No-Till Garden - Tallahassee, FL

Contact me if you want me to consult with you on no-till bed construction details. I could work with you to construct your 1st 2-3 beds then you could do the rest.  Process and workflow are key to building these beds quickly with the least amount of labor.

Some Details to Consider:

1.  Compost quality effects veg/herb quality in the 1st year especially and beyond.  Make it yourself or get the best stuff you can find and inoculate it with BioComplete compost like the one I sell.   You may consider getting a soil and compost microscope assessment from me to understand what level of biology you are starting with.  Some compost is very poor in the biology department – that stuff should be free or very cheap because you will spend more energy to get it to nutrient cycle enough.

2.  If you intend to grow nutrient dense high demand plants which are most market garden vegetables, especially if insects and diseases are currently attacking the plants consider growing a diverse pasture (5-10 species especially with forbs) before covering it with compost.  This pasture may effectively prepare the top 40″ and kick start major nutrient cycling and microbial biodiversity.  If growing a pasture is out of the question expect to apply frequent foliar treatments of high quality compost tea (the soilfooweb.com way) and compost extract soil drenches or use AEA/John Kempf prepared amendments and recommendations, including sap analysis if you want to grow nutrient dense plants free of insect pests or other microbe attacks.  Please consider reviewing his podcasts, especially his explanation of the plant growing pyramid info graphic and how growing nutrient dense plants protect them for diseases and pests.

Kathryn and I installed this No-Till Market garden for two main reasons. 1) Reduce weeding labor from about 70% to 10% of our total gardening time and 2) quickly establish the soil food web so biology can grow the fertility – GROW YOUR OWN FERTILIZER – like nature does it. The goal was to get this garden naturally fully nutrient cycling.

This garden was 26 beds (50 ft long x31 inches wide per bed, 5-6inches deep of compost) with 17inch paths filled with woodchips (specifically ramial chipped wood). The paths were level with the beds. The planting area was about 3300sqft (not including paths).

The garden was built with a small 1/5 yard bucket front loader tractor (see photos) and the dump gator (side by side) in the photo. I dumped compost and wood chips into these buckets to move the material into position. Constructing two 50 foot beds/paths in 4-6hrs once I got my construction system worked out. It worked out best for me to build about 1-3 beds per week, depending on my other garden responsibilities that week. One bed alone is about is 80 5-gallon buckets or about five dump gator loads. Lifting down 80 buckets is a good amount of labor so spreading it over a few weeks helped out a lot to allow my body to recover. Each bed was about 2 cubic yards of compost. A 50ft path was about 40 5-gallon buckets.  

We had some help building 7-10 of the beds.  Our deepest appreciation and gratitude for all who helped and supported this project.

The main advantage of this method of bed construction was to almost eliminate the weeds – if the compost is weed free. 6″ deep of compost seemed to smoother most weeds except nut grass (nut sedge), Which we aggressively and regularly hand pulled which caused it to die off eventually. In retrospect I would have spent and extra $30-40 per bed to apply rolled packing cardboard because it is easy to install and will break down consistently. Using random cardboard pieces is problematic because it can bring in a verity of negative chemicals and breaks down at different rates. Plus installation of rolled packing cardboard is much easier.

This type of garden bed has an up front labor and material cost but the return is a no weed garden as long as all new weeds are pulled weekly and then monthly once the garden gets established. For warm season crops (tomato, pepper, squash, cucumbers, mellons…) can keep the Fungi to Bacteria ratio (F:B) at about 0.8 to 1:1 which will prevent many weeds from germinating.   Most weed seeds are programmed to germinate in bacteria dominated soils.   Disturbed soils (tilled, long term flooding, compacted….) are almost always bacteria dominated soils. 

Contact me for BioComplete(TM) Compost and microscope assessments of your soil, compost, compost tea and compost extract.

Grow Greatness,

Christopher