 Welcome everybody. Let's keep going with tonight's spring fever garden forums. And now we're going to learn about a hot topic in gardening, which is no till gardening. And our expert at NDSU on this topic is Kala Edwards. Kala, she grew up in a nursery in greenhouse business, and this instilled in her a love for gardening. She later led to a degree in horticulture business at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. Today Kala is agriculture extension agent in McLean County. Kala, welcome to the forums. So, I first started working for extension in 2016. Most of the producers that I work with are involved in no till far or minimal till farming. And we're talking to them about being improving the soil structure improving their soil quality, and really being stewards of this land. It kind of got me to thinking about how that I garden growing up. And as I started to think about my garden and what I wanted to do when I bought my house. I, you know, I really thought about how we, we garden we grew up we had the tiller we got it out every spring, we worked the ground we added some compost we planted our plants, and then, as you know we spent most of the summer. We were working on picking our produce weeding. So, you know, we picked the produce we weeded we worked on, you know we tilled some of the some things periodically. But working with farmers that did no till gardening it really got me to thinking if, if that was the best option, if there was maybe another way to garden that would make me a better steward of my land. I was talking to a friend of mine about gardening one day, and he said that he did a form of no till gardening where he he didn't work the ground up. And he'd seen really good results, and that sparked my interest and led me on a journey to no till gardening. All right, so no till gardening has been gone by a variety of names. And one would be lasagna gardening, but it's also been known as sheet mulching, no dig gardening, or sheet composting. And the most popular turn lasagna gardening was first coined in 1998 by a gardener named Patricia Lanza, who was a military wife with seven kids, and they moved every three years. So she was always looking for a new way to make her garden better in the short period of time that she she lived in the house she lived in because they moved every three years. So she turned coined the term lasagna gardening, and much like making a lasagna in your kitchen lasagna gardening involves creating layers of material, like our meats or cheeses and our pasta in the popular dish. And those layers of material go on our soil to protect it. The goal of no till or no dig gardening are twofold. The first is to improve our soil quality. Since we're not working up the soil every single year, we're improving our soil structure, which in turn helps improve, allow moisture to to infiltrate the soil. So it helps to reduce beneficial mycorrhiza bacteria fungi and insects to to be more active in our soil, instead of being disturbed and chased out every year. But it also helps reduce weeding. Since we're not turning the soil over, we aren't bringing new weed seeds to the surface, but we're also removing one of the competitive advantages that weeds have. And they thrive in disturbed soils or soils with poor structure, where our vegetables prefer soils with good structure, so that they can can grow and can thrive really. There are a couple different methods or different ways to do no till gardening. Now the first one that I'm going to talk about is probably the most traditional form of gardening for no till, and it involves forming a very thick bed of mulch about six to 10 inches thick. If you see anything that you can compost, you can use to form this bed of mulch. Now I will say this form of composting is called cold composting. So it takes a long period of time to break down when you compare it to traditional compost. Now if you have something like a corn cob or things that take a long time to break down, even in a compost pile, I probably wouldn't use them when you're forming that bed of mulch just because it's going to take so long to break down. Now once you have that bed of mulch, you lay your beds out approximately three to four feet wide. One of the things that makes this form of gardening so effective is to have defined pathways where you're going to walk in your garden. Humans don't weigh a lot, but over time we can compact the soil slightly in areas that we walk continuously. So we don't want to walk in our flower beds or in our vegetable beds. Now when you go to plant your garden, you're going to scrape away your mulch in those beds only where you're going to plant your plants or where you're going to plant rows of seeds. And once your plants is planted or your seeds have come up and they're taller than the mulch, you can push that mulch back around the plants so that weed seeds don't get light and they don't germinate. Now the second form of no-till gardening and the one that I use is to use a weed mat or a weed barrier of some kind on top of the soil. And you can see in this picture on the right, this is our community garden that I've used our weed mat on. And I use this at my house, I've used this at the 4-H camp garden for the last four or five years, and it's really been very effective for me. But what I do is I cut strips or holes in the fabric