost mulching or the no-dig system. Now, you can also add a small amount of compost to bare soil, let's say an inch or so, and then tarp it for a few or a couple warm months. The earthworms and other critters will help you get those things going. Could you use a different mulch other than compost for that? Sure, those mulches can make things a little slower in the spring because they are cool, but you could add hay or straw, a couple lines of drip tape, irrigation to ensure enough moisture, and then throw a tarp over top for a few months. That will help with the warmth and it will help kind of break down some of those weed seed potential, that sort of stuff. With the deep composting, my favorite thing is to do this in the summer. Add a winter-killed cover crop like peas, for instance, one of my favorites, to a compost mulch by mid-September. Then you can start planting in the spring when the soil has had time to, you know, meld with the compost, held together and enlivened by those pea roots. Do you need a mulch? Well, I guess technically you could go without a mulch, like just tarp it and then plant, but the soil is going to be pretty difficult to work with if it's got practically any percentage of clay in it. Not applying a mulch might be better in one of the low-tillage methods, but I generally still recommend a mulch or a lot of compost to be worked into the surface layer. This creates a sort of blended mulch with soil particles, which will help the compost to hold moisture and lead to better germination. People who use the tilther or the power harrow, for instance, are using this sort of system that I'm describing. I discussed how to evaluate your soil's needs for tillage in this video last week, but for some soils a small amount of tillage might be the best thing you can do for your soil to get it started, so you never have to till it again. My goal is always to think long-term about this stuff. For instance, for some folks, this is what they are starting with. There is just practically nothing in this sort of heavily compacted soil to preserve by not disturbing it, save for the soil particles themselves, which are important. So in the beginning, we do not have to be that precious about it, as long as we, one, have a good plan for reducing or eliminating tillage afterward, and two, do the soil work at the right time so as not to cause further damage, and three, we get that soil covered and or planted as fast as possible to protect those soil particles and any organic matter that might be there, and, you know, for all the other reasons that we use mulch. Think of starting a garden like building a house. A good foundation is key to long-term success and stability. You wouldn't build a house on a bad foundation, same thing goes for gardening. For some soils, especially those that have been abused, we need to build that foundation, otherwise it could take a year or two for the soil to do that work on their own, and possibly more. And all the while, you're not really building soil because nothing is able to grow very well, the products of photosynthesis, photosynthate, carbohydrates, being the soil's favorite food. That, and hot Cheetos, weirdly. Kidding, organic certifiers. So some lower-till methods might be like doing that initial tarping, adding compost or whatever amendments you intend to add, and lightly harrowing or tilling or digging that into the soil four or so inches deep, thereby injecting some good organic matter into the soil to break up the compaction a bit, but also making a nice, arable planting bed. Or you can mound the beds together, like make raised beds with a shovel or a tool like this rotary plow or whatever makes sense for you, add compost, then cover that with a tarp. Or if you want to take the tarp out of the picture entirely, you can just mulch over those mounded beds to preserve that loosened soil. If you're working on a small scale, maybe it's literally just flipping the soil with a shovel, breaking up the clods, and adding a mulch of some sort to protect the soil, or a tarp to help with the weeds. In fact, this sort of digging is where we get to the other options, like double digging. This is where you would dig out a row, placing the soil into a wheelbarrow, fill that hole with compost, and cover that with the next row or bed worth of soil. I'm not a fan of this because of the sheer amount of work, but it is a thing people do, and do to success. For me, I'd also just rather have all that compost near or on the surface as a mulch. There are also things like hugelkultur beds where pits are dug, though it can just be done on the surface as well, but pits are dug and large logs are placed down in the pit, followed by progressively smaller sticks, followed by soil, and then compost. Other materials like straw can also be involved. The idea here is long-term fertility as the trees break down, but oof, that is also a lot of work, and tall mounds may not be that easy to manage or weed or plant. I'm not knocking it because I have no experience really with hugelkultur beds, and I'm sure it does work in terms of fertility, but only do that sort