Fifty Plus Gardening bythe Month

Tilling: Not All It’s Cracked Up to Be

Soil Conservation Starts at Home

To till or not to till? Louis Bromfield, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, famous playwright and pioneering conservationist, posed this question nearly a century ago. Well, 80 years ago anyway, and people are still undecided today.
As you travel through the rural countryside in the spring it is not uncommon to see huge plowed fields, acre upon acre of freshly turned soil. If it is raining, the field may be a mucky, compacted mess. Wet soils clump when tilled and then dry in hard, rock-like masses.
If the weather is dry, it can be even worse. Dry soil turns to fine dust when plowed, with clouds of dirt swirling in the air, away from the fields. These sights might make you wonder: Where did we go wrong? How can people not realize what this is doing to the earth? Don’t they know about the dustbowl and the Great Depression?

Lessons from Malabar Farm
Two separate events prompted today’s article. My son and I recently attended the Mohican Wildlife Weekend, an annual event in Mansfield, Ohio. While there, we toured Bromfield’s Malabar Farm, learning a bit more about his pioneering conservationist persona.
The second is recent news of how farmers are taking land that had been put aside for conservation and return it to “productivity.” The symbol often used for this transition is a plow.
The government operates a Conservation Reserve Program, in which they pay farmers to leave some land fallow. With record-high grain and corn prices, farmers are pulling land out of this program and plowing and planting it at escalating rates.
Louis Bromfield demonstrated that conservation practices worked. You could produce food on the land and not abuse it or deplete it, and still have room for wildlife. How can something so transformational in the 1930s still be novel in the 21st century? Why are practices that were proven to be counterproductive in the 1920s still the norm?
You may be thinking, “I am not the owner of a large commercial farm. How does this apply to me?” You can do many things to conserve soil from erosion, both on your little plot of land and more globally.

Develop New Spring Rituals
Many gardeners till their gardens every spring. Malabar Farm had a display showing the incredible soil loss of small plots when they are tilled. The soil loss is amplified by even the slightest grade.
Tilling is a ritual of spring for many gardeners. Seeing the fresh, weed-free tilled soil is a sign of renewal. And it is apparent that tilling works, because the weeds are eradicated, right? Wrong.
In reality, tilling has little effect on most weeds and actually helps some. Perennial weeds have extensive root systems that extend far underground. They quickly sprout back after tilling.
Some weeds, such as comfrey, dandelions and quackgrass, even benefit by tilling. Tiny bits of roots created by the tiller each grow into new plants. Tilling also brings buried weed seeds back up to the soil surface, allowing them to germinate.
A simple alternative to tilling, that at the same time amends the soil, is to smother the weeds with an impermeable layer of mulch such as newspaper or cardboard. Punch holes in the mulch for plants, or remove it to plant seeds after everything has been smothered.

Change Weed Strategies
Some gardeners plant rows wide enough for a tiller to pass between the rows, thinking that tilling is a quick and easy method of weed eradication. However, when you till between the rows you are merely knocking the weeds back and damaging the side roots of your crops in the process.
Wide rows, if you have the space, are nice, but not to bring a tiller through. Rather, wide rows reduce damage to delicate crop side roots by reducing soil compaction. Other ways to reduce this compaction is to place boards in your path rows, to distribute your weight over a larger area. Heavy mulching effectively controls weeds in the rows.

Direct Your Dollars
When you purchase produce, try to buy from farmers that have good conservation practices. These are usually small, local farmers, so you are also benefitting the local economy.

Consider the Factor of Ten
Farmers are plowing more land because grain and corn prices are up. It takes ten times as much grain and corn production to feed an animal and then eat the animal as it does to eat the grains and corn ourselves.
Eliminate the middle-animal, and you have ten times as much food, and certainly more healthy land. An added benefit of being vegetarian is that it is much healthier for you.

Malabar Farm

The next time you find yourself in central Ohio, I encourage you to visit Bromfield’s estate in Mansfield. It is now a state park, and has great displays and tours of Bromfield’s conservation practices. Their goal is to be fully self-sustaining by the year 2010.
The farm is in Richland County, Ohio, about halfway between Columbus and Cleveland. See malabarfarm.org or call (419) 892-2784 for more information.

Marie Gardner has an M.S. in biology and a Ph.D. in education and is a Virginia Master Gardener. Email suggestions for future columns to MGardner@vcu.edu. Please include "garden column suggestion" in the subject line.

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