where I want the plants, plant my plants, and then I put my compost around them. Much like I would do in the traditional lasagna gardening, then that compost, those grass clippings drop decomposed throughout the summer and they go down into the soil. Now every once in a while, every couple years, I will pull the weed mat up and I will either spread mulch or compost grass clippings underneath that weed mat. If it's also been like last year, we had a fairly early killing frost, and then we had a lot of really nice weather. What we can also do is plant a cover crop, say, of oats. You could also plant peas, lettuce, something that's going to help cover the soil, let it die when the frost hits again, and then I would cover it back up with that weed mat. So I'm keeping that soil armor and I'm also helping to add nutrients that will decompose. And this method has been really very successful for me. Now you might be wondering, you're interested in no-till gardening, but you don't know how to get started. Now there's included two formulas or two paths on this slide, because if you're a new gardener and you're starting a new garden, you're going to use a little different method than if you have an existing garden that you've been working with for a while. So with starting a new garden, you would start this in the fall. You're going to pick your garden spot, you will mow your grass really short. If there's weeds, you're going to mow them really short, and you're going to leave those clippings lie where they fall. Now if you have some of those really nasty weeds, like we talked about at the end, the creeping Jenny, if you have some Canada thistle maybe in your garden, I've been dealing with that out at the 4-H camp, you may want to use a chemical in the fall to help spray it down to help get a better kill to it, but that is ultimately up to you and what you feel comfortable with. But once you get your garden spot, the grass mowed short, your weeds cut off, you're going to cover the ground with about either four layers of newspaper or a couple layers of cardboard. Now these are going to serve to remove all the light that your weeds and your grass would get. So these will help to kill off those plants that you don't want to grow through. You'll wet this all down, get it really damp, so in our North Dakota winds things don't blow away quite as easily. And then you're going to get started with the next layer of your lasagna. So the next layer would be a composted material, either composted manure. If you have compost from your kitchen scraps or your garden scraps, that works really well. But you're going to add a couple-inch layer to that on top of that newspaper or cardboard. And then you're going to start to do your traditional lasagna. So you're going to add a layer of browns, that could be pine needles, that could be leaves, dead plant material, and on top of that you'll put a layer of green. So grass clippings, garden living plant material. And you're going to layer that until you get to about that 10-inch mark. And you're going to water everything in really well and let it sit over the winter. So when you're getting started with a new garden, it's really something you have to start in the fall, just to make sure that you get your weeds and your grass killed and taken care of really well. And then in the spring, you will, again, scrape away where your rows are, scrape away where your plants will need to be, and you'll plant your plant like you would in a traditional garden. Now if you have a new garden, you can skip kind of the fall step and start this spring. So you don't need to mow your grass. In theory, you shouldn't have many weeds in that spot. So you can start with your newspaper and cardboard, again, four layers of newspaper and a couple layers of cardboard. Water everything in. Make sure you've completely covered the ground so that light's not getting to the soil. And again, add your compost layer, your brown and green materials, and then water everything in well. And you do want, again, that 10-inch layer. And the reason for wanting a really thick layer is it's going to prevent your weeds from coming through, because the light's not going to hit them, but also that material is going to condense and shrink as your growing season goes on. So you want a thick layer so your weeds aren't going to be able to come through towards the end of the year. Now in the fall, as you're putting your garden to bed, then you add additional layers of compost and brown and green materials until you're again back up to that 10-inch layer. And you're going to do this again every year that you have your garden. But once you have it started, these gardens really are fairly self-sufficient. I know Greta talked about bindweed and how hard of a thing that is to get rid of. When I started my garden, and this is actually the first year I had it in the picture on the left. I did work up my soil. I sprayed it out in the fall because I had a really bad bindweed infestation in this particular garden. And this over the last four years I have had less and less bindweed issues because we're choking it out. So some things that I have noticed, some benefits for me that I've noticed in my garden is I've seen increased moisture retention. I don't have to water quite as much as I did when I first got started. And that's all because as we