When we had initially brainstormed “Step 1 “ for preparing the field for veggie gardening, we thought our decision would be between:
A. purchasing a tilling attachment for the tractor
B. renting a labor-intensive hand-tiller
My dad with a post hole digger, surveying the field he marked out for a veggie garden plot.
At just that moment of decision I remembered having seen a grower from outside Blacksburg, VA preparing a pumpkin patch using a large black tarp. I got in touch with her to find out more about where she had purchased her silage tarp. Soon after, I came upon several no-till resources in a row, including the No-Till Market Gardener’s podcast and Charles Dowding’s book Organic Gardening: The Natural No-Dig Way (published in 2007), all of which made so much sense in bringing together my limited experiences with soil health.
My respect for handling soil with respect began with a huge mistake I am still trying to counteract.
In the spring of 2019 I had added a significant amount of sand to the compacted soil in our raised beds that was no longer draining well. The idea—which was recommended to me by zero growers!—was a disaster. Starting right away in the following months I was dealing with parasitic nematodes in the soil throughout that summer and fall, which showed up as root damage in everything from Swiss chard to beans, to sweet potatoes, to tomatoes.
Swiss chard roots with root knot nematode damage
I removed as much of the damaged root material as I could that fall, solarized 1 bed to see if I could make a dent in the parasitic nematodes, sought out nematode-resistant varieties of beans, peppers and tomatoes for the following year and hoped for better results. The spring/summer of 2020 showed similar widespread nematode damage, so I decided to make some more dramatic changes over the fall to eradicate the nematodes.
I reached out to Marco at Microbes by Marco in the summer of 2020 to ask for his input about fixing nematode trouble. He said that there shouldn’t be trouble with nematodes unless there is a serious imbalance in the soil. Up until then, I hadn’t realized that my input of of so much inert sand had really messed with the soil food web in my soil, compounded by the fact that I hadn’t done much to “feed” my soil since we had initially installed the beds in 2015 (only minor additions of home compost per year).
For the fall of 2020, I wanted to both add beneficial soil activity and target the nematodes I wanted to starve out. I ordered some inoculated grains from Microbes by Marco in hopes of jumpstarting the indigenous microbial growth in the soil, as well as Neem Seed Meal (2.5 lbs per 4’ x 4’ bed).
By the end of Feb 2021, we made a couple more moves. Gus and I did some extensive soil testing with a home-kit and found the soil was deficient in both Nitrogen and Potassium/potash, but pH level looked pretty good. I bought kelp meal (potash source), alfalfa meal (nitrogen, potassium and other elements), crab meal (nitrogen and calcium source, plus nematode reduction) and Black Kow (nitrogen) compost.
Once the early spring seeds that I had seeded directly started sprouting, I was already starting to enjoy the visible improvement. Time will tell if we have the root damage from nematodes that we had in the past, but the above-ground growth is already super improved.
So with that short-term exposure to the impact of feeding soil rather than feeding plants, I was ready to try out a very different approach to prepping the rural plot for its first in-ground beds. We knew there would be some good underground activity there, even if there were dense clay soil not far below the topsoil, because the field had been used for both goat and cow pasture in recent years, with lots of happy weeds on top to show for it.
June 11th - Step 1: heat-kill all existing weeds and their seeds.
After a quick mow with the tractor, we unfolded a 24’ x 100’ foot silage tarp over the ankle-high weed growth. We were able to easily cut the length of the tarp and overlap the 2 pieces to cover an area of 50’ x 38’. We covered all of the edges heavily with bricks and large 2 x 6 barn wood boards to keep it in place through an upcoming summer storms. We will leave it in place for 4 weeks through the upcoming hot weather and trust that trapped heat will do the weed-killing for us, without destruction to the beneficial visible and microscopic networks of creatures in the soil.
Silage in place. In the summer, it can take as little as 3 weeks to heat-kill weeds.