Hi Elaine:
I looked over Jeff's post and mine
again.
Jeff's argument was 'we till because Jethro Tull
said to'. Sorry, this is nonsense. Yeah, Tull's argument that plants eat fine
soil particles was largely wrong, Bargyla's photos notwithstanding, but in point
of fact before Jeff's post I doubt if you could have found more than a handful
of active farmers who are even aware of Tull's theory, much less slavishly
following it.
Farmers till for pragmatic reasons, mostly these
two:
1) to destroy existing competitive vegetation,
opening up space for their crops;
2) to allow high efficiency seeding and
transplanting tools the ability to function in opened soil.
Coleman makes a number of other arguments,
including the tendency of tillage to warm up soils in spring, and the benefit of
incorporating in the top six inches or so such materials as rock phosphate,
which otherwise will move very little into the active root zone if surface
applied.
The 'pulverization' Tull describes we now call
'secondary tillage'. As a clay raised gardener, I can tell you that if you dig
or till clay before it is sufficiently dry, you can get clods the size of small
bricks, and if you don't break them up into smaller pieces while they are a bit
moist, they will plague you for the rest of the growing season as physical
obstacles to moving about the garden, tripping you and stopping your
wheelbarrow! Providing sufficient size reduction of clods to allow passage of
equipment and personnel, seeders and transplanters, is a good thing, and
breaking up clods whilst mixing in organic matter makes it possible for the
benefits of the organic matter to more quickly affect the now exposed innards of
the clod. So at least, I think, there's a Goldilocks principle at work here, as
elsewhere.
No-till gardening is not that difficult, and Ruth
Stout describes it well enough for anyone to follow her simple advice and
succeed. On a larger, but still small scale, it is also possible but not so easy
for the smaller seeded crops, see http://www.seedballs.com/mcain.html
But putting this to work on a field
scale with the full spectrum of vegetable crops, especially in fields with high
perennial weed pressure, is frankly a daunting prospect. There hardly seems an
alternative to either tillage, or herbicides, to initially clean a field
infested with things like quackgrass, for example (Agropyron repens, or now
Eletrigia repens, I think)
Even Steve Groff doesn't grow every vegetable in
his no-till system: www.cedarmeadowfarm.com
I haven't heard of a no-till way to grow carrots,
for example, on a field scale.
Steel in the field still has its
place.
As long as that remains true, the real issue for
this list should be, what role can tea play in helping soil recover from
necessary tillage? How is tea as an additive to transplanting water, for
example, or as a soil drench pre- or post- cultivation? Can I put tea into a
hydromulch or hydroseeding application to get the microherd back into the
picture?
Of course, if some agro-genius can tell me a tea
method for making quackgrass pack its bags, and how to no-till grow carrots, I
am all ears.
And, it is possible to grow some very nice
vegetables using the rototiller, troybilt or other, if you add enough organic
matter to rebuild the soil you are destroying by tilling, which is something the
Rodales (pere et fils) always advocated.
As always, the TANSTAAFL priniciple is in full
force and effect.
My contrary, but hopefully not nasty, two
cents.
Frank Teuton
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