- As a gardener, I've grown in small spaces
for most of the seasons that I've been growing
until the last couple of years or so,
where I've grown in the soil.
And I've never tilled my soil at all
in those about two years,
that I've been an in-ground gardener, until last fall.
So you're probably thinking, "Why would Kevin,
the man who has gone to the UK,
toured Charles Dowding's market farm,
who has done a collaboration video with Charles Dowding,
and even has a picture of myself and Charles
framed in my office."
Why would I do the unthinkable and actually till my garden,
or dig my garden out?
And that's exactly what we're gonna get into
in this video.
So let's talk about tilling your garden,
why you actually may want to do it at least once,
but first, what is tilling?
It's really just the act of breaking up the soil surface.
Sometimes six, 12, maybe even 18 or 24 inches deep,
depending on the methodology that you use,
you could use a rototiller,
or you could just come in
with the old school double-dig method,
which actually Jacques, our resident garden hermit
here at Epic Gardening,
that's the way he built his first garden,
was double-digging the entire thing, which he says,
number one was a lot of work and number two,
he would never do again.
But why would you do this?
Why would you break the soil up to plant into a garden?
Well, if you have crazy compact soil,
it's gonna help break soil compaction.
It's also going to kill some weeds
or the ability to actually root up some gnarly weeds
and then filter them out from that garden planting area.
And typically what happens
is you mix in plant matter or organic matter
at the moment of tilling.
And then that first planting in after
tends to have a bit more of a nutrient release.
And so you have a nice strong crop
that first time after tilling.
Now, when you talk about like agricultural monocropping,
then that's really the only system they're running,
they're tilling, their reincorporating,
mostly synthetic or chemical fertilizers,
and then they're just doing that over and over again.
I'm not saying that's what we need to go towards,
but we do need to understand what tilling is
and then we can talk about the downsides.
So the first downside is almost the reverse of the benefit,
which seems very counterintuitive,
but actually tilling can increase soil compaction
at the layer below the depth that you till to.
So if you're coming in with a rototiller
or a shovel or something like that,
and you're going to be six to 12 inches deep,
well below the point where you stop tilling,
the soil is gonna get compressed and compacted down.
So for deep rooted vegetables and plants,
they're gonna hit sort of a, not a concrete layer,
but just a very, very hard layer,
which can, weirdly, stunt their growth and not help it.
Another thing you might notice is that
while you can get rid of the existing weeds by tilling,
maybe things like Bermuda grass,
where you need to get it really
deep there to get all those little rhizome chunks
out of there,
it can actually also increase the amount of weeds
that you see in your garden,
including things you've never seen before.
So think about it,
if you're taking soil,
that's never been disturbed before
and you're tilling it six inches deep,
there's a seed bed,
a weed seed bed, that kind of just lays dormant
and may have never had the resources
or the triggers to grow.
But when you start mixing it up,
bringing it up towards the surface,
you're planting in it,
you're adding organic matter into it,
that's the perfect moment for it to be triggered
and say, "Hey, look, my time has come.
I'm gonna start sprouting."
And I'm gonna have a crazy amount of weeds that are new,
that you may not have seen before.
The final and arguably the largest downside
to tilling your garden
is the effect that it has not on your plants,
but on the soil underneath them.
So what you're doing is
you are working up that soil, right?
So what about everything that lives in that soil?
You have your mycorrhizal fungal networks
that partner with the plant roots,
you have bacteria, you have earthworms,
you have invertebrates.
All of these things partner up together
and the soil really acts as this cohesive,
multi-species organism, so to speak,
to help your plants grow.
So when you're tilling
you are shredding that all up,
so bacteria that are adapted to maybe a certain depth
are getting moved to a different depth,
earthworms are getting ripped apart.
The mycelial networks are getting shredded
and they have to rebuild themselves.
And on top of that,
because you've caused so much destruction and disturbance,
you're gonna have a lot of organisms that die off.
And then that dying off, the carbon,
the nitrogen that's within their bodies
starts to decompose and be oxidized and become available.
So you get this sort of rush of nutrients in the soil,
mostly from the things that you have destroyed,
which seems nice,
but it's kind of like slamming a bunch of coffee.
Trust me, I've been slamming
probably too many cups of coffee
and it does not last as long as you might think.
It's not a long-lasting energy source.
So tilling the garden
and seeing that sort of death release of nutrition
might seem good at the start
but really after that fades away,
it's not gonna be great for the garden.
