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"Think about it," Pat challenges. "Think about how the leaves
fall from the trees and land at their bases. Nobody comes to rake them up. They just stay there and decay - and they begin to feed the trees, those big, healthy trees. No one fertilizes them. No one cleans away the leaves and makes the forest floor neat and tidy but the trees flourish."
Pat and Howard both grew up in farming communities but had worked and lived most of their lives in Northern Virginia. They
knew they wanted to retire to a place where they could garden and when they saw this seven acre property in Fluvanna, with its south facing slope, they knew this was it.
"We became very interested in no-till gardening shortly after we started gardening here," Pat explains. "We tilled the beds the first year, and again the second year, but no more - we just pull
the mulch aside, plant, and pull the mulch back again." And,
indeed, the mulch is never removed - it is simply added to and
over-planted with cover crops in the off-season.
"Our favorite cover crops are bearded oats, field peas and hairy vetch," reveals Pat. "We broadcast the seeds, take the rake and tamp the mulch that is in place so the seeds to settle in, and let them grow." The oats and peas come up almost immediately and they grow and flourish until the frost kills them. The vetch grows a little but it's the oats and peas that take over the "resting" beds during the fall. When they die, Pat and
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Howard do not pull the cover crops up by their roots. The plants will simply fall over by themselves and there they will remain. In the early spring the vetch takes over and grows until the couple is ready to plant their food crops. Then the vetch is cut down to act as mulch and eventually it, too, composts in place.
Even when their vegetable crops are finished, the plant remains are composted in place. Pat says
that when it comes to the corn stalks, Howard will use the chipper/shredder and grind the stalks
down before returning them to the plot where the corn had grown. "You could just throw the whole stalks on the ground and they would eventually turn into compost but they're awkward to work around. It's easier just to break them up and give them a head start," she says.
"No-till gardening is based on improving the soil," Pat explains. "We keep the soil covered with
organic matter. Soil microorganisms (the "microherd" as they're affectionately known among some organic gardeners) feed on the organic matter, mixing it into the soil, and eventually the soil
changes. That's how Nature tills the soil. Because vegetable plants have a high nutrient
requirement, we also add our own finished compost at planting time. Depending on the vegetable,
we might add 1/2" compost over the whole bed, or we might just add a shovelful in each planting spot."
Pat is a Master Gardener with the Virginia Extension Service's Master Gardening Program and notes that there's usually a new Master Gardening class starting every year in late January. She
recommends it for anyone who wants to learn more about gardening. (Contact your local extension service for more details.)
"Soil is built from the top down," she continues. "Nature tills the soil that way and that's part of the philosophy of no-till gardening. We compost in place, perhaps adding a little more compost here
and there, and the microorganisms in the soil, the microherd, feed on the compost, dragging some
if it down with them, leaving behind their castings, and eventually the soil changes."
The soil in the vegetable beds has changed greatly in the seven years since they came to garden
here. As Pat pulls away a small circle of matted hay and other decaying cover to show off some of
her ready to harvest potatoes, she easily shoves her hand nearly wrist deep with little effort. The
soil is beautiful, dark loam - the kind of soil that even Martha Stewart would envy.
"Two of the principles of no-till gardening are to make sure that there is always something for the microherd in the soil to eat," Pat explains as the teaching side of her comes out. "The plants don't access the hay and cover crops directly. The microherd does and it's their waste that the plants eat. No-till gardeners always make sure that there is something for those organisms to eat so that the plants will always have something to eat. The second principle is that the organic material that composts in place, eventually breaks down and changes the texture of the soil for the better, which makes it easier for the plant roots to develop and take in nourishment." It definitely appears that
their gardening method is working well for their garden.
"We started planting from the very first year, of course," Pat says. "The crops were okay. We
started with the hay (spoiled hay was a favorite mulch of Ruth Stout, the method's founder) and compost and cover crops. "But it was somewhere about the fourth year that the garden took on
a new vigor - we just saw this really big change in the fourth year. This is the seventh year now
and we think the garden has made another big advance this year."
The no-till gardening method has another benefit that the couple enjoys. According to Pat, it's only
the northern most vegetable beds, those at the top of the hill, that must be watered every week
or so. "The lower beds don't seem to need the extra water," she says. "The thatch of mulch holds
in the moisture that the plants need and we don't need to water the lower beds very often. It's
really a big benefit of the no-till philosophy."
The additional compost that is applied to the beds in early spring comes from their property.
Leaving the leaves that fall beneath the trees on the property to feed the trees from which they
come, Howard takes the leaves that blow onto the grassy areas of lawn, along with grass clippings and chipped branches that have fallen or are groomed from the surrounding bushes and trees and
he composts them behind the couple's berry bushes on the northwest side of their property. The compost is used solely in the vegetable garden and not on any of the many beautiful perennial
beds that surround the property. "We use the no-till method with them, too," Pat states, "but
they have to rough it on their own, compared to the vegetable beds."
If the condition of Pat's and Howard's perennial beds is based on roughing it, then their vegetable beds are nothing short of a five-star restaurant for plants and there's not a tiller, man or machine,
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