Developing a No-Till Garden From Scratch

Hey nerds, Farmer Jesse here. Super fun video for you all today. We are going to do a deep dive into no-till garden starting, and by we I really mean my co-founder in no-till growers, Jackson Roulette. He recently started a half acre no-till garden and in this video gives you a complete rundown including site assessment, materials and amendments used, cost, and so much more. We've done broad overviews of garden starting in the past like this video, but today you're going to get a lot more technical detail and see it in a more start to finish sort of way, which is rad, but also very helpful. One last thing is if you enjoy our work, please consider picking up a copy of the Living Soil Handbook from notillgrowers.com or other merch. That helps to keep these videos coming. Yeah, all right. Here's the co-founder of no-till growers, Jackson Roulette. We are here at an apostle's garden, my fifth garden in 10 years, and we are on the grounds of Holy Apostles Orthodox Church here in Bowling Green, Kentucky, where we lease about an acre and a half to two acres, but we are only cultivating approximately a half acre in bed space at the moment. So we started this garden in May of 2023 is when we started working out here. The first thing that I did was get a good site assessment. So what that entailed was getting a soil test, walking the land to see how it laid, to see where the low spots were and if there were going to be any drainage issues, and then also look at the site on the web soil survey. Start with getting a soil test. I marked out approximately where I wanted the initial round of beds to go. So we ended up with four plots that are 50 by 100 feet. So after marking those out, I went through and took a soil sample and got a number of cores from each spot about six inches deep. And since this is one contiguous field, I just mixed all of those in a bucket and that was my one soil sample that I used for the entire for the entire half acre of production. I sent that off to Logan Labs. I don't know off the top of my head. I don't remember how much that cost. Maybe we could put it over here somewhere. And really there are a few things that I'm looking for when I do a soil test. I know it's a divisive issue. I know you can send soil tests to different places and get different results. But really all I'm looking for are any significant deficiencies in micronutrients that can be applied when I do an initial tillage. That way I can go ahead and work those into the soil. And the other two things that I'm looking for are pH to make sure that my pH is level. Here we don't have too many pH issues. We seem to we seem to be right where we need to be. The other thing that I'm looking for is percent organic matter. So to be clear when we started this this new garden we were starting with four and a half percent organic matter which is probably more than any other farm that I have grown on combined. So we were very blessed to have a really high organic matter here. And then the other thing that I did was get a really good site assessment. So fortunately I've been going to church here. My family's been going to church here for several years now. So we've seen this field every week at least once a week throughout all the seasons of the year. I know that there's a low spot on this ground. It's right underneath where the tunnels are which is not ideal. But I do know that even with the significant rains that we've had this spring there's no ponding or pooling or water issues. So even though it's a low spot I know that the drainage on this plot is good. So that's not anything that we're going to have to worry about. You know here in zone officially zone seven we get 55 to 60 or more inches of rain a year and it's been a very wet spring. So we can always add water when we need to. We are fortunate to have a lot of easy access to water here but it's a lot harder to take it away. So we wanted to make sure that we didn't have any drainage or water issues when we were setting up the plots or if it was anything that we could avoid. So you can go back and check how to determine drainage rates there or even compaction issues like the rebar test. I really like using a piece of rebar particularly because the penetrometer is going to determine pounds per square inch or if you look at the end of a rebar that piece is about one square inch and then you can kind of guess how much weight you're putting on it. So I'm about 150 pounds and I can determine if I can get that rebar into the ground fairly easily. I know I'm well below the 150 pound compaction rate. So you can go to the Web Soil Survey. I believe it's websoilsurvey.com. Type in the location or the address of the field that you want to look for and mark out the parameters on a map using this tool here and then you can get a profile of the field that you're looking at. So there might be some information on there that you can't see just by looking at the field like typical depths to the water table or any restrictive features that are below the soil. You can get a little better picture of the slope of the land or the contours of the using the Web Soil Survey as well. So that's a that's a great tool that I recommend everybody use. One more note about a site assessment is like what is the vegetation telling you? I don't know a lot about weeds and what they mean but I do know that I can walk out into a field and see what vegetation that I'm going to have to deal with as a grower in the future. So whenever we walk this field we know that it had a lot of red clover a lot of johnson grass and I knew that I was going to have to get that under control before we started producing. So walking the field is going to give you a really good idea about what weeds you're going to curse for the rest of your life. Hopefully not. So knowing that we had a lot of johnson grass here I was going to have to find a way to tarp or occultate the ground for as long as humanly possible before we pulled it back and I was