Travis, I am so impressed by your willingness to try alternate methods of growing. As you suggest, context is very important. In zone 6b, we have much less pest pressure and mulch a lot, except brassicas, which we clean cultivate because of harlequin bugs. Also we mostly use transplants, so don’t need the clean seed bed that direct seeding needs. We started with very fertile soils so use modest amounts of compost and organic fertilizer and get very good results. We are talking about maybe 4000 sq ft vegetable garden, another 2000 sq ft beans and corn and winter squash.
I think it's important for folks to see a visual explanation of why certain methods work in certain areas. Many people have a blanket approach to gardening.
My garden is just a raised bed garden taking up about 35’x35’. Since it is small and made up of raised beds, I don’t till. I try to disturb my soil as little as possible, whenever possible. But that’s easy in raised beds. Having such large plots as you have, it would be a different story. My personal opinion is this: You have been having great success for a very long time doing things your way. While your operation may be smaller than many commercial operations, for 99.9% of us all, it’s huge. You guys are always responsible with your plantings. You don’t monocrop. You interplant varieties, rotate crops, grow cover crops and while you’re not entirely organic, you’re very natural. I don’t see a no-till approach being good for your setup. Especially for growing vegetables. The whole no-till approach is great for perennials. Growing things like fruit trees, you want to disturb the soil as little as possible and mulch heavily to create a fungal-dominated environment and a fungal web that is disturbed as little as possible. I don’t see that being as reasonable for growing annual vegetables. Planting annuals requires constantly disturbing soil to some degree. The turnover is fast and frequent, and since vegetables (unlike trees) grow better in a bacteria-dominated environment, the whole fungal web theory is less impactful when growing annual vegetables. I’m not saying no-till is bad. I’m just saying that I think this approach is going to create a whole lot of additional work for a minimal additional benefit since you can’t really no-till annual plots with high turnover, and even if you could, fungal associations are less critical with annuals. I do think it’ll be better, but I don’t think it’ll give back as much as you’re putting in for a vegetable garden. That being said, I would love to see this experiment progress. It’ll be a fun watch as long as you have the time. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong.
I agree with the millennial gardner here, but I do know of a man in Abbeville S.C. that has so much compost (just shredded leaves and grass clippings) in his garden that it's raising millions of worms. I believe that solves the bacterial issue. This guys soil was so deep it was like walking on a mattress. I have not stopped by there in years, but if it still in use as a garden I know it would be doing great still.
Travis, I’m really enjoying this thread! Such an interesting experiment and you are covering so many approaches and angles. Your ol country boy does have some edumacation! 😉😊
When I shop for seeds, I stay away from GMO. When I prepare the area, give me machinery!!! The bigger the better. Mix in compost, Gypsum soil amendment, till all that in with the afore mentioned machinery. Pest control, I tell the person at the Co-Op, give me the strongest pesticide you have. No Hanky Panky with "Organic". I tell them I want instant gratification when it comes to killing bugs... So, I'd have to say... I'll pass on the organic, "no till" option. I'd say I am a modern./Traditional gardener lol. Love your videos. I'd have to say you have taught this old farmer a lot of new/better ways. Also, You have inspired me to expand and experiment. Thank you. Always looking forward to the next Hoss Tools Notifications...
Small farmers cannot buy GMO in my area (North Alabama) without a contract, I stay away from hybrids because I seed save, so traditional or heirloom seeds are my choice. I have not used poisons in years and my harvest is comparable to neighbors. I use a large amount of leaf mulch.
Here’s the thing... I’m doing what works for me in a very hot spot in Northern California in the Sacramento Valley where we get little rain, a good amount of wind and am surrounded by large scale orchards. I do mostly no till with lasagne beds for new plots. After tarping, I lay cardboard or newspaper, then a layer of straw followed by several inches of compost. With established beds I just rake and add compost, then mulch with straw again. No this isn’t true of all my beds. I also have raised beds, the newest based on hugelkulter. I water using soaker hose laid on the compost but under the straw.(Travis soaker line May solve your water problems.) I’d never cover cropped until this year after watching Travis and Greg. Iron clay peas in one area and now daikon radish in another. I do believe that a no till approach is best for overall soil health but even a ‘less till’ system is better than repeated disturbance of the soil. But ultimately doesn’t it just come down to doing what works for each micro environment? Oh yeah... using Hoss Tools seeds is the other thing that works for my garden 😁
As for the brocolli, it's done just as you suspect by several no-till market gardeners. Cut the stalk at the surface and leave the root system to slowly decompose in place. I think the reason the no-till plots do well is because the mycelium links don't get broken up. I've been gardening no-till for 5 years, though I have used a tiller to make most of my permanent beds. I've also used once on beds to shallow till to rid of weeds that got ahead of me. I think root crops help to break the stratification of nutrients/organic matter and things mix in deeper when digging out the crop, such as carrots.
Nother great video! Appreciate your patience and honesty. I can see why the black tarp method is good for weed suppression and did you say to break down the cover crop too? If soil is supposed to be “living “, does the heat from the black tarp destroy the living bits in the soil? After the tarp are you left with a sterile soil? Thank you.
The soil doesn't get that hot underneath the tarp. It basically just prevents light, so weed seeds germinate in the moist environment but then die due to a lack of light.
I appreciate all the information you share in your videos and I learn a lot from them. Keep up the great work! We truly appreciate your help in #shedwars it means so much!
The question of compost in your no-till garden is one to potentially attempt different methods. One of the advantages you have with using compost in your garden is the much warmer temperatures for a greater time during the year. The compost will continue to break down at a much faster rate once it is in the garden over a longer period of time. I used all of our compost this year around around tomato and pepper plants as a mulch that continued to break down all summer long and not only feed the plants (maybe??) but also to help hold the moisture in the soil. I also used some of it directly into the spots where I put some of the plants to do a side by side comparison of which worked better. I did not see any benefit of incorporating the compost into the planting holes versus on the surface. What I did see was that when the summer got the hottest and driest, these plants continued to grow and did not suffer the drought and heat stress like the rest of the garden did. And now that the season is over, that compost has fully decomposed down into the soil and given us better soil from a nutrient and filtration aspect. We do not have quite the disease pressure up here that you do in the South, so I do not think the chop and drop will work as well for you when a plant is done and harvested. I try to use as much of my "done" plants as possible in the rows between my corn that I grew to continue to break down and put nutrients back into the soil. It also helped with slowing the evaporation and drying out of the soil around our corn. Just some thoughts as you continue with your experiment. I really appreciate you doing this comparison of two separate plots and continuing to produce update videos on how things are going.
Good video! That answered a lot of questions. I'll be following this! I'm still thinking, in the back of my mind, that the broadfork might come into play at some point. I know compaction is always an enemy for me. I hate to ride the thing, but it sure does a lot for my soil, or seems to. This is going to be interesting, thanks for bringing us along!
One thing I believe Mr. Dowding says that applies anywhere, north, south, east or west...keep adding the compost annually, at least. In your potato example, that’s how you level. And it is the only way completely natural methods will replenish the soil as we pull nutrients from it in the form of FOOD. All the bugs and fungi help, but you have to feed them...ie, compost. We are lucky as well, we have a local compost supply, either free municipal once a year or modestly priced at a bulk lot. Seedlings love it, transplants love it, and you are burying weeds, soil borne disease and evil bugs with every shovel. We have commercial Ag with large scale no-till (completely different than this) as well as land that is turned annually. But my food is grown with no tilling, not in any purist’s idea of Dowding or “Eden” or “Weed Free”, but a hodgepodge of them that works in NC. I bury drip. I dig potatoes, and I fertilize corn and tomatoes. And my earthworms still love me! This discussion will devolve and evolve, just stay the course!!!
Plants feed the soil. Not compost. Leaving a living root in the ground on a seasonal basis via perennials or covercrops is what grows soil biology. Compost is at best an assist to intoduce bacteria & fungi where it is needed. Plants are transformative to soil. Not merely additive.
