Tilling time

   Timing is everything….
   The best times for roto-tilling vary on location, soil types, prospective crops, cover crops and local weather conditions…
   In this area, we get most of our rain in the winter… and the temperatures in winter are usually pretty decent.

   Most of the native forbes growth here is in the winter when the rains enable growth, and the nice temps encourage lush growth.  I like to let the winter-time native weeds and grasses grow through most of the winter. They can form a nice dense carpet of green that I can then roto-till into the soil… putting that nourishment back into the soil, while simultaneously adding a huge amount of green matter to the soil. This will in time break down into that soil-building material called humus. An abundance of humus is usually characterised by a dark soil, with excellent friability (workable, breaks apart easily, has air/water pore spaces). These same characteristics enable easy penetration by roots, and a flourishing soil micro-fauna/flora environment…. this is the true key to building soil. You need to get those little critters that are in the soil to high numbers…. they will secret enzymes that help plant growth, and further break down the natural soil particles, freeing the good minerals for the plant growth.

   Soil must not be tilled when it is too wet, nor when too dry… it is something you have to learn for your own soils…. if you really must till today for some reason, but your soil is too dry, you should have watered it a few days beforehand, tilled dry it can turn into a powder that repels water, and when still dry can easily blow away. If it is too wet, you will beat it into a mass much as a potter expels air from clay.

   Treat your soil right…. if you don’t, you’ll lose harvest.  Your soil will also be harder to work… weeds will be harder to pul out….. and you’ll have more hard or powdery patches where nothing good will grow.

  This is one of our terraces…. it has not been tilled for nearly a year… and the native nettles (a really excellent green food source full of minerals) have grown pretty rampant at this end…. the other end of the terrace has more shade, and the chickweed (another wild edible green) have grown heavily at that end.  This is a good stage to till them into the ground… they have not yet set seed, but are just now starting to open flowers… so the top growth has nearly as much nutrients as it will ever carry, and it is still no risk at all of having viable seeds that will mean a quick resprout.

  This close-up of the nettle shows the flower development. These forbs are chock-full of nutrients, and that will all go back into the soil in a form that the little soil-building creatures can use easily. Their numbers will go into an explosive growth. And then after they have assimilated much of the green nutrients, they will die, other creatures will use their bodies, and that waste product is much of what the human-sown food-crop will feed on.  Managed in this way… this soil will only get better and better year by year. It is sustainable forever…. true, we could grow a food crop instead of the weeds to be turned in…. but that wears the soil out faster… this way may reduce the yearly yield… but the yield can be sustained indefinitely….. So we get one good crop yearly, rather than the three that might be possible. Also, since our main crops are a long-term cactus that we grow in one location for six years… we can’t till the soil once the crop is in. So I like to let the soil get to a high state of fertility before I plant our cactus.  Then after growing cactus for five or six years, we let the weeds grow for a few years tilling the ground a couple of times yearly…. in that few years we’ll get a couple of food crops from them also… but this is incidental to the micro-crop we grow in the soil to ready it for the cactus again.

   This is the other end of the terrace… this end had grasses and chickweed growing in it.
   One pass with this most excellent and powerful tiller turns the grasses under quite well…. I’ll till it again in another two months after the weeds have regrown.  Yes, they will re-sprout quickly in this warmish winter weather we are having right now…. this is one of the most important parts of this operation… you must analyze the current weather conditions along with your soil conditions, soil moisture, projected weather and how that will influence what you do now…..
   In this case, we have rain projected in a few days…. this warm weather we have now, and the general high levels of moisture in the soil (it is moist, but not too wet to till) will cause the weeds to sprout within days… the rain will encourage them to grow… as usual we’ll surely get some patches of warm weather making for quick growth, some patches of cool rainy weather (we hope) to enable growth…. perhaps I’ll be tilling this again in two months…. mid March or April. We’ll get little or no rain after that…. one tilling or two, and I’ll gently rake the soil once a week for a few weeks…. that will kill most of the weeds that will want to grow.. then I’ll set posts and lay fencing wire and some drip-emitting waterline.. and plant the gourds we plan to grow on these terraces this year.  They will have little competition with weeds due to the raking… and the rest of the soil will get no supplementary water…. so weed growth there will be inhibited, and later when the large rangy gourd leaves blanket the soil, hardly anything will be able to grow through.