going to need to do that during the johnson grasses growing season. You can tarp over the winter and that might clear some ground depending on the species that you're dealing with but it's not going to do anything to summer grasses they're just going to come back. So like I said we started in May of last year and after getting a soil test after seeing what weeds were out there I mowed the section that was going to be garden space very low and I stretched out four 50 by 100 farmer's friend tarps. So one of the experiments that we're running here is what effect tarping or occultation has on perennial johnson grass or rhizomus johnson grass. So one of the plots was tarped for three months that was pulled off and put into fall production of carrots and garlic. Another tarp was left on there for three months and pulled off for overwinter production of brassicas and root crops that's also where our caterpillar tunnels went. The third quadrant to the third tarp was left on for approximately six months it was pulled off and sewn to a cover crop of winter wheat and then a fourth tarp was left on for approximately nine months so from May till the following spring early spring late winter that was pulled off and beds were made for spring production of brassicas and root vegetables. And one of the things that I like to stress is a sort of order of operations for using tarps to manage weeds. So generally how it breaks down on this garden is we leave the tarps down for as long as possible to take care of the particular weeds we need to take care of. So in the case of johnson grass as long as possible. So the tarps were left on when they are pulled back that is when we add our amendments based on our soil test and I've got a breakdown of what amendments we did use and the amounts and the dollar value so we'll keep a running total here for people that are playing the game at home. So we added those amendments to a plot after the tarp was pulled up and we did that using just a typical lawn spreader. So we mix the amendments together in the appropriate amount per 50 by 100 foot plot apply it with a spreader and then that's when we do our initial tillage with a rotary plow. So we will go ahead and rotary plow the plot laterally not the direction of the beds and I'll tell you why in just a minute. So we're incorporating all of those mineral amendments this is also like the ideal time to incorporate any organic matter you have like compost but we just don't have access to any. So one of the caveats to starting this garden is we're doing it without compost. Now we are using a little bit of wood chips and a lot of leaf mold for its mulching effect but we're not using any compost as such when starting this garden. So we rotary plow in all of our mineral amendments and then we wait for a rain and after that rain we're going to recover the area with the tarp for at least an additional two weeks more like four to six weeks if we're doing it in the winter time. And what that's going to do after we do our initial tillage and bring all of those weed seeds to the surface since we don't have compost for a mulch or we're not doing any plastic mulch or anything like that we are terminating all of those annual weeds that come to the surface. So when we pull the tarp back the second time we've taken care of our perennial weed issues with the initial tarping and then we have taken care of our most of our annual weed issues with the second tarping. So then when we pull it back it's time to go ahead and prep beds. Now one of the reasons that we plow the plot laterally is you get these weird furrows on either side of your plot when you're using the rotary plow. So what we did was fill in that space with a lot of wood chips and then we put a three foot wide woven fabric weed barrier down just at the head of the of the bed or of the plot and that's where our irrigation header is going to go. That way you know as we're irrigating throughout the season we don't have to worry about moving it to mow underneath it or it getting weedy you know it's leaking water weeds really like to accumulate there. And just a note about like the BCS and the rotary plow and some of the other implements that I use on the farm I really think this is a good opportunity because we only use the rotary plow really to set up beds or to fix any drainage issues that we see. These are tools that aren't necessarily time sensitive and I think that a BCS could be shared amongst several half acre to one acre market gardens just because when you're producing in this style you just don't need that level of mechanization all the time and you certainly don't need it right away. It's something that you could plan or schedule out and it would be a super super easy tool and very costly tool that could definitely be shared. So yeah after a couple few weeks under the tarp a couple few is a totally legitimate number down here in the south we pull it back and we're ready to prepare our beds. So the order in which I do bed prep is when we pull the tarp off we'll go ahead and mark out where the beds are going to be. Now I do beds a little differently. I do a three foot wide bed and a two foot wide walkway. I like a little more walkway than just 18 inches. I grow a not small number of larger crops especially in the fall so brussel sprouts, a lot of full-size kale, cabbages, stuff that also tends to canopy out into the aisleway. If you've got just 18 inch pathways and 30 inch beds then you've got to tromp through a lot of those crops and break off some leaves or you can't get harvest bins down when they have fully canopied out. So I like that extra six inches of aisleway and I just took that extra six inches and I just applied it to the next bed. So instead of 30 inches I've got 36 inches. So spreading everything out just a little bit I feel like makes for a lot more space to move around comfortably in which I think is is just as important if not more important than efficiency is being able to move comfortably. The other thing that we