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Years ago, I would spend hours and hours cleaning up the garden so that it was transformed into a barren bed of lumpy soil.
To put the garden to bed, I cut back all my perennials, I pulled out all my annuals, I raked the leaves from the garden and lawn, pulled all the weeds and turned over the soil. It was a lot of back-breaking grunt work, but I thought it was necessary to get the garden ready for spring planting.
Then, after reading about the components and importance and healthy soil, I realized I had been doing a lot of counterproductive and unnecessary work.
First of all, I learned that soil is teeming with living organisms such as bacteria, archaea, actinomycetes, fungi, algae, protozoa and a wide variety of larger soil fauna, including springtails, mites, nematodes, earthworms, ants and insects that spend all or part of their life underground, and larger organisms such as burrowing rodents.
It turns out one teaspoon of soil contains more than one billion single-celled bacteria!
Bacteria perform many important ecosystem services in the soil by helping the plants to obtain nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen thereby increasing soil fertility, protecting the plants from diseases, improving the structure of the soil, better aggregation, recycling of soil nutrients, decomposing dead and organic matter in the soil, and water recycling.
Bacteria help make nutrients available to plants that they can utilize. We could add mounds of compost filled with essential nutrients to our garden, but without bacteria they would never be small enough for plants to uptake through their roots. By decomposing organic matter, bacteria recycle those nutrients into a form available to plants.
A perfect example is nitrogen, the most in-demand nutrient in the soil. It is abundant in the air, but isn’t available to plants in this state. Bacteria fix nitrogen from the air and protozoa make it available to plants.
I discovered that all my hours of exhausting digging was probably the worst thing I could do. By digging, I had been damaging all the soil structure, destroyed all the networks created by fungus and bacteria in the soil, and greatly disturbed all the drainage channels created by earthworms.
In the soil, you will find numerous threads of mycorrhizal fungi. It helps the plants obtain much-needed nutrients by reaching into tiny cavities where the roots are roots simply too big to reach.
And, as someone who works tirelessly to reduce my carbon footprint, I was quite upset and taken back to learn that, by my digging, I had released carbon that is locked in the soil into the air and thereby creating more greenhouse gases, which are responsible for global overheating.
As well, by digging and removing all plant life, I was not doing anything to provide habitats and food sources for our precious pollinators and birds, which provide us with a myriad of life-sustaining benefits.
It turns the leaf litter left in gardens and on lawns provides much-needed habitats for insects. Insects shelter, breed and feed inside the leaves while getting protection from harsh winters and predators. So, those insects will become a much-needed food source for millions of migratory birds flying south for the winter.
As an added bonus, not only do leaves provide shelter but they decompose over time, enriching the soil and it’s all free! There are many other advantages to not digging your garden. First of all, you save a lot of time and you vastly reduce the amount of grunt work by not digging or tilling.
When I first moved into a house many years ago, surrounded by a mono-culture of sod, I spent countless hours of back-breaking digging up and then removing the sod. It would take days and days by the time I had completed a garden bed.
Then I discovered a no-dig garden and, presto, I had a garden ready for planting in a couple of hours! Instead of spending hours digging, I simply placed cardboard on top of the soil. Then I layered the cardboard with compost, grass clippings, fallen leaves, pine and spruce needles, compost, and cow manure.
I was pleasantly surprised to discover fewer weeds than I remembered in my well-dug gardens. As well, when you use lots of compost the fertility of the soil is enhanced thereby increasing crop yield. Since you are not exposing the soil to the air, the moisture in the soil is retained and therefore your garden will need less watering. The plant biomass reduces soil erosion as the vegetation dissipates heavy rainfalls and powerful winds.
When you use Mother Nature's bounties like leaves, grass clippings, coniferous needles, twigs and compost there is no need for human-made synthetic damaging fertilizers. And, you definitely will have no need for toxic herbicides as weeds are repressed or easily removed manually.
There is a saying “less is more.” That is definitely true when it comes to no-dig gardens — less ”grunt” work, less prep time, less energy expended, less weed pull, less watering and less carbon loss.
Gwen Petreman
Barrie