Yep I'm like all over the place. Multiple things seem to work well but not for every application. I watch every type of gardening video I find but my biggest hangup is paying hundreds of dollars for compost when you can get manure for free. A bag of 13-13-13 has like 5.2 lbs each NPK vs about a ton of manure. The manure softens the soil, but requires fall application vs 40lbs of instant fertilizer you can put in the back seat of your car. Work vs convenience vs natural vs availability vs weed pressure vs hauling capabilities vs smell (neighbors and manure) makes it hard to say one method works for everyone. I have a friend that keeps me straight. He asks, "are you getting good production?" If I say yes, he asks "then what's the problem?"
@@flatsville1 So true! But compost is 100% plant matter, so we are saying the same thing. We refer to cover crops as “green compost”. The deficiency with plants only is when you harvest and remove plant matter from the garden. This has to be replaced. I do that with compost.
@@scottbaruth6386 We have horses and use the manure for heavy feeders. But most of it goes back onto the pasture land to replenish it...I am lucky we have compost here so cheap. And we make our own as well, but it’s only about a third of our needs.
Travis, instead of cutting the stem off at ground level, how about twisting the plant out which would still leave a root mas for the micro to process, what are your thoughts?
Not sure about your broccoli plants, but I can't twist mine and break them. Stalks are too thick. The goal of cutting them at soil level is to leave the root mass as you stated.
I don’t always read the comments on every video. But I imagine people are ripping on you. Travis!! Just do your thing the way you want!! I love that you are trying new things your own way. I remember something you said. There can be many variables garden to garden. I imagine people that preach “no till” most likely have all the water and nice weather they could ask for. Keep moving forward with your head held high, with no apologies for your effort in your hot southern region. Geez, we NEVER get rain here where I live in Cali 😰and I’m stuck with city water even though I’m living in the county limits 🤦♀️ Some should feel lucky 🌧 😂😂 Keep it up TRAV, you’re doing awesome!!!
@@gardeningwithhoss Charles lives in a much different latitude than i do also. I am in Tn and do no till or no dig i call it. I grow a wide variety of veggies and it works for all of them. I plant my plants in beds. Not raised beds and no sides on most of them. It takes a lot less compost with beds and planting much closer together. Of course some plants cannot be planted closer like squashes, sweet potatoes, etc. If your compost is weed free and you stay on top of the weeds you do get, eventually there will be less weeds. Also the longer you do it the less water you will need. I only use about 1 inch of compost. I put it on in the fall and grow 1 to 3 crops in each bed in a years time. occasionally i add a little around some plants, but for the most part i do not. I get nice size onions each year. They are not huge, but most are baseball size or bigger. If i was doing it for the first time like you i would have probably used about 3 inches also. I am very thankful that i stumbled up on Charles Dowdings website about 4 years ago. It saves me time and i get good crops and healthy food. Also i would not do no dig if i was using conventional rows like you are there. Not knocking that you are, but i would not. I like the beds !!! You get a lot more food on less space.
Agreed on the Charles Dowding thing. Absolutely true on the different climate statement...but I think many of the concerns you have on how to handle some of the challenges with different crop types and rotation he has been working working out the bugs (pun intended) for decades. Not only in his current location but I believe southern France as well (which is probably much closer to what your are dealing with). For the watering...yeah, we had to switch from Sub irrigation to above ground drip in the beds but it's not that bad...just squeeze those rows together to twin rows with a line in the center and you are good to go or emitters spaced to match up with the nightshades...works out real nice. Late thing...lil compost once a year after you shear off a crop and follow up with your next starters and you are golden. Love the content...thanks for your time!!
Travis just lay the drip tape on the surface . I have never buried the drip tape on my no till beds and just add a couple inches of compost every planting and my garden does well. I’m in California so much different scenario. Looking forward to this experiment
Sir, I wholeheartedly agree with your way of gardening in your patches where you till. I do not believe that you are destroying the soil as an answer to the question, which is the name of your video. I am living in Soyth Africa, in the Cape Peninsula, where the soil is almost dead sand, so fatty that it is almost impossible to wet. It is white of colour, similar to sea sand, just more dirty. After a couple of year of feedig it with compost, cow manure and mushroom compost, the coulour slowly change to dark brown to almost black. The soil maintain the moist and everything grow like it is a kind of magic soil. Tilling and cultivation is not destroying my soil, as I am putting back ten times more than what nature can put back. I believe in organic principles, but I do mix traditional methods as well. I immediately frown when someone claim to be an organic gardener, because in most instances you will find oil products or chemicals in that garden. They use plastic sheets to conserve moist. It is a byproduct of oil. They use garden hoses, which is also a byproduct of oil. They use plastic bottles, water cans, etc. They will not use chemicals in their garden, or claim not to be, as it can be harmful to the plant, although it may save or heal the plant, but they use, sulpher, baking soda, epsom salts, which are also chemicals. I agree it may be a matter of opinion. But the same people will go to the chemist when they get sick, and will use chemicals to cure their cancers or dull pain. But the plants may die or pulled out when they don't succeed. I agree that tilling or ploughing may be harmfull to soil on large farms, where the farmer cannot replace what is taken out or do not have compost to use. In my garden, I prefer to place 6 - 8 inches of compost or manure and lightly fork it in. Now I use a small tiller (soon) and I also have a German Forschrit copy of the Planet Junior wheel hoe. I also use the usual forks, spades and hoes. I am handicapped to an extend that I cannot squat so well and therefore I till. I had to give up my garden for extending our house after years of gardening, with the most beautiful black soil, that I changed to black gold from the white dead sand. Tilling did not changed my soil at all. The very firs planting after I added so much compost is always beans, the bush type, and then the soil is immediately better. I sometimes mulch by adding a thin layer of more compost, but I wil fork it in when I change to another crop. Where I can get hold of clay, I wil add it once, and then my soil stay wet. So my opinion, based on my own experience and reasoning is that tilling will only destroy soil on the long run on farms, where the farmer do not have the quantities of compost to replace. On my smalle garden, where I add annually a thick layer of compost, and inbetween between each crop, it makes no difference.
I've had success running drip tape above ground for sweet corn. I double row and run the tape on top the ground. However, it does eventually get slightly covered when I sidedress. I don't no till and located in south Louisiana. P.S. Thank you for all the helpful videos. I haven't seen many helpful videos for deep south gardening till finding hoss tools.
I’m so excited that y’all are doing this experiment! Question: did y’all not install subsurface drip tape on the no dig bed from the jump? If so, how come? Or were you saying you had to overhead water in addition to the scheduled drip irrigating?
There was quite a bit of debris from the previous cover crop still there. That's why we added so much compost -- to cover that debris. If we were to try to bury drip tape there, it would have made quite a mess with all that debris below the compost. So we decided not to do it in this case.
I hope you can give me some advice here.I have an area that hasn't been used for gardening in a couple years now.We just moved into the home and the area is overgrown with grass and weeds so my question is where or how should I start to be able to use this spot for gardening hen it's time to start planting?
A tarp and till technique works great. Till the area, put a tarp over the area for a couple weeks, pull back the tarp, till again, put the tarp back on and keep repeating until you have no grass or weeds.
I have a hard time direct seeding into compost too. Even the expensive stuff has too much bark, etc to really work well. Especially because I like really straight rows. I have looked into a compost sifter and think this would solve the problem, but if you have more than a few raised beds or less than several acres, there is not really a shifter that would meet your scale. Maybe Greg will have an epiphany!
I could put down cardboard. But since I'm rotating crops every 60-90 days, I'm pretty sure the cardboard would just get in the way. Weeds are not the issue here. And down here in the south, we don't really have leaf mulch.
