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To kick off my series about growing your own food I am going to start with the way I am most familiar.
Growing a garden in an average urban back/front yard. Growing your own food on an urban lot comes with its challenges as well as benefits. You obviously lack space that you would get on a larger piece of land but what you gain is easy access to water and immediate proximity to your garden. This walkout your back door kind of access makes it really convenient to do everything. From planting and maintaining to harvesting your produce, having your garden just 10 steps from your door makes it really easy to garden.
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Unless you have been asleep for the last decade or maybe you're just really out of touch you are bound to heard of the No Till movement that is sweeping the nation in both the farming and gardening sectors of agriculture. Like the term implies no till is a method of growing crops on both large and small scales without tilling the soil. To those of you that have been raised in what became industrial farming/gardening this idea of not tilling the soil will seem just backwards and potentially a waste of your time.
Cultivation has been a tried and true practice for agriculture since its beginnings. But in recent years we have begun to understand what the long term negative effects it can have on your soil. The negatives are not little ones either and repairing them will take long term changes in how we conduct agriculture. While there are many different consequences to much tillage I am just going to quickly gloss over three of the most common ones.
Tillage the practice of turning over and mixing the soil to incorporate nutrients, crop residues and to kill weeds in the fields. For many years tillage has been the go to soil preparation technique for its soil enhancement properties like,
But what we have discovered in recent years is that tillage can lead to more problems then it help alleviate. |