did is we have 50 foot long beds so we're not doing 100 foot beds we're doing 50 foot. You could really psychologically wrap your head around 50 feet's worth of work better than you can 100 feet's worth of work so it allows us to stay a little bit longer. The other reason is 50 feet's worth of material is a lot easier to manage by one person than 100 feet's worth of material especially if you're getting into tarps that have water on them or medium weight row covers that span multiple beds. Because of the size of this garden it's only a half acre so we're probably only able to employ one and a half full timers given when a certain job needs to be done say with a tarp or with row covers I'm not always going to have a dedicated other person out here with me or maybe I'm not going to be here and my part timer is here they're going to need to be able to navigate those materials by themselves and if we've got 100 foot long stretches of tarps those are a lot more difficult to deal with than a 50 foot section so that's the other reason that we've broken things off into into 50 foot beds. On top of that a farmer's friend tarp is 50 by 100 so we just use that as a standard plot layout so in a 50 by 100 foot space given five foot bed centers we've got about 20 beds in each plot. Now in each plot I've subdivided that in half so really for planning purposes I have 10 beds in a section 20 beds in a plot and four plots in my field. And then one more reason I forgot about this why we broke things off into 50 foot sections is for caterpillar tunnels. So this being a lease situation and we're really you know trying to make sure that that everything is working smoothly between between all parties and that it's beneficial for everyone I didn't want to put permanent infrastructure in right away but for the time being we're just running on caterpillar tunnels. Part of me farming part-time which we can get into later is I don't have time to come out here and raise and lower sides all the time especially after rains push the sides down so a 50 foot caterpillar tunnel will ventilate passively much better than a 100 foot caterpillar tunnel. At a previous farm where we had 100 foot caterpillar tunnels if the sides were down and it got hot there would be a dead zone in the middle where there wasn't a lot of ventilation. We've always tended to see disease start there so at 50 feet air is able to travel the length of the tunnel it's able to passively ventilate much better and for the most part the sides can just stay down I don't notice a significant temperature difference in the center as opposed to the end and for the summer months we just leave the end walls completely off they're really just there to protect from the rain and actually diffuse the light and provide a little bit of shade and we'll cover some of them with shade cloth later in the summer but that's another reason why we went down to 50 foot beds is so that we could have 50 foot caterpillar tunnels and not have to worry so much about actively managing those for ventilation purposes. Okay back to bed prep. So how we prepare beds is we go ahead and line them out the first time with a string. I only do this once but I want to make sure that I've got my beds and my aisles exactly where they need to be. The first thing that we do is broadfork and then we will add our amendments. Now the amendments that I use I know there are a million philosophies on fertilization out there but again this being a part-time farm and me having to dramatically simplify a lot of the processes so that it can keep moving forward. The fertilizer that I use is RevitaPro which is a 5-4-5 composted chicken manure with kelp and some other micronutrients in there and we will apply that at a rate of five pounds per bed and then you can see how I got that calculation here because I'm going for on average depending on the crop about 100 pounds of nitrogen per acre. Maybe a little underneath that because you know we have such a high percentage of organic matter in this plot already. So I add five pounds to a 150 square foot bed. We will run the tilter to incorporate that into the soil profile because we don't just want it sitting on the soil surface. From there we add two to three inches of leaf mold. We also don't worry about raising the beds again we don't have any drainage issues here so raising the beds is going to be an unnecessary step. What we do instead is after we broad fork and we add that leaf mulch and then as we're walking in the aisleways those beds will naturally raise a little bit but it's not something that we actively worry about or manage again because we don't have any drainage issues it's a it's a waste wasted step. And just a another general note on the design of this farm from a layout perspective so we have four plots with a 10 foot grass strip in between each plot. Now that's just for the ease of driving a vehicle say if we're driving a truckload of materials say for the high tunnel construction we can drive it right up where it needs to be. We also have plenty of room for you know two large wheelbarrows to pass one another if we're moving compost or harvesting out of the field and moving crops around moving crops in for harvest rather. The other reason is I'm not quite up to the task of living pathways just yet but we feel like this is a good intermediary step so part of having the wood chips at the head and the foot of the bed is that's where water is naturally going to flow so we have sort of a buffer to catch any compost any sediment any erosion and then on top of that we've got these grass ways which will further aid in keeping that material at least in the plot that it's supposed to be in. All right how awesome was that breakdown? If you enjoy our work please consider picking up a copy of the Living Soil Handbook or other merch at notillgrowers.com become a patreon member at patreon.com slash notillgrowers or just hit that super thanks button that works too otherwise thanks for watching we'll see you next week bye