Well, I just spent the last few minutes
absolutely trash talking tilling,
so why would I have then tilled my garden,
especially when we did this redesign here in the backyard?
There used to be just a few beds here.
Now we have eight of these five by five beds
and we have these huge long beds
full of alliums right now, garlic, onions, leeks.
And honestly, everything is looking pretty stellar
after I tilled.
Well, Jacques and I both,
we study a lot from market gardeners,
market farmers, commercial farmers,
people who have to make a living gardening
and farming and actually producing at scale.
And when you're talking about, even no till growers,
a lot of no till growers have moved to a one till method.
And the reason is pretty simple.
We've talked about how you can shred up that soil life.
Well, here are the epic homestead,
what we did is we tested our soil
and our organic matter content was somewhere around 2%
and it's a very heavy, compacted clay.
So the sweet spot for organic matter
is somewhere around that five-ish percent range.
You could say maybe up to 10,
but somewhere in that 5% range.
So we were well under that amount,
we needed a little bit more organic matter,
we did a soil test.
We knew we were low in a couple of essential micro
and macro nutrients here.
So we wanted to work some of that into the soil
and we wanted to break up the soil.
So if you have organic matter contents
that are that low, think about it.
When you're tilling through that soil,
what are you actually killing?
There's not a whole lot of soil life to begin with.
We did a couple of soil samples where we dug down
and I'm talking, it's a light tan-ish clay,
no earthworms, not a lot of weeds,
almost nothing in there at all.
And so when you think about destroying a soil food web,
well, you need to build a soil food web to destroy it.
And we didn't really have much of one here at the homestead.
So a first initial till, I think,
is probably the optimal solution
for most of us
who are trying to grow in ground.
And unless you magically have
really fantastic soil from the start,
maybe it was growing something else in the past,
and you can just do a quick little compost addition,
plant it out, rake it out, and you form your beds up
and you're good to go.
But a lot of us here in suburban homes, I mean,
you're looking at fill dirt here
that they built the back of your lot with,
from some sort of backhoe that they just
leveled the whole backyard,
and you're not dealing with much to speak of.
And so you do need to supercharge it.
And then the other thing I wanna say here is,
you only have so many seasons of a garden in your life.
Let's say you started gardening when you're 30 years old.
I started when I was about 21.
So for me, let's hope I live till 90, right?
I got 69 seasons.
And at the latter half of my life,
I'm probably not just grinding out here in the garden.
So you don't have that much time to wait
for it to improve over a three, four or five-year timeline
if you really go all in on the no dig.
I think a one till method
makes a lot of sense for practical,
smaller space gardeners
who want a quick return on that first season.
And after that, don't ever deal with tilling it ever again.
So if like me,
you are trying to get a bit of a quicker turnaround
on turning that soil into something absolutely amazing,
here's what I would recommend.
First of all, I do highly recommend
getting a soil test done.
You can just grab some soil samples,
send it in to a lab or university,
and you'll get your organic matter content,
you'll get the type of soil that you have,
you'll have any nutrient deficiencies you might have.
Give it a till, whatever method you use is fine,
we used just a classic hand rototiller
that we rented from a Big Box Store
and then water it in quite well and let those beds rest
for at least a week or two.
So, if you're in a colder part of the world right now,
and it's starting to warm up just slightly,
it might be an okay time to do this before spring comes.
So you can actually give it some time
for that nutrient base to get worked into the soil
a little bit,
maybe for some soil life to actually start coming back in.
And then on top of that,
you can look at the soil and start weeding out
some of those stale seeds that have started to germinate
because you did the till.
So look, I always try to think as practically as possible
about gardening and not stick to one dogma or another,
not, "I'm tilling all the time"
or not, "I'm never tilling,
regardless of any circumstance whatsoever."
A hybrid approach is best, usually, for me.
So everything in the backyard has been tilled.
It will never be tilled again from then on.
I'm just gonna be adding compost, chicken manure, mulch,
building these beds up, of course, harvesting.
I mean, even the act of harvesting
does disrupt the soil a little bit.
So I just wanted to come on and share this with you guys,
because I've evolved, slowly over time in my methodologies,
from square foot gardening, to all containers, to balconies,
to microgreens, all of these different techniques.
It really is what works for you,
given that you know
why you're doing what you're doing in the garden.
And with that said,
good luck in the garden and keep on growing.