What are the advantages and disadvantages of “no-till” gardening?
Common-sense points gardeners to work their soil about as deeply as their backs will allow. Digging in generous quantities of manures and composts, burying cover crops, or just plain turning the soil improves the feel and look of the soil almost immediately. Increasing the organic content “is a good thing”. One of the benefits of tillage is that it loosens the soil by incorporating large quantities of air. The problem, however, is that it often incorporates too much which accelerates the breakdown of the organic material over and above the needs of the garden. In practice, simply covering the soil surface with a layer of organic material and letting nature do the job seems to work just as well, if not better, and it is considerably easier. One exception is heavy clay soil that has been undisturbed for an extended period of time. The best way of dealing with that challenge is to simply dig in a lot of organic material and to repeat the process a couple of times per year. Eventually, it