The easiest solution to all that is to drift over to your barn and get out your tiller... and move on. :) I'm not even considering doing what you are doing... I have cut WAY back on how much I till. After I got my BCS I was so proud of that thing, I would just look for an opportunity to use it. Now days I generally don't use my BCS much at all. When I turn over a piece of my garden (currently don't have individual plots) generally I will use my big tiller on my 25 HP Tractor. I highly recommend you just go get a Kubota L2501... not what I have, but if I was buying today that's where I would start looking, my "big" tractor is a Kubota... 25 years later I would buy it again, but I digress. I generally just till the entire spot, and plant a cover crop. Then when I terminate that, I till it again with my big tiller and then just leave it set for a couple weeks. Then I use my BCS just where I'm going to plant... till those strips, put in my drip and move along. The reason I do that is my big tiller turns much slower, and while it does a good job of turning under the cover crop, it doesn't leave a really nice bed to seed or transplant into. I know you are trying really hard to demonstrating that you don't need to own equipment, and that is true up to a point. But when you have 10 garden plots... you have crossed the line in terms of wasting time (the most valuable item on earth... by far) just my opinion.
There's no doubt that the way we (and you) usually do it is so much easier and practical. However, I think it's important to see if the increased effort really makes a drastic difference. I have my doubts, but it will be interesting to see.
Would tarping during off season help with bug and fungal pressure? I have been wanting to try no till, just to see how well it works. Have always tilled my soil in the past. So I am interested in watching how your experiment goes. As well as how my own experiment turns out using goat barn clean out soil amendments.
agrilifeextension.tamu.edu/library/gardening/soil-solarization/ This artical from Texas A&M says it will if done in the hottest part of the summer. (Which is when my garden is growing full force) haha.
Where did you get so much compost? I’m in Southern California, that would be very expensive to buy that from either a traditional nursery or a big box store.
Here's my 2c, what I've learned, observed & thought about, re: destroying our soil...... Mainly, questions, rather than answers.... What happens to a seed if man doesn't intervene? What makes it grow? How deep does it fall from the parent plant and make it germinate? In what soil does it thrive? What other plants are around it and compete or are syymbiotic? What fertilizes it? What happens if no one harvests it? How does it propagate? Will it continue to grow in the same place, or will it spread out, and WHY? If it's not picked, will its own debris be the source of future fertilizer, or will it deplete nutrients from that spot and be forced to move on, leaving the soil ripe for a succession species (weed to grass to bush to forest?) What is the natural interaction with animals (ie: bison to the Great Plains). It seems to me, man needs to insert himself into the natural order of things, rather than drastically altering it. Tomatoes are an example. Left on their own, they will spread out, wider each year, but unless pruned to the primary stalk, the fruit will not be as large or delicious, having dispersed the energy derived from sun and soil to multiple fruits rather than fewer well developed ones. Here, the intervention of man serves a beneficial function to himself AND the plant, without upsetting the natural cycle. But in most agriculture the soil is denuded after harvest and left unprotected by removal of the debris, or the entire crop, in an unnatural fashion, often removed to a different location to be burned or "composted" instead of overlaying the soil and composting in place. Does mono*culture "agriculture" occur anywhere in nature? And why not? When nutrients are removed from the soil into plants, how do plants naturally return the nutrients back into the soil ? If agriculture means constantly removing without replenishing, it can only create desert. Logically, either a plant creates its own optimum conditions for its next generation by creating a natural recycling in place, OR preparing the soil for a SUCCESSIVE species to take over. To me, that seems to be the purpose of weeds, which are hardy, deep rooted and function to regenerate depleted soil until conditions are favorable to other, more complex species needing more soil nutrition. Repetitive agriculture may solve the population-feeding problem, but perhaps humanity is overgrazing, and making up for it using artificial chemical processes that will eventually overwhelm the soils capacity to be anything other than a medium to stabilize roots in a chemical solution. When man first came along, low-hanging fruit was the menu. Learning how to manipulate nature has gotten a little out of hand. I think we need to calculate species progression into our long term thinking, unless we want to continually buy compost from Home Depot. Joel Salatin & others seem to have uncovered some of the solutions in this regard, including animal interaction, which doesn't quite work in backyard gardens or 1000 acre farms. We need to calculate how to grow the food and gardens we need and want, in such a way as to mimic the clues nature has given us, and LISTEN and OBSERVE, rather than radically altering the million year old system that functions well without us.... (Just some thought, for what its worth.)
We don't have deer near our homestead because it is surrounded by hundreds of acres of commercial farmland. So there's no real prime habitat near our gardens. We have tons of deer in our county -- so much that you can hunt them over a pile of corn legally.
"Wireless deer fense" They really work. Place them early in the planting season. The deer get zapped once and don't come back that season. I was getting damage on my strawberries and apple trees. Placed the zappers and no more damage.
My well produces hard water from a limestone aquifer. If I do not bury the drip tape, the emitters will clog over the growing season due to evaporation of residual water leaving lime deposits behind at the emitter's orifice. No evaporation problem with buried drip tape. That said, this spring I will experiment with laying the drip tape on the soil's surface and then covering it with compost. Hopefully an inch of compost will be sufficient to prevent evaporation and lime deposits.
I’ve read that sunflowers are allelopathic meaning they exude toxins that stop nearby plants from growing. Could the leftover sunflower debris be effecting the growth of the new plants in your till garden?
is it possible to use cover crops on my raised beds? I will be able to mow them because they are above ground but I probably could go through and slice them off
Sure you can. Once you're ready to terminate them, you can use a weed eater or something similar to cut them. Then use a fork to turn them into the soil, or tarp the raised beds if you didn't want to turn the soil.
There is some field corn around here that is grown without irrigation, but almost all the sweet corn is grown with pivot irrigation. Those pivots are taller than the plants, so they can get water down to the roots. My sweet corn regularly gets 7' tall and most folks don't have an overhead sprinkler that tall. As a result, you'll waste a ton of water trying to water a plot sweet corn in that way.
We've been growing vegetables in there for a couple years now. Grew peppers and eggplant there in 2019 until our first frost. Then planted a cover crop of winter rye that grew throughout the cool months into 2020. We planted a crop of Temptress QuadSweet Corn in there late spring. Then cover cropped with iron clay peas, mowed, tarped, composted, planted cool-season crops and here we are.
@@gardeningwithhoss that’s why it’s doing better than what others thought it would. If it was new ground then the two to three years would be correct. It looks good. Plants look healthy!! Im giving props to the previous tills!! Lol.
My biggest problem with no till is accessing all that compost. Where I'm from I can't just go out and buy tons of compost. So I would have to make it myself. This would totally defeat any benefits I would be getting had I just tilled in a moderate amount of compost.
The only pest that would give me an impossibly hard time being no till is root knot nematodes. If I grow okra in a pristine spot, by the end of the season I have rkn which would not be a huge deal if I could just put okra someplace else until they were gone. The problem is that once they are in a spot they can maintain enough of a population that I could never grow okra there, or some other things like tomatoes without tilling in some mustard first. So I keep a six year rotation where I grow the same things in fall in spring, then a summer crop then rotate those to the next plot. I keep potatoes, sweet potatoes and okra close together in the succession because then the soil can have a four year “ recovery period” from intense tilling for four years. I am six years in on my current property and moving next growing season🙄. So I guess I’ll let you know how it goes in about a decade.
Your no-till plot was built on a plot that had been tilled in the past. Do you think a no-till plot could be created on a grass covered area with hard compact soil?
Really good question. I would lean towards NOT. I think with heavy clay, you would need to do some heavy cover cropping with daikon radishes and incorporate lots of compost into the soil. Once you got it right though, you probably could just add to the top like we did here.
Yes, I know this for a fact. I live in the south with Bermuda Grass on compact clay soil. A growers nightmare one would think but it works and works well. I simply put down a thick layer of compost directly on the grass and off I went. The key is to put down a thick layer that smothers and kills the grass. I put down 6 inches. If you put down any less you are just fertilizing the grass. You might think this sounds like a lot but it's a one time thing. I add about 1 inch every year and that's it. It's an expensive up front cost but totally worth it. I like to think of it like a house...I want a strong and sturdy foundation to work on. I have never broad forked and I still get the most amazing carrots. It really blows my mind that with all the information and examples out there, that people still till. Tilling is an outdated practice and shouldn't be recommended by anyone.