   Our hillside plantings are all terraced…. the terrace widths vary depending on the grade of hillside.  I like to leave a terrace unsown here and there…. these provide access, workspace for packing etc… they also enable that terrace to grow its weeds through most of the year… I also use them to toss any plant refuse that I need to get rid of. Prunings, spent plants, plants felled in storms or eaten from the roots by gophers can all get tossed into this ‘unused’ terrace.  You can see the oak-tree prunings laid onto this terrace…. some of these branches are nearly two inches thick… but they have been laying there since we trimmed the oaks in the summertime…. they are dry and brittle…. or half rotted already… the soil is so biologically active….
   With our big huge strong tiller we can plow right into this assemblage of cactus prunings and their sprouts, and the oak tree trimmings and the grasses…. this will all get churned and cut and mixed into the soil… actually, I enjoy doing this…. there’s a certain kids’-play at work here… being destructive, chopping stuff up, hacking away and breaking things and making a lot of noise while doing it…. but I can assuage much of my guilt at destruction by knowing that I am participating in a population explosion of the soil-builders…. I am in essence setting up certain conditions favorable to this collection of critters… I am ‘farming’ the micro-flora and fauna…. in essence this is my true crop… and my harvest is the many pounds of creatures that will ‘do their thing’ and help enrich the soil in the process.
   The amazing thing is the improvement in our soils through the years…. now for sure, it’s not been fast… it’s taken almost 20 years to get this soil to this condition….. but when I started it was mostly a shale-based rocky soil composed of the frayed and fractured shale bedrock.  These shales are built up from the clay particles of some long-ago landscape… they were washed to a shallow sea that sat here some 14 million years ago….. the layers of clay gathered and deepened through millions of years… then it was all compressed into a loose rock…. these rocky layers can be tilled and decomposed over the course of years, replicating what nature does over centuries. But you really have to enlist the help of the micro organisms.. they do the right amount of soil-etching while adding the humus that wil release humic acid… eating into the rock….

  

     This is the same area after being tilled. You can see how deep the soil is… the dark rich color…. and the bits of chopped cactus and oak branches… this area will be tilled again once or twice before being planted with gourds.
   Bit by bit, this soil will do nothing but get better.

   Here we show some of the terraces higher up… the ground is steeper here…
   We leave the up slope untouched… I only till a two foot-wide area…. the grasses on the slopes keep everything hooked together, reducing soil erosion (eliminating we hope).  Sure, we can only get one row of cactus in…. but we can use the hillside safely, and not cause any erosion issues. In fact, these terraces eliminate run-off from our hillside. The slope makes for water retention. I have designed them so that they flow from one to another so the water is retained.  I really like keeping the water that falls…. it is so much better for the soil than the well water we have to pump.  Breaking the soil up with terraces allows the water to penetrate. Properly designed slopes will keep water from gathering speed, and allow it to infiltrate well.  You don’t want to lose your water, your soil, or your organic matter.  The grasses on the slopes will suck up plenty of rainfall in the winter…. in the summer they die and don’t pull water up at all.

   In the early summertime I have to mow the slopes as the annual grasses will grow their seed stalks…. in that case I like to let the seeds mature on the grasses… they get heavy and fall from the stalks… then I weed whack them… the stalks and the seed heads will fall onto the roto-tilled section.. covering the soil as a mulch… they will also be tilled in the next year, adding to the soil organic-matter content. And the matured seeds will sprout when the autumn rains come, growing another mat of green vegetation that I will be able to till-in the next winter.

   These terraces are only four years old. We will likely plant cactus on a couple of them this year… but may leave one open… it is rockier than the others and will need another couple of years work to get better. In the meantime, it will be the terrace that will serve to hold all organic scraps from nearby operations on other terraces. This will all add to its fertility when tilled in again…..

   These terraces will have a number of years before I will consider the soil optimum for planting….
   But as with the others… I consider it a five year project to get a soil to good shape…. unless it is virgin forest soils….. those are the best already… thousands of years of leaf mold makes for good soils…. and if these techniques are used on those soils, they also can remain in fine shape forever.