Lee Reich - Weedless Gardening

By Lee Reich

Illustrations by Michael A. Hill

Workman Publishing New York

To my wife, Deb, who likes gardening, and to my daughter, Genevieve, who loves books.

Lets blame it on Jethro Tull. He was the 18th-century farmer and writer who advocated thorough pulverization of the soil on the (wrong) assumption that plant roots could most efficiently gobble up the resulting small soil particles. That is one reason why, each spring or fall, gardeners go out into their gardens to turn their soil over and over, only to battle weeds throughout the season.

This conventional way of gardening does welcome in the growing season with a clean slate, but the benefits are transitory. Dont weeds always seem to return with a vengeance? In a new garden, growth of vegetables and flowers will be especially lush following a thorough working of the soil. But this benefit is also deceiving, the result of too much air pumped into the soil suddenly mobilizing great reserves of nutrients. The situation becomes akin to withdrawals outstripping deposits in a bank account.

Enter Weedless Gardening, only one benefit of which is fewer weeds and less time spent fighting them. The essence of this new way of gardening is to care for the soil from the top down. All feeding is done at the surface, which is always snuggled beneath a protective, perhaps nutritive, cover. The particular cover might be a mulch of compost or wood chips or living plantsdepending on what youre growing and how you want the garden to look. Annual disruption of the soil (whether by rototiller, plow, or shovel) is eliminated so the soil can develop and maintain the layering found in its natural state. The result: nutrients, air, and beneficial humus become most abundant at or near the surface, where plant roots naturally proliferate.

Weedless Gardening springs from very old methods, so old that they might well be considered new. Perhaps the best, and surely the oldest case to be made for gardening this wayfrom the top downcomes from Nature. Just look to the forest or the prairie or the meadow, where the soil is undisturbed and nourishment from old leaves, stems, and roots accumulate at the surface. How well plants grow there, with little regard to whether the season has been warm or cool, wet or dry. For the starkest contrast, take a look at the lush green weeds flaunted by Mother Nature in the uncultivated border of a parched garden or farm field during a dry summer. Arent those weeds and the soil in which they grow saying something?

Primitive cultures lacking the rototillers, digging forks, spades, and other tools of modern gardeners and farmers have always had no other choice but to care for their soil from the top down. After all, how much dirt can you stir up or turn over with a pointed stick or an animal bone poked into the ground or tugged through a field?

The lay of the land is what prompted early farmers near present-day Mexico City to develop their version of gardening from the top down. There, a naturally broad expanse of shallow water surrounded by arid land was turned into a patchwork of islands and canals. This landscape was created and maintained by scooping mud and vegetation up from the waterways to form the islands of rich soil. Capillary water oozed up to plant roots from below, or water could be conveniently dipped from the canal with a bucket. Weeds were few because the soil was regularly topped up with new mud and vegetation. The remains of this agriculture can be seen today in the so-called floating gardens at Xochimilco.

Weeds thrive in the untilled soil bordering a tilled field of wilting corn.

Even in modern times, the occasional gardener or farmer has rallied against excessive disruption of garden and farm soil. In his 1943 classic Plowmans Folly, Edward Faulkner answered his question Why do farmers plow? with nothing more than Farmers like to plow. Is there some primal urge that prompts all of us to stir the soil in spring and then sit back and admire the clean expanse of soft brown earth? To both lessen weed problems and help plants survive on less rainfall, Faulkner suggested abandoning the plow for the disc. This tractor-pulled implement breaks up only the surface of the ground, cutting any existing vegetation into the top layer with gangs of weighted, rolling metal discs.

Beginning in the 1950s, weeds, water, and a desire to make gardening less work prompted Ruth Stout (chronicled in How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back and The Ruth Stout No-Work Garden Book) to tout a gardening system of doing nothing more than blanketing the ground with hay. (And plenty of itabout 25 bales annually for a plot 50 feet by 50 feet.) She poked large seeds right into this tawny blanket, but parted the hay and created little peat-moss beds for small seeds. Weeds that appeared were either yanked out and laid down to add to the covering, bent over and smothered with more hay, or discombobulated as the hay was purposely fluffed up by Ms. Stouts pitchfork. With no disruption of the natural layering of the soil and the permanent hay blanket, water needs and weed problems were minimal.

Across the Atlantic in Britain, Rosa Dalziel OBrien described yet another variation on this theme in Intensive Gardening (1956). Rather than being allowed to intimidate, weeds were allowed to grow to a certain extent under a watchful eye to shelter crop plants, to balance soil fertility, and in an ironic twist, to provide material for compost to feed future plants when spread on top of the soil.

The cry for minimizing soil disturbance and for protecting the soils surface continued to be voiced. Plant health, soil health, and less work are the attractions. Masanobu Fukoka, in One Straw Revolution (1978), took a laissez-faire approach to his rice farm by tossing out seed for the next crop in among standing stalks of the harvested crop. Robert Kourik (Designing and Maintaining Your Edible Landscape Naturally, 1986), Patricia Lanza (Lasagna Gardening, 1998), and others have advocated starting a garden with a layered sandwich that includes fertilizers, grass clippings, leaves, manure, newspaper or cardboard, compost, wood ashes, and sand.

To round out the possibilities, I am reminded of a friends ultimate variation on the top-down theme, practiced decades ago: He simply used a lawnmower to cut back weeds that grew up between rows of vegetables. University research on the possibilities of living mulches for farms and orchards no longer make this idea seem so far-fetched.

Laying straw on the ground can kill weeds, just like a rototiller or spade, but works most effectively when integrated with other Weedless Gardening practices.

What is now needed, rather than to blame Jethro Tull or take random stabs at maintaining the integrity of the soil, is a workable alternative to the conventional way of caring for our soil. Going back to pushing or pulling a pointed stick or animal bone through the soil is not the answer; these are inefficient tools that try to do what rototillers do better. Few of us garden in shallow water, where we could emulate the canals and islands of Toltec and Aztec gardeners of hundreds of years ago. And as for Edward Faulkners disc? It had potential on a great spread of farmland in the 1940s, but its not a tool that youre likely to find in the garden shed of todays backyard gardener. Ruth Stouts methods work fine if you have a sandy soil that wont pack down as you tromp all over it year after year, and if there are no stumbling blocks to getting bales and bales of hay into your garden each year, or if you have, as Ruth did, a hayfield and someone to cut it right next door. Fukokas methods are hardly adaptable to growing anything beyond citrus and grains. And layer upon layer of organic materials might be a way to start a plot of vegetables, but such a system needs to be elaborated on to be useful year after year and with other plants.