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 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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