of stuff when you have the equipment and don't really need to rely on it for production maybe, at least in the first few years. A miniature version of that would maybe be better, and that would be like lasagna beds. If you have a bunch of compost and a bunch of straw, you could layer those things, like lasagna, on the surface for another great never-till method. This does require some time to settle, generally speaking, so at least give yourself a few months to allow that sort of lasagna layer to break down, and depending on the depth of the compost layer, like if you've got several inches on the top, you may not need to let it break down for that long, but preferably probably a couple months. Honestly, there are an endless number of ways to start gardens in-ground, and it's hard to kind of do it wrong so long as your long-term goal is to keep the soil covered and planted and undisturbed as much as possible. If you're left wanting a few more details about this whole thing, I get way deeper into starting gardens in the Living Soil Handbook, which, when you get it from notillgrowers.com, that helps support our work. Every time I see an order come in for one of those, it warms my nerdy little heart, so thank you. Okay, I promised to touch on raised-bed gardens for those who don't have the space or option of doing a garden in-ground, or who simply are done with bending over, I feel ya, like physically in my back, like right this moment I feel you. Now, in the name of full disclosure, I am not a raised-bed gardener, but I can give you my opinion as a professional grower, who has also spoken with, like, hundreds of people through the podcast, on what I would do. If it were me building raised beds first, I would purchase metal raised beds and not go for the wooden sides. This is largely because of how long those metal ones will last, or conversely, how not long the wooden ones will last. There are several metal options on the market, and I have not tried any of them, but the reason I would still go with one of those over wood is that I don't want to be replacing my wooden sides a few years down the road. If you do use wood, do not use the treated wood or railroad ties for the chemicals used to preserve them. Preferably, you would use a more rot-resistant wood, like cedar or black locust. The depth of these beds will be determined by your budget and height, like your own height. Like, if you're tall, you may want them taller, if you're shorter, you may want them shorter. Obviously, the less bending you have to do to plant and harvest, the better. The length of these beds is totally up to you and up to your budget, but I would probably build raised beds no wider than four feet, just for ease of getting into the center of them. Now, in terms of the soil you're going to fill it with, you have quite a few options. If I had my absolute druthers, I would just fill the whole thing with something like the raised bed mix from our friend Jane at EarthCare Farm, for instance, or just call up a good composter and see if they make a good raised bed mix themselves, somebody close to you. Of course, raised bed mix is not cheap, but maybe you only use the raised bed mix for the top six or eight inches of your raised beds, and under that you use good, reliable fill dirt or filler. Fill dirt can be complicated if you don't know the provenance, because it could be from an old building site and have lead or something from paint or oil or whatever, or something else equally toxic. If you know where the soil came from and trust it, you can use that to fill in the bulk of the container and then just top it off with the good stuff like compost or raised bed mix. I like the raised bed mix because it also contains all the nutrients you need, but your soil should and so should your compost. So by and large, if you have two of those three things, you should be covered. You can also alternatively dig a trench around your raised bed and throw that soil into the bottom of that raised bed before you put the raised bed mix in it. This way you effectively raise its height by lowering the space around it and then fill it up from the bottom. Kind of a win-win there. There are also smaller versions of raised beds like these grow bags or these garden socks. I've mentioned that I will talk more about them in other videos and I do plan to do that, so I guess I'm just going to put that on future Jesse to address. You're welcome, future me. You'll love it. Anyway, for more on garden starting, watch this video here and or pick up a copy of the Living Soil Handbook or a hat or other merch at notillgrowers.com. Become a Patreon member at patreon.com slash notillgrowers where you not only chip in to make videos like these, but also can find some sweet discounts on things like seeds and boots and irrigation. Or just hit that super thanks button. That's easy enough. Otherwise, like this video if you like this video. If you're not subscribed to the channel, make sure to hit the subscribe button. If you are subscribed, you're awesome and a nerd. Thanks for watching. We'll see you later. Bye. Oof. That answers that, I guess.