2,000 lbs = 1 ton -- When we get a load, they weigh the truck before adding compost and weight it after. We pay by the ton. I've never tried to obtain a volumetric equivalent.
About potatoes ... I have no-till plots, framed off with wood but not raised, and when I harvest potatoes, I have to dig up the whole plot. That kind of defeats the purpose of no-till. Then I just smooth it over and add compost for the next year,. I also rotate the plots so everywhere I plant potatoes the soil gets dug up. This bothers me
G'day from Australia Travis, I stopped using chemical fertilizers 5 years ago in a no dig scenario , I now use composted sheep manure as it's abundant in my area as well as blood and bone and homemade compost, I also water with a worm casting tea, compost tea, fish emulsion and a seaweed solution which I believe is the key to feeding a no dig vegetable garden. Growing potatoes in a no dig garden is quite simple for me but my "vegie patch" is about half the size of one of yours, I still hill up my potatoes "spuds" by raking some top soil from either side of the row to help cover my spuds also use straw/hay to keep them covered. p.s love the show and say G'day to Greg for me
No till potatoes....3-6” compost, lay potatoes on top of compost I suggest double rows, cover with 4-6” of seed free hay or straw...can add drip before the hay or straw and can add more straw if any tubers pop up through...also you just move the hay to harvest, no digging
Oh, and I guarantee that any one of the new wave gardeners who touts a utopian garden hasn’t faced corn tasseling in the middle of a four week 90 degree drought. If they have, and succeeded in more than half empty ears, they snuck some buried drip lines in before the TH-cam video was taken!
@@gardeningwithhoss Not but a handful of channels based in the feast or famine rainfall area south of Mason-Dixon, either. We certainly appreciate yours! Keep them coming! You should start a sub channel...”Eden Realism”!!! The irony is, I live in Eden...literally! 🤣
Travis I wouldn't overlook foliar feeding of the no till plot, with the fish/guano emulsion, as a possible reason for the better looking plants as well.
That's definitely helping. But considering the nutrient analysis on the Fish and Guano vs. the 20-20-20 + MicroBoost, I'm not sure that could be considered definitive. We're definitely pumping more nutrients per unit on the tilled plot.
God bless you for trying it. I fully believe no till is northern propaganda for us Deep South gardeners. Our pest pressure and weed pressure is just way too high to justify no till on a large scale. With that said, I’m very interested to see how your journey goes though and I will be happy to be proven wrong.
Northern propaganda. Sigh, now I am waiting for the chemtrails comment to start. I am a southerner and it works. Holistically managed livestock can regenerate land and no-till farmers can feed the world. The USA loses topsoil 10 times faster than it can replace it. This is not sustainable. Tilling does so much damage and all the info is out there. People are just too stubborn and stupid.
@@jackturner4917 ya ever heard of the curly girl method? So bacially its a buncha chicks that no longer brush their hair they do a minimum wash no chemicals no heat treatments right. So i thought "wow thats awesome their hair is sooo pretty and they dont do anything to it." So i tried it. 2 months into no lie i had a guy approach me in wally world asking how long id been growing my dreads out for...... I came home took a brush to it and ripped out so much of my hair i cried. Moral of the story just because something works for other people doesn't mean itll work for you.
Hey Travis! Jess at Roots and Refuge said last night on their live that you were sold out of your potatoes, and you sold out FAST! I was on the email list and was never notified that you started selling and y’all have always been great about notifications..... Was she misinformed?
We are not "sold out." We haven't even started pre-selling them yet. We will start taking pre-orders in December and start shipping towards the end of January.
@@gardeningwithhoss That’s what I thought! I knew y’all would have mentioned it on the show or a VLOG! I’m not sure what she was thinking about! LOL Obviously an honest mistake, we all make them.
@@sydneydbrooks I believe she meant in the last round of potatoes, they were sold out fast and that the upcoming season’s upload hadn’t been posted yet, just as Travis said. Hope you get some when they upload!
@@mirandabeaudry7936 I would have thought that also it was just a bit confusing because someone asked where she was getting her potatoes this year... she said at Hoss and that they were sold out and went fast..... clearly they are just about to start selling. No big deal, just a misunderstanding. I know Jess is always being nothing but helpful and is a big fan of Hoss Tools!
I wouldn't think this would violate your rules. You shouldn't need to remove anything of you fence it in and put pigs in there to take out all off your old crop roots and all, grubs too. That should take care of any extra potatoes, other stalks, fungus, and diseases etc. Plus they will add fertilizer at no extra charge.
I recently started watching your row by row show and going back and watching your older ones. I noticed the amount of commercials I have to watch is annoying, I have stopped walking row by row. too many commercials.
The "Tilther" type tool for direct seeding. It's a tiller ... but extremely small-scale/lightweight. You can get by with only tilling the top inch or so, without digging in on giant 8-inch diameter tiller tines. th-cam.com/video/6dUXPeDsHGU/w-d-xo.html Even a small Mantis (or knock-off) type cultivator works here - it's bigger, more damaging than the Tilther, but hella better than a full-sized tiller in terms of not tearin' sh*t up.
I've seen the "tilther," but am honestly not impressed by the construction of the tool. I do agree that it serves the purpose of "frothing" the seed bed.
@@gardeningwithhoss My understanding is that the Tilther only goes about 1” deep and is used primarily to mix amendments in the top 1” and well as redefining the edges of the planting bed.
Travis, I am so impressed by your willingness to try alternate methods of growing. As you suggest, context is very important. In zone 6b, we have much less pest pressure and mulch a lot, except brassicas, which we clean cultivate because of harlequin bugs. Also we mostly use transplants, so don’t need the clean seed bed that direct seeding needs. We started with very fertile soils so use modest amounts of compost and organic fertilizer and get very good results. We are talking about maybe 4000 sq ft vegetable garden, another 2000 sq ft beans and corn and winter squash.
I think it's important for folks to see a visual explanation of why certain methods work in certain areas. Many people have a blanket approach to gardening.
My garden is just a raised bed garden taking up about 35’x35’. Since it is small and made up of raised beds, I don’t till. I try to disturb my soil as little as possible, whenever possible. But that’s easy in raised beds.
Having such large plots as you have, it would be a different story. My personal opinion is this:
You have been having great success for a very long time doing things your way. While your operation may be smaller than many commercial operations, for 99.9% of us all, it’s huge. You guys are always responsible with your plantings. You don’t monocrop. You interplant varieties, rotate crops, grow cover crops and while you’re not entirely organic, you’re very natural. I don’t see a no-till approach being good for your setup. Especially for growing vegetables.
The whole no-till approach is great for perennials. Growing things like fruit trees, you want to disturb the soil as little as possible and mulch heavily to create a fungal-dominated environment and a fungal web that is disturbed as little as possible.
I don’t see that being as reasonable for growing annual vegetables. Planting annuals requires constantly disturbing soil to some degree. The turnover is fast and frequent, and since vegetables (unlike trees) grow better in a bacteria-dominated environment, the whole fungal web theory is less impactful when growing annual vegetables.
I’m not saying no-till is bad. I’m just saying that I think this approach is going to create a whole lot of additional work for a minimal additional benefit since you can’t really no-till annual plots with high turnover, and even if you could, fungal associations are less critical with annuals. I do think it’ll be better, but I don’t think it’ll give back as much as you’re putting in for a vegetable garden.
That being said, I would love to see this experiment progress. It’ll be a fun watch as long as you have the time. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong.
Completely agree. The "food forest" theory is much more practical for perennials. Fast-growing annuals are a bit of a different story.
