Comment on Breakthrough: "Electronic soil" boosts crop growth by over 50%
douglasg14b@lemmy.world 6 months agoDon’t you have to till at least once?
I tried growing on ground that was matted deep with thick, dead, vegetation. And even after raking the crap out of it and trying to dethatch it, I couldn’t get anything to stick.
After giving it a good till and mixing in a decent bit of old herbivore manure, my plants would take and grow wonderfully.
Pipoca@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Nope. The idea in no till is just adding stuff to the top and letting worms and roots handle the tilling.
I’ve had good luck just dumping a foot or two of finished compost on the ground and growing in it.
Another solid no-till approach is sheet mulching. You put down a layer of cardboard (to kill weeds), then layers of carbon and nitrogen like straw and kitchen scraps. Wait a few months, then plant. So you could do that in the late summer or fall to prepare a site for spring planting.
A lot of these things depend on location, though. Something that works great in Pennsylvania might not work as well in Utah.