It’s the Science, whereby in a short while the soil in your garden literally turns from dirty to divine – very rich in foods for flowers, fruit trees, ornamentals, or vegetables. (Grow Rich image[1] from amazon.com)
Without digging, yes!
Cheryl Magyar gives you “6 Reasons To Stop Digging Your Garden + How To Get Started[2]” (01 July 2019, Rural Sprout). She says:
Now is the season to stop treating your backyard garden as a mini-farm and end the backbreaking work of digging once and for all.
Not only will your gardening “work” be more fun, you’ll end up working less hard too – which can only be a good thing.
Instead of digging up your garden, mulch it!
I have a direct experience in mulching our ricefield of 1 ha in our town of Asingan, Pangasinan, Philippines in the 1960s. I got the idea from American Edward H Faulkner: minimum tillage. I told the giant Howard rotavator tractor operator not to set the rotating blades to any depth but to simply pass the big, hulky thing over the field. My brother-in-law Inso said later he saw the operator smiling on the side. Why because he knew that would hardly use up any diesel fuel. But I also knew that the counter-pointed rotating blades will cut finely the weeds & soil in the same motion & mix them well on the upper surface of the soil, spread across the field as it went. My mulch!
Many years later, Inso told me he had continued that kind of mulching with his hand tractor and the results are as amazing – greater harvests. His neighbor farmers told him they had been imitating everything they saw him doing, but their yields were still much lower. He never told them about the mulching.
If you dig your garden, you are destroying the soil structure. Miss Cheryl says:
Fluffing the soil, then recompacting it, either by tractor or feet, destroys the intricate soil structure. It also prevents air and water penetration to the roots of the plants. Water is essential to the life of the plant; don’t cut off the supply, rather increase it by building the soil over time.
If your garden is covered green, meaning you don’t dig it, Miss Cheryl says, “The lack of bare soil prevents… seeds of annuals from germinating.” No weeds!
When you stop digging, over time your garden becomes more fertile. This will also encourage the multiplication of earthworms, which help aerate the soil, not to mention contribute their waste as soil wealth.
With your surface mulch, you will not have to water your crop every day, if at all.
And yes, you will experience higher yields in your Do-Not-Disturb Vegetable Garden as you add compost and organic matter to it.
There is another benefit if you do not disturb your garden. Miss Cheryl says:
Where you leave the soil unturned, beneficial organisms can thrive in their natural undisturbed environment. This allows for a balance between prey and predator species.
This is Gardening Without Pests!@517
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