I agree with the millennial gardner here, but I do know of a man in Abbeville S.C. that has so much compost (just shredded leaves and grass clippings) in his garden that it's raising millions of worms.
I believe that solves the bacterial issue.
This guys soil was so deep it was like walking on a mattress. I have not stopped by there in years, but if it still in use as a garden I know it would be doing great still.
I'm watching here in the philippines, good & clear explaination good bless you...
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Travis, I’m really enjoying this thread! Such an interesting experiment and you are covering so many approaches and angles. Your ol country boy does have some edumacation! 😉😊
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Thank you for sharing your experience. The detailed analysis and comparison are so valuable.
Thanks for watching Susan!
When I shop for seeds, I stay away from GMO. When I prepare the area, give me machinery!!! The bigger the better. Mix in compost, Gypsum soil amendment, till all that in with the afore mentioned machinery. Pest control, I tell the person at the Co-Op, give me the strongest pesticide you have. No Hanky Panky with "Organic". I tell them I want instant gratification when it comes to killing bugs... So, I'd have to say... I'll pass on the organic, "no till" option. I'd say I am a modern./Traditional gardener lol. Love your videos. I'd have to say you have taught this old farmer a lot of new/better ways. Also, You have inspired me to expand and experiment. Thank you. Always looking forward to the next Hoss Tools Notifications...
Thanks for watching!
Small farmers cannot buy GMO in my area (North Alabama) without a contract, I stay away from hybrids because I seed save, so traditional or heirloom seeds are my choice. I have not used poisons in years and my harvest is comparable to neighbors. I use a large amount of leaf mulch.
Here’s the thing... I’m doing what works for me in a very hot spot in Northern California in the Sacramento Valley where we get little rain, a good amount of wind and am surrounded by large scale orchards. I do mostly no till with lasagne beds for new plots. After tarping, I lay cardboard or newspaper, then a layer of straw followed by several inches of compost. With established beds I just rake and add compost, then mulch with straw again. No this isn’t true of all my beds. I also have raised beds, the newest based on hugelkulter. I water using soaker hose laid on the compost but under the straw.(Travis soaker line May solve your water problems.) I’d never cover cropped until this year after watching Travis and Greg. Iron clay peas in one area and now daikon radish in another. I do believe that a no till approach is best for overall soil health but even a ‘less till’ system is better than repeated disturbance of the soil. But ultimately doesn’t it just come down to doing what works for each micro environment? Oh yeah... using Hoss Tools seeds is the other thing that works for my garden 😁
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As for the brocolli, it's done just as you suspect by several no-till market gardeners. Cut the stalk at the surface and leave the root system to slowly decompose in place. I think the reason the no-till plots do well is because the mycelium links don't get broken up. I've been gardening no-till for 5 years, though I have used a tiller to make most of my permanent beds. I've also used once on beds to shallow till to rid of weeds that got ahead of me.
I think root crops help to break the stratification of nutrients/organic matter and things mix in deeper when digging out the crop, such as carrots.
Always a good idea to leave that root structure in place if possible.
Nother great video! Appreciate your patience and honesty. I can see why the black tarp method is good for weed suppression and did you say to break down the cover crop too? If soil is supposed to be “living “, does the heat from the black tarp destroy the living bits in the soil? After the tarp are you left with a sterile soil? Thank you.
The soil doesn't get that hot underneath the tarp. It basically just prevents light, so weed seeds germinate in the moist environment but then die due to a lack of light.
I appreciate all the information you share in your videos and I learn a lot from them. Keep up the great work!
We truly appreciate your help in #shedwars it means so much!
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The question of compost in your no-till garden is one to potentially attempt different methods. One of the advantages you have with using compost in your garden is the much warmer temperatures for a greater time during the year. The compost will continue to break down at a much faster rate once it is in the garden over a longer period of time. I used all of our compost this year around around tomato and pepper plants as a mulch that continued to break down all summer long and not only feed the plants (maybe??) but also to help hold the moisture in the soil. I also used some of it directly into the spots where I put some of the plants to do a side by side comparison of which worked better. I did not see any benefit of incorporating the compost into the planting holes versus on the surface. What I did see was that when the summer got the hottest and driest, these plants continued to grow and did not suffer the drought and heat stress like the rest of the garden did. And now that the season is over, that compost has fully decomposed down into the soil and given us better soil from a nutrient and filtration aspect. We do not have quite the disease pressure up here that you do in the South, so I do not think the chop and drop will work as well for you when a plant is done and harvested. I try to use as much of my "done" plants as possible in the rows between my corn that I grew to continue to break down and put nutrients back into the soil. It also helped with slowing the evaporation and drying out of the soil around our corn. Just some thoughts as you continue with your experiment. I really appreciate you doing this comparison of two separate plots and continuing to produce update videos on how things are going.
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Great detail mate, I subscribe. Would love to see an easy way to in stall drip tape
If you watch some of our planting videos, you'll see our drip tape layer attachment which makes it really easy.
@@gardeningwithhoss great thanks
Good video! That answered a lot of questions. I'll be following this! I'm still thinking, in the back of my mind, that the broadfork might come into play at some point. I know compaction is always an enemy for me. I hate to ride the thing, but it sure does a lot for my soil, or seems to. This is going to be interesting, thanks for bringing us along!
I have a broadfork and would give it away if someone would come get it. 😂
@@gardeningwithhoss Just hang on to it. I'll be down there to visit one day, and I'll take it! :)
One thing I believe Mr. Dowding says that applies anywhere, north, south, east or west...keep adding the compost annually, at least. In your potato example, that’s how you level. And it is the only way completely natural methods will replenish the soil as we pull nutrients from it in the form of FOOD. All the bugs and fungi help, but you have to feed them...ie, compost. We are lucky as well, we have a local compost supply, either free municipal once a year or modestly priced at a bulk lot. Seedlings love it, transplants love it, and you are burying weeds, soil borne disease and evil bugs with every shovel. We have commercial Ag with large scale no-till (completely different than this) as well as land that is turned annually. But my food is grown with no tilling, not in any purist’s idea of Dowding or “Eden” or “Weed Free”, but a hodgepodge of them that works in NC. I bury drip. I dig potatoes, and I fertilize corn and tomatoes. And my earthworms still love me! This discussion will devolve and evolve, just stay the course!!!
Well said.
Plants feed the soil. Not compost.
Leaving a living root in the ground on a seasonal basis via perennials or covercrops is what grows soil biology.
Compost is at best an assist to intoduce bacteria & fungi where it is needed.
Plants are transformative to soil. Not merely additive.
Yep I'm like all over the place. Multiple things seem to work well but not for every application. I watch every type of gardening video I find but my biggest hangup is paying hundreds of dollars for compost when you can get manure for free. A bag of 13-13-13 has like 5.2 lbs each NPK vs about a ton of manure. The manure softens the soil, but requires fall application vs 40lbs of instant fertilizer you can put in the back seat of your car.
Work vs convenience vs natural vs availability vs weed pressure vs hauling capabilities vs smell (neighbors and manure) makes it hard to say one method works for everyone.
I have a friend that keeps me straight. He asks, "are you getting good production?" If I say yes, he asks "then what's the problem?"
@@flatsville1 So true! But compost is 100% plant matter, so we are saying the same thing. We refer to cover crops as “green compost”. The deficiency with plants only is when you harvest and remove plant matter from the garden. This has to be replaced. I do that with compost.
@@scottbaruth6386 We have horses and use the manure for heavy feeders. But most of it goes back onto the pasture land to replenish it...I am lucky we have compost here so cheap. And we make our own as well, but it’s only about a third of our needs.
Travis, instead of cutting the stem off at ground level, how about twisting the plant out which would still leave a root mas for the micro to process, what are your thoughts?
Not sure about your broccoli plants, but I can't twist mine and break them. Stalks are too thick. The goal of cutting them at soil level is to leave the root mass as you stated.
