No-till Gardening Questions
© Deborah Turton
What if grass comes up through the paper?
If you catch it early enough, you can easily pull it out. The other option is to move the mulch aside, cover it with paper and put the mulch back on. If it's a particularly invasive weed, you can leave the paper uncovered. Just use some rocks to weigh it down. The paper decays faster when it's wet, so by keeping it dry you can outlast the weeds. I had to do this when I lived in Alabama. The Bermuda grass was so invasive that I couldn't mulch in my garden to control it. Instead I used rocks to weigh down the paper and this kept the Bermuda grassed to tolerable levels during the growing season. Unfortunately, this isn't too visually appealing for the flower garden. There I spent a lot of time weeding out the Bermuda grass. I tried the landscaping cloth. That worked really well. Only Bermuda grass can grow through that. You can get a nice pure stand of the stuff that way.
What if my paper hasn't decayed yet?
My paper doesn't decay over the fall either. I poke holes in it and plant my transplants. Add some compost under the paper when you do this. As your plant grows bigger, you ca spread some more compost around the soil above the roots.
Won't the soil become hard if I don't till it?
No. Next question Actually, soil is held together and made porous by all the nice organisms living in it. When you till the soil, you destroy this community of organisms. They need time to recover. While they're recovering, your soil can pack down or wash away. When you no-till garden, you cultivate those organisms, so the individual soil grains are held together. As long as you don't walk on your garden beds it will remain light and airy. Of course, it may take a few years to get that way, but once there, it will provide lots of air and nutrients for your plants.
Walk around your yard with a shovel. Try sticking it in your perennial beds that you don't till at all. If you've been mulching and adding organic matter to the top of your soil, your perennial beds should be easily shoveled. When I moved my blueberry bushes a few years ago, the soil was easily dug. Nobody had done anything to it for 20 years. The leaves had accumulated on top of it and been incorporated by the worms. Now try digging in your lawn. Most people add little to no organic matter to the soil, and the lawn is tramped on regularly. Even though this isn't tilled, it's going to be harder to dig. The foot traffic causes compaction. The lack of organic matter limits the organisms living under your soil.
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