Many gardeners till their gardens to aerate the soil, dig out weeds, and improve the soil’s fertility.
While it has numerous advantages, excessive or inappropriate tilling also has its negatives.
Should you till your garden or not? What are the possible repercussions of too much or inaccurate tilling?
To answer these questions, you must understand the right depth, method, and time to till your garden.
Why You Should Till Your Garden
Soil tilling is done for a variety of reasons. Even expert gardeners recommend it twice a year (during spring and fall) to keep the soil healthy.
However, it’s important that you learn how to do it the right way. Otherwise, you could be doing your soil more harm than good.
Here are the most common reasons why you should till your garden:
It warms the spring soil.
Among the many advantages of tilling is that it allows the soil to warm up quicker in the spring.
Tilling improves soil air quality and stimulates the growth of aerobic microorganisms.
As a result, organic compounds break down faster, generating heat as a by-product.
It amends the soil in the fall season.
Organic residues, such as withered vegetable plants, get added to your soil if you till it during the fall season.
In time, this debris degrades and enriches the soil, increasing its nutritional and moisture content.
Plants need nitrogen and carbon for growth and proper soil composition.
Organic additions like compost, leaf litter, grass clippings, and other materials during tilling enhance the nutrient richness of the soil.
It aerates the soil.
Another benefit of soil tilling is that it aerates and allows oxygen to penetrate the soil bed.
Doing so provides a solid foundation for newly grown roots and allows water, nutrients, and oxygen to reach these roots.
Excessive drainage from a no-till soil bed can remove topsoil and leave crops dry.
Moreover, pockets in tilled soil hold water and allow excess water to flow down into the soil, preventing sodden roots.
It helps control weed growth.
If you are not a fan of weeds, regular tilling is a great way to keep them out of your garden.
Using a tiller early in the season may help remove troublesome weeds before they can establish root systems.
Perennial weeds may be cut off at the knees by fall tilling, which stops them from storing energy throughout the winter months.
Why You Should NOT Till Your Garden
While loosening up your garden’s soil has its advantages, there are also possible issues you may encounter.
This is especially true if you don’t learn how to till your garden correctly.
So, should you till your garden or not? To help you decide, it will also help to look at its disadvantages.
It can cause erosion.
Raising and loosening the soil by tilling increases its susceptibility to erosion. In case you don’t know, erosion is the primary cause of soil degradation.
Maintaining the topsoil in place is facilitated by the organic material above it, both living and decaying.
All that biological material is turned on its head when the soil is tilled.
The problem with this is that it makes even the best soil more vulnerable to being washed away by downpours or swept away by winds.
It dries out the soil.
The best time to till your garden is in the late winter or early spring when the soil is still a bit wet to prevent the soil from drying out.
If you don’t, the microbes that keep your soil healthy and nourished will be destroyed.
No-till raised gardens, on the other hand, can drain well.
Using raised beds and positioning organic items above the soil may help avoid waterlogged soils by encouraging soil organisms to eat them.
It may allow dormant weeds to multiply.
Tilling is commonly cited as a way to get rid of weeds since it breaks up the roots and harms already-existing plants.
The chopped roots theory isn’t entirely wrong.
However, the difficulty is that soil changes (and root cuts in particular) may expose dormant seedlings to the environment, allowing new weeds to proliferate.
Disturbed soil encourages weeds to flourish.
It can deplete soil life.
The paradox of tilling is that although it may increase soil productivity, this advantage only lasts for a limited period.
Fertility comes from the decomposition of soil life. Inevitably, repeated tilling depletes soil life and robs it of its former richness.
Many garden-friendly creatures are destroyed when we till, especially when we do it using machines.
Keep these things in mind before you set out to till your garden:
- Start at one end and work your way to the other. This is the best approach.
- Before you begin mowing, create a strategy for doing so. Work your way up the tiller row by row.
- Don’t rush, and don’t keep going back and forth. Excessive tilling may cause the soil to become compacted rather than loosened.
It is too labor-intensive.
No one is particularly eager to begin plowing the ground.
Even with the aid of a rototiller, the task is far from easy and requires a great deal of backbreaking labor.
In addition to being better for the environment, new no-till systems are also more user-friendly.
Digging, twisting, and cutting up heavy earth is no longer necessary.
You can have healthy, well-structured soil over time if you add compost and mulches over the top.
It has no long–term benefits.
Tilling does not offer any long-term benefits to the soil, and its effects are temporary.
Some may even say that the long-term loss of soil life offsets the short-term gain in fertility.
It’s possible to lose the topsoil, leaving you with just bleak subsoil to plant in.
That said, it might be best to work with and nurture the soil instead of breaking it apart.
Working in tune with nature means not using chemical fertilizers and not over-tilling the soil, which creates dust bowls.
On the other hand, nature tends to provide results that are simpler to get and need less work.
It has a considerably longer lifespan than people since it is much better at gardening than humans are.
It may be better to use mulch instead.
Over time, well-mulched gardens absorb and distribute water more evenly, preventing the soil from becoming soggy.
As the mulch protects plants from wind and rain damage and gives nutrients, weeds simply cannot thrive in organic gardens.
Many gardeners now mulch heavily in the autumn or winter instead of tilling in the spring.
Should You Till Your Garden or Not?
Tilling your garden has both its positives and negatives.
Making sure you till your garden properly and at the right time can minimize the damage to your soil and maximize its positive impacts.
If done correctly, tilling can help improve your garden by aerating the soil and controlling weed growth.