@@gardeningwithhoss good thought travis thank you
I don’t always read the comments on every video. But I imagine people are ripping on you. Travis!! Just do your thing the way you want!! I love that you are trying new things your own way. I remember something you said. There can be many variables garden to garden. I imagine people that preach “no till” most likely have all the water and nice weather they could ask for.
Keep moving forward with your head held high, with no apologies for your effort in your hot southern region. Geez, we NEVER get rain here where I live in Cali 😰and I’m stuck with city water even though I’m living in the county limits 🤦♀️
Some should feel lucky 🌧 😂😂
Keep it up TRAV, you’re doing awesome!!!
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If No-Dig is in your future, you need to watch some Charles Dowding. He IS the master!
Not sure it is "our future," but worth a comparison. He also lives in much different latitude than we do.
@@gardeningwithhoss Charles lives in a much different latitude than i do also. I am in Tn and do no till or no dig i call it. I grow a wide variety of veggies and it works for all of them. I plant my plants in beds. Not raised beds and no sides on most of them. It takes a lot less compost with beds and planting much closer together. Of course some plants cannot be planted closer like squashes, sweet potatoes, etc. If your compost is weed free and you stay on top of the weeds you do get, eventually there will be less weeds. Also the longer you do it the less water you will need. I only use about 1 inch of compost. I put it on in the fall and grow 1 to 3 crops in each bed in a years time. occasionally i add a little around some plants, but for the most part i do not. I get nice size onions each year. They are not huge, but most are baseball size or bigger. If i was doing it for the first time like you i would have probably used about 3 inches also. I am very thankful that i stumbled up on Charles Dowdings website about 4 years ago. It saves me time and i get good crops and healthy food. Also i would not do no dig if i was using conventional rows like you are there. Not knocking that you are, but i would not. I like the beds !!! You get a lot more food on less space.
Agreed on the Charles Dowding thing. Absolutely true on the different climate statement...but I think many of the concerns you have on how to handle some of the challenges with different crop types and rotation he has been working working out the bugs (pun intended) for decades. Not only in his current location but I believe southern France as well (which is probably much closer to what your are dealing with). For the watering...yeah, we had to switch from Sub irrigation to above ground drip in the beds but it's not that bad...just squeeze those rows together to twin rows with a line in the center and you are good to go or emitters spaced to match up with the nightshades...works out real nice.
Late thing...lil compost once a year after you shear off a crop and follow up with your next starters and you are golden.
Love the content...thanks for your time!!
Travis just lay the drip tape on the surface . I have never buried the drip tape on my no till beds and just add a couple inches of compost every planting and my garden does well. I’m in California so much different scenario. Looking forward to this experiment
I'd rather not use drip tape than put it on the surface.
@@gardeningwithhoss alright alright alright haha stubborn mule 😃
Sir,
I wholeheartedly agree with your way of gardening in your patches where you till. I do not believe that you are destroying the soil as an answer to the question, which is the name of your video.
I am living in Soyth Africa, in the Cape Peninsula, where the soil is almost dead sand, so fatty that it is almost impossible to wet. It is white of colour, similar to sea sand, just more dirty.
After a couple of year of feedig it with compost, cow manure and mushroom compost, the coulour slowly change to dark brown to almost black. The soil maintain the moist and everything grow like it is a kind of magic soil. Tilling and cultivation is not destroying my soil, as I am putting back ten times more than what nature can put back.
I believe in organic principles, but I do mix traditional methods as well. I immediately frown when someone claim to be an organic gardener, because in most instances you will find oil products or chemicals in that garden. They use plastic sheets to conserve moist. It is a byproduct of oil. They use garden hoses, which is also a byproduct of oil. They use plastic bottles, water cans, etc. They will not use chemicals in their garden, or claim not to be, as it can be harmful to the plant, although it may save or heal the plant, but they use, sulpher, baking soda, epsom salts, which are also chemicals. I agree it may be a matter of opinion. But the same people will go to the chemist when they get sick, and will use chemicals to cure their cancers or dull pain. But the plants may die or pulled out when they don't succeed.
I agree that tilling or ploughing may be harmfull to soil on large farms, where the farmer cannot replace what is taken out or do not have compost to use. In my garden, I prefer to place 6 - 8 inches of compost or manure and lightly fork it in. Now I use a small tiller (soon) and I also have a German Forschrit copy of the Planet Junior wheel hoe. I also use the usual forks, spades and hoes. I am handicapped to an extend that I cannot squat so well and therefore I till.
I had to give up my garden for extending our house after years of gardening, with the most beautiful black soil, that I changed to black gold from the white dead sand. Tilling did not changed my soil at all. The very firs planting after I added so much compost is always beans, the bush type, and then the soil is immediately better. I sometimes mulch by adding a thin layer of more compost, but I wil fork it in when I change to another crop. Where I can get hold of clay, I wil add it once, and then my soil stay wet.
So my opinion, based on my own experience and reasoning is that tilling will only destroy soil on the long run on farms, where the farmer do not have the quantities of compost to replace. On my smalle garden, where I add annually a thick layer of compost, and inbetween between each crop, it makes no difference.
Thanks for your thoughtful response.
I've had success running drip tape above ground for sweet corn. I double row and run the tape on top the ground. However, it does eventually get slightly covered when I sidedress. I don't no till and located in south Louisiana.
P.S. Thank you for all the helpful videos. I haven't seen many helpful videos for deep south gardening till finding hoss tools.
Glad you found us! Thanks for watching!
I’m so excited that y’all are doing this experiment!
Question: did y’all not install subsurface drip tape on the no dig bed from the jump? If so, how come? Or were you saying you had to overhead water in addition to the scheduled drip irrigating?
There was quite a bit of debris from the previous cover crop still there. That's why we added so much compost -- to cover that debris. If we were to try to bury drip tape there, it would have made quite a mess with all that debris below the compost. So we decided not to do it in this case.
I hope you can give me some advice here.I have an area that hasn't been used for gardening in a couple years now.We just moved into the home and the area is overgrown with grass and weeds so my question is where or how should I start to be able to use this spot for gardening hen it's time to start planting?
A tarp and till technique works great. Till the area, put a tarp over the area for a couple weeks, pull back the tarp, till again, put the tarp back on and keep repeating until you have no grass or weeds.
I have a hard time direct seeding into compost too. Even the expensive stuff has too much bark, etc to really work well. Especially because I like really straight rows. I have looked into a compost sifter and think this would solve the problem, but if you have more than a few raised beds or less than several acres, there is not really a shifter that would meet your scale. Maybe Greg will have an epiphany!
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Can you mulch with cardboard or something free like shredded leaf mulch?
I could put down cardboard. But since I'm rotating crops every 60-90 days, I'm pretty sure the cardboard would just get in the way. Weeds are not the issue here. And down here in the south, we don't really have leaf mulch.
The easiest solution to all that is to drift over to your barn and get out your tiller... and move on. :) I'm not even considering doing what you are doing... I have cut WAY back on how much I till. After I got my BCS I was so proud of that thing, I would just look for an opportunity to use it. Now days I generally don't use my BCS much at all. When I turn over a piece of my garden (currently don't have individual plots) generally I will use my big tiller on my 25 HP Tractor. I highly recommend you just go get a Kubota L2501... not what I have, but if I was buying today that's where I would start looking, my "big" tractor is a Kubota... 25 years later I would buy it again, but I digress. I generally just till the entire spot, and plant a cover crop. Then when I terminate that, I till it again with my big tiller and then just leave it set for a couple weeks. Then I use my BCS just where I'm going to plant... till those strips, put in my drip and move along. The reason I do that is my big tiller turns much slower, and while it does a good job of turning under the cover crop, it doesn't leave a really nice bed to seed or transplant into. I know you are trying really hard to demonstrating that you don't need to own equipment, and that is true up to a point. But when you have 10 garden plots... you have crossed the line in terms of wasting time (the most valuable item on earth... by far) just my opinion.
