My No-Till Mulch Gardening

I grew up with a traditional garden - plowing in the fall, tilling in the spring, and tilling/hoeing between the rows during the summer. In Pennsylvania, bare soil means weeds. I spent countless childhood hours fighting weeds in the garden. The work didn't hurt me, but the battle with weeds wasn't enjoyable and the weeds always won. 

When I married, Ed introduced me to mulching. We collected grass clippings from our yard and used them to mulch the garden. Sometimes we also layered cardboard and newspaper. I was amazed at the difference. Covered soil results in far fewer weeds. But it was always a fight every spring to get enough grass clippings to cover the freshly-tilled soil before the weeds grew. We usually loss. 

Over the years I have read about mulch gardening - a method of keeping your garden covered in mulch and not tilling the ground so weed seeds are not exposed. There was an older woman (I can't remember her name) who wrote about mulch gardening in Organic Gardening magazine decades ago, and I found a compilation of her articles. Lasagna Gardening was a popular book that came out twenty years ago. And Back to Eden has made the method popular in recent years. 

I've experimented with various mulching methods through the years, but got more serious the last two years. I'm hardly strong enough to handle our tiller and though my brothers are willing to help, it would be nice to be able to garden without always asking for help.

We have a large yard with many big trees so I started by layering grass clippings and leaves on sections of the garden. In the spring, the mulch had settled and began to rot, and I dug holes in the mulch and directly planted things like tomatoes, broccoli, and pumpkins. I had nearly no weeds. Success! 

But I wasn't sure how well I could plant seeds in mulch. 

Last fall I covered the whole garden with at least a small bit of mulch. This spring I did no tilling. Using a hoe, I pulled aside the mulch and planted onion sets, beans and corn seeds, and vegetable plants directly in the mulch. I had a large amount of finished compost from my compost pile that I added to the planting rows as well.

I was able to plant the entire garden with only a hoe - no tiller needed.

The result has been a lovely garden with almost no weeding. I'm still learning what ingredients such as lime that I'll need to add to my garden to increase its fertility. As mulch decompose, it can lock up certain nutrients which is why some people allow their mulch to rot before adding it to their garden.

Garden in June

After the strawberries were finished in June, my brother tilled under some of the old strawberries, and I planted some late beans and corn. These tilled areas immediately grew a fine crop of weeds. The contrast between the mulched and tilled areas was significant.

Potatoes were another experiment this year. I often have volunteer potatoes grow in the spring from potatoes that were missed in the harvest. I decided to have purposeful volunteer potato patch. 

When we dug our potatoes in the fall, I sorted out some of the small potatoes. We tilled one end of the garden, made rows, and planted those small potatoes. We then covered this section of the garden with leaves and waited for spring.

This spring the potato plants emerged.

Potato patch in June

Not every potato grew, so we had a few skippers in the rows, but it was a lovely potato patch, with no work at all in the spring.

Last week the potato plants were nearly dead so we started digging.

I first pulled out the plants, and since we had not hilled the potato plants, the potatoes were right at the surface under the mulch. This made digging potatoes much simpler, but it also meant that quite a few of the potatoes had green skin from exposure to the sun. The mulch from the fall had rotted down too much to protect them.  We should have added another layer of mulch in the spring to protect the potatoes from the sun. The green on potatoes is poisonous, but we'll cut off the green part and eat the rest of the potato.

But despite our dry weather, the potatoes were a great size - some larger than my hand. We are getting about a half bushel per row (my rows are short), which I think is about average from past years.

When we finish digging the potatoes, I plan to sort out the small potatoes and plant next year's crop. I'll try to be more diligent in adding another mulch layer in the spring, but otherwise, this experiment worked well enough to repeat.

I love gardening, but hate weeding, and mulching allows me to maximize my favorite parts of gardening (planting and harvest) and minimize the least favorite. I look forward to learning how to make this method work better for us.

Have you tried mulch gardening?