No-Till Gardening and Ibuprofen…

…Go together like peas and carrots. No really.

One of the first things that excited me about buying a house is having a garden. We always had one growing up, normally overflowing with peppers, radishes, carrots, and a special tomato bred by my great uncle Tom. That’s not the only attraction: Heather and I are into local produce and food and nothing gets more local than the front yard and I need another hobby that doesn’t abuse my feet as much as my triathlons.

This year, we had a failed attempt at growing. Heather and I raised our plants from seed, setting up a greenhouse in our dining room, watering, watching, warming the sprouts until the day we transplanted them into the raised beds. Then they died. Something about hardening them off or some such crap. Tomatoes were a total loss, the peppers came back a little, the lettuce and microgreens finally started growing, but no radishes, carrots, cucumbers or peas. So, I decided to take drastic action. Gone are the two 4 by 8 raised beds and in their place, six neat 30″ no-till rows.

The principle is simple: your garden mimics nature. Nature doesn’t till or turn soil, it simply dumps this year’s waste on top of the last and lets bugs, rain, and heat do the rest. The no-till concept is pretty easy: lay down some newspaper; cover with organic matter; cover with even more organic matter; repeat steps two and three; wait.

I grabbed a few pictures of the process, so here you go:

This is the pepper bed in the foreground and the remains of the tomato bed in back.

View looking toward the house, beds in back.

String outlines of the beds.

Five truckloads of horse manure later…

Finally, covered with some old straw and hay for the winter.

Now we just wait. Beaufort, SC is in Zone 8/8a so I could plant a fall/winter crop, but I’m going to let the beds compost a bit first. Hopefully another topping of aged poop in the spring and the beds will be good to go.

I do have another bed that I’m going to do a winter crop of lettuce, greens and some root veggies. No pictures of that yet, but I’ll get some shortly. Now, one last picture:

photo credit: JasonRogersFooDogGiraffeBee