There's no doubt that the way we (and you) usually do it is so much easier and practical. However, I think it's important to see if the increased effort really makes a drastic difference. I have my doubts, but it will be interesting to see.
Would tarping during off season help with bug and fungal pressure? I have been wanting to try no till, just to see how well it works. Have always tilled my soil in the past. So I am interested in watching how your experiment goes. As well as how my own experiment turns out using goat barn clean out soil amendments.
Tarping will not remove any eggs or fungal spores in the soil, but tilling will.
I thought maybe the heat created from tarping would make eggs non viable, as well as the fungal spores.
agrilifeextension.tamu.edu/library/gardening/soil-solarization/
This artical from Texas A&M says it will if done in the hottest part of the summer. (Which is when my garden is growing full force) haha.
Doesn't get that hot underneath the tarp.
The artical says it can reach 180° under the tarp.
When was the last time the new ground turned over ?
Spring of 2020
Where did you get so much compost? I’m in Southern California, that would be very expensive to buy that from either a traditional nursery or a big box store.
There is a cotton gin near him and someone compost the cotton hulls
We are lucky to live in "cotton land" and can get good compost for $18 a ton.
Everything is expensive in California lol, get out while you can.
Here's my 2c, what I've learned, observed & thought about, re: destroying our soil...... Mainly, questions, rather than answers.... What happens to a seed if man doesn't intervene? What makes it grow? How deep does it fall from the parent plant and make it germinate? In what soil does it thrive? What other plants are around it and compete or are syymbiotic? What fertilizes it? What happens if no one harvests it? How does it propagate? Will it continue to grow in the same place, or will it spread out, and WHY? If it's not picked, will its own debris be the source of future fertilizer, or will it deplete nutrients from that spot and be forced to move on, leaving the soil ripe for a succession species (weed to grass to bush to forest?) What is the natural interaction with animals (ie: bison to the Great Plains).
It seems to me, man needs to insert himself into the natural order of things, rather than drastically altering it.
Tomatoes are an example. Left on their own, they will spread out, wider each year, but unless pruned to the primary stalk, the fruit will not be as large or delicious, having dispersed the energy derived from sun and soil to multiple fruits rather than fewer well developed ones. Here, the intervention of man serves a beneficial function to himself AND the plant, without upsetting the natural cycle.
But in most agriculture the soil is denuded after harvest and left unprotected by removal of the debris, or the entire crop, in an unnatural fashion, often removed to a different location to be burned or "composted" instead of overlaying the soil and composting in place. Does mono*culture "agriculture" occur anywhere in nature? And why not? When nutrients are removed from the soil into plants, how do plants naturally return the nutrients back into the soil ? If agriculture means constantly removing without replenishing, it can only create desert.
Logically, either a plant creates its own optimum conditions for its next generation by creating a natural recycling in place, OR preparing the soil for a SUCCESSIVE species to take over. To me, that seems to be the purpose of weeds, which are hardy, deep rooted and function to regenerate depleted soil until conditions are favorable to other, more complex species needing more soil nutrition. Repetitive agriculture may solve the population-feeding problem, but perhaps humanity is overgrazing, and making up for it using artificial chemical processes that will eventually overwhelm the soils capacity to be anything other than a medium to stabilize roots in a chemical solution. When man first came along, low-hanging fruit was the menu. Learning how to manipulate nature has gotten a little out of hand. I think we need to calculate species progression into our long term thinking, unless we want to continually buy compost from Home Depot. Joel Salatin & others seem to have uncovered some of the solutions in this regard, including animal interaction, which doesn't quite work in backyard gardens or 1000 acre farms. We need to calculate how to grow the food and gardens we need and want, in such a way as to mimic the clues nature has given us, and LISTEN and OBSERVE, rather than radically altering the million year old system that functions well without us.... (Just some thought, for what its worth.)
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Y’all give a lot of great advise but what you do to keep the deer out. I have more trouble with deer than weeds😆
I need this answer. I'm tired of the deer.
We don't have deer near our homestead because it is surrounded by hundreds of acres of commercial farmland. So there's no real prime habitat near our gardens. We have tons of deer in our county -- so much that you can hunt them over a pile of corn legally.
We use 7 1/2 or 8 ft fence. Nothing else is more reliable in the mid Atlantic region.
3 wire electric fence works for me. I baited it with peanut butter on aluminum foil folded over the wire. After a shock on the nose, deer stay away.
"Wireless deer fense" They really work. Place them early in the planting season. The deer get zapped once and don't come back that season. I was getting damage on my strawberries and apple trees. Placed the zappers and no more damage.
Is there a reason that your drip tape needs to be buried? Mine (not purchased from Hoss) is laid on top of the soil.
Drip tape was designed to be buried. It works so much better that way. When it's buried, we can weed on top of it and it stays out of the way.
My well produces hard water from a limestone aquifer. If I do not bury the drip tape, the emitters will clog over the growing season due to evaporation of residual water leaving lime deposits behind at the emitter's orifice. No evaporation problem with buried drip tape. That said, this spring I will experiment with laying the drip tape on the soil's surface and then covering it with compost. Hopefully an inch of compost will be sufficient to prevent evaporation and lime deposits.
I’ve read that sunflowers are allelopathic meaning they exude toxins that stop nearby plants from growing. Could the leftover sunflower debris be effecting the growth of the new plants in your till garden?
I don't think so. I've seen allellopathic effects before and this is not it.
Oil in the seeds, in excessive amounts will suppress plant growth. If you're harvesting or composting heads, no problem.
Looks like a beautiful plot to me. Excited to watch the results over the years.
is it possible to use cover crops on my raised beds? I will be able to mow them because they are above ground but I probably could go through and slice them off
Sure you can. Once you're ready to terminate them, you can use a weed eater or something similar to cut them. Then use a fork to turn them into the soil, or tarp the raised beds if you didn't want to turn the soil.
Where did the compost come from?
We get ours from a local cotton gin. They take the remnants from the cotton ginning process, pile it up and let it get really hot.
Have you ever done a brix test on any vegetables?
We haven't. Just the good ole fashioned taste test.
Hiw can you say over head watering will not give corn enough water when farmers in area that depend solely on rainfall to water crops?????
There is some field corn around here that is grown without irrigation, but almost all the sweet corn is grown with pivot irrigation. Those pivots are taller than the plants, so they can get water down to the roots. My sweet corn regularly gets 7' tall and most folks don't have an overhead sprinkler that tall. As a result, you'll waste a ton of water trying to water a plot sweet corn in that way.
Was the plot that you put the no till compost on new ground? Or have you tilled it before and grown vegetables in that plot before?
We've been growing vegetables in there for a couple years now. Grew peppers and eggplant there in 2019 until our first frost. Then planted a cover crop of winter rye that grew throughout the cool months into 2020. We planted a crop of Temptress QuadSweet Corn in there late spring. Then cover cropped with iron clay peas, mowed, tarped, composted, planted cool-season crops and here we are.
@@gardeningwithhoss that’s why it’s doing better than what others thought it would. If it was new ground then the two to three years would be correct. It looks good. Plants look healthy!! Im giving props to the previous tills!! Lol.
My biggest problem with no till is accessing all that compost. Where I'm from I can't just go out and buy tons of compost. So I would have to make it myself. This would totally defeat any benefits I would be getting had I just tilled in a moderate amount of compost.
The way you will garden will depend greatly on the resources you have available.
@@gardeningwithhoss Yep definitely!
The only pest that would give me an impossibly hard time being no till is root knot nematodes. If I grow okra in a pristine spot, by the end of the season I have rkn which would not be a huge deal if I could just put okra someplace else until they were gone. The problem is that once they are in a spot they can maintain enough of a population that I could never grow okra there, or some other things like tomatoes without tilling in some mustard first. So I keep a six year rotation where I grow the same things in fall in spring, then a summer crop then rotate those to the next plot. I keep potatoes, sweet potatoes and okra close together in the succession because then the soil can have a four year “ recovery period” from intense tilling for four years. I am six years in on my current property and moving next growing season🙄. So I guess I’ll let you know how it goes in about a decade.
Great to hear you are practicing proper crop rotation!
All I know is that my parents not till garden of 15 years is so is amazing! You can bury your hands in it...no tools needed!
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Your no-till plot was built on a plot that had been tilled in the past. Do you think a no-till plot could be created on a grass covered area with hard compact soil?
Really good question. I would lean towards NOT. I think with heavy clay, you would need to do some heavy cover cropping with daikon radishes and incorporate lots of compost into the soil. Once you got it right though, you probably could just add to the top like we did here.
Yes, I know this for a fact. I live in the south with Bermuda Grass on compact clay soil. A growers nightmare one would think but it works and works well. I simply put down a thick layer of compost directly on the grass and off I went. The key is to put down a thick layer that smothers and kills the grass. I put down 6 inches. If you put down any less you are just fertilizing the grass.
You might think this sounds like a lot but it's a one time thing. I add about 1 inch every year and that's it. It's an expensive up front cost but totally worth it. I like to think of it like a house...I want a strong and sturdy foundation to work on. I have never broad forked and I still get the most amazing carrots. It really blows my mind that with all the information and examples out there, that people still till. Tilling is an outdated practice and shouldn't be recommended by anyone.
What volume is a ton of compost?
2,000 lbs = 1 ton -- When we get a load, they weigh the truck before adding compost and weight it after. We pay by the ton. I've never tried to obtain a volumetric equivalent.
Pure compost weighs about 1300 pounds per cubic yard.
About potatoes ... I have no-till plots, framed off with wood but not raised, and when I harvest potatoes, I have to dig up the whole plot. That kind of defeats the purpose of no-till. Then I just smooth it over and add compost for the next year,. I also rotate the plots so everywhere I plant potatoes the soil gets dug up. This bothers me
Exactly! Can you really consider it no-till? Growing potatoes requires a good bit of soil disturbance any way you do it.
G'day from Australia Travis, I stopped using chemical fertilizers 5 years ago in a no dig scenario , I now use composted sheep manure as it's abundant in my area as well as blood and bone and homemade compost, I also water with a worm casting tea, compost tea, fish emulsion and a seaweed solution which I believe is the key to feeding a no dig vegetable garden.
Growing potatoes in a no dig garden is quite simple for me but my "vegie patch" is about half the size of one of yours, I still hill up my potatoes "spuds" by raking some top soil from either side of the row to help cover my spuds also use straw/hay to keep them covered.
p.s love the show and say G'day to Greg for me
Will do! Thanks for watching!
How "no till" we talkin? A tilther for the top 2 inches of potato hills or cover crops could save time with minimal destruction vs by hand
Another great question ... Is a little disturbance okay? What level of disturbance is too much?
No till potatoes....3-6” compost, lay potatoes on top of compost I suggest double rows, cover with 4-6” of seed free hay or straw...can add drip before the hay or straw and can add more straw if any tubers pop up through...also you just move the hay to harvest, no digging
Sounds like considerably more effort (and more costly) than growing them in the soil.
Oh, and I guarantee that any one of the new wave gardeners who touts a utopian garden hasn’t faced corn tasseling in the middle of a four week 90 degree drought. If they have, and succeeded in more than half empty ears, they snuck some buried drip lines in before the TH-cam video was taken!
😂 Ever noticed that none of the "no-till utopians" ever grow sweet corn?
@@gardeningwithhoss I did notice!
@@gardeningwithhoss Not but a handful of channels based in the feast or famine rainfall area south of Mason-Dixon, either. We certainly appreciate yours! Keep them coming! You should start a sub channel...”Eden Realism”!!! The irony is, I live in Eden...literally! 🤣
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Travis I wouldn't overlook foliar feeding of the no till plot, with the fish/guano emulsion, as a possible reason for the better looking plants as well.
That's definitely helping. But considering the nutrient analysis on the Fish and Guano vs. the 20-20-20 + MicroBoost, I'm not sure that could be considered definitive. We're definitely pumping more nutrients per unit on the tilled plot.
I’d be curious what Charles Dowding would say
He'd probably say his ass is cold this time of year.
@@gardeningwithhoss 😂😂😂
Charles would say 'be curious'.
In my opinion he's well worth a watch - he shows his methods and let's the results do the talking.
God bless you for trying it. I fully believe no till is northern propaganda for us Deep South gardeners. Our pest pressure and weed pressure is just way too high to justify no till on a large scale. With that said, I’m very interested to see how your journey goes though and I will be happy to be proven wrong.
My gut tells me you're right. But we shall see.
Mulch = stink bug city lol
Northern propaganda. Sigh, now I am waiting for the chemtrails comment to start. I am a southerner and it works. Holistically managed livestock can regenerate land and no-till farmers can feed the world. The USA loses topsoil 10 times faster than it can replace it. This is not sustainable. Tilling does so much damage and all the info is out there. People are just too stubborn and stupid.
@@jackturner4917 ya ever heard of the curly girl method? So bacially its a buncha chicks that no longer brush their hair they do a minimum wash no chemicals no heat treatments right. So i thought "wow thats awesome their hair is sooo pretty and they dont do anything to it." So i tried it. 2 months into no lie i had a guy approach me in wally world asking how long id been growing my dreads out for...... I came home took a brush to it and ripped out so much of my hair i cried. Moral of the story just because something works for other people doesn't mean itll work for you.
Hey Travis! Jess at Roots and Refuge said last night on their live that you were sold out of your potatoes, and you sold out FAST! I was on the email list and was never notified that you started selling and y’all have always been great about notifications..... Was she misinformed?
We are not "sold out." We haven't even started pre-selling them yet. We will start taking pre-orders in December and start shipping towards the end of January.
@@gardeningwithhoss That’s what I thought! I knew y’all would have mentioned it on the show or a VLOG! I’m not sure what she was thinking about! LOL Obviously an honest mistake, we all make them.
@@sydneydbrooks I believe she meant in the last round of potatoes, they were sold out fast and that the upcoming season’s upload hadn’t been posted yet, just as Travis said. Hope you get some when they upload!
@@mirandabeaudry7936 I would have thought that also it was just a bit confusing because someone asked where she was getting her potatoes this year... she said at Hoss and that they were sold out and went fast..... clearly they are just about to start selling. No big deal, just a misunderstanding. I know Jess is always being nothing but helpful and is a big fan of Hoss Tools!
I wouldn't think this would violate your rules. You shouldn't need to remove anything of you fence it in and put pigs in there to take out all off your old crop roots and all, grubs too. That should take care of any extra potatoes, other stalks, fungus, and diseases etc. Plus they will add fertilizer at no extra charge.
If we had pigs, that wouldn't be a bad idea at all!
@@gardeningwithhoss Read a book called Restoration Agriculture, by Mark Sheppard. If you don't like to read(or don't have the time), it's on Audible.
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I recently started watching your row by row show and going back and watching your older ones. I noticed the amount of commercials I have to watch is annoying, I have stopped walking row by row. too many commercials.
Unfortunately, we don't control the ad frequency. YT does have a premium option where you don't see the ads.
The "Tilther" type tool for direct seeding.
It's a tiller ... but extremely small-scale/lightweight.
You can get by with only tilling the top inch or so, without digging in on giant 8-inch diameter tiller tines.
th-cam.com/video/6dUXPeDsHGU/w-d-xo.html
Even a small Mantis (or knock-off) type cultivator works here - it's bigger, more damaging than the Tilther, but hella better than a full-sized tiller in terms of not tearin' sh*t up.
I've seen the "tilther," but am honestly not impressed by the construction of the tool. I do agree that it serves the purpose of "frothing" the seed bed.
@@gardeningwithhoss My understanding is that the Tilther only goes about 1” deep and is used primarily to mix amendments in the top 1” and well as redefining the edges of the planting bed.