improve the soil structure within our gardens, the water is infiltrating better. It's not being pulled and lost to evaporation like it would traditionally be. And then because we have that layer of mulch, or in my case a layer of weed mat, the soil is not exposed to the sun. So I'm losing less water through evaporation than I would if I didn't have that armor on top of my soil. I've also seen increased nutrients in my soil as that material is breaking down. I'm having to apply less fertilizer to get the same amount of yield. And I'm actually seeing my yields increase steadily over the last few years. Now last year's tomatoes didn't do so well, but I'm blaming that one on the individual in the neighborhood that sprayed and the drift that hit my poor tomatoes. But I saw a dramatic increase in my green beans and my corn and my other plants this last year. Now one of the main benefits to me is I have seen a dramatic decrease in the amount of time that I have to spend working in my garden. Between I have, if you heard earlier I have a two year old toddler working on college classes and working full time. As much as I love to spend time in my garden, I don't have as much time to weed as I used to. But the good thing is, I don't have to spend as much time weeding as I normally did. Now the first year that I had my no-till garden, I will say I spent about an hour a week weeding the garden, trying to get rid of that bindweed issue. And every time I'd see it I'd pull it up. And as the years have gone by, I have seen a dramatic decrease in the amount of time that I need to spend weeding. Last year I would say I averaged less than 30 minutes a week weeding my garden. And that was specifically around my corn plants, my onions, my carrots, places where I have wider rows that are getting more exposure to sunlight. But it's been really nice to be able to go on a vacation for a week and come back and not find a jungle that I have to dig to find my plants. The other benefit for me, when I bought my house, I had a shovel, I had some rakes, I had a hoe, I had some hand trowels. But I didn't have a tiller because before this I lived in an apartment. And because I'm not working up my soil every year, I don't need to have a tiller. And I don't need to ask a neighbor to come over and work my garden up or borrow a tiller from my neighbor, which has decreased my labor, and I also haven't had to spend as much money. The other thing I've noticed with this particular garden is, if you can kind of see in the corner where the picket fence is, my garden slopes down fairly steeply there. And that part of the garden had started to erode from heavy rains washing the soil away. And since we've done the no-till gardening because the water infiltrates at a slower rate and I have that soil armor, I've really seen a decrease in erosion and I haven't seen any soil actually being washed into my yard since I started doing this practice. So that is really benefiting me and benefiting the soil. Now, this is a picture you can kind of tell from the tomatoes that this is towards the end of the season. And this master gardener has planted a cover crop of oats underneath of his tomato plants in these raised beds. And he will let this be killed off with a frost at the end of the year, and that's going to be what forms his mulch for next year's lasagna garden. So there are, like I said, there's a lot of different ways that you can do a lasagna garden, whether you use weed mat that you purchase, whether you use the layers of compostable materials, or whether you look at doing a cover crop towards the end of the growing season to provide that mulch. You can really make lasagna gardening work for your situation. I've had a lot of success and I've really enjoyed this method of gardening. I don't know that I would continue to garden if I had to spend as much time weeding as I did when I was a kid. With that, if there are any questions, I would be happy to answer them at this time. Great. We have lots of questions here. Yay! That's always good. You know, keep your answers a little bit brief. I mean, we're okay. We're in good shape. Okay. How about first one, Calla? You talked about using newspapers. Is there a concern about the inks in the paper harming the soil? You know, I haven't heard a lot about that. If you're concerned about it, shredded, just shredded white paper works really well. Just make sure you get it really damp. Because otherwise, like in North Dakota, things tend to blow away. I haven't heard much about newspaper ink being a big issue. Yeah, I think in the past that that was an issue a long time ago, but now they use natural, natural based inks. So I don't think that's an issue anymore. How about speaking of the wind, Calla, how do you keep that weed mad down with the high winds? So I use some stakes. Ironically, my dad went to an auction and thought he was buying one box of stakes and they gave him 25. But I use a lot of stakes. I put them every couple of feet. And when I put my weed mat down, I try and make sure that the prevailing winds, I have the edge on top opposite where the prevailing wind is. It's less likely to catch underneath of that weed mat and flip it up. I've only had one time where I've had an issue with the weed mat and that was when we had 110 mile an hour windstorm come through. I'm going to just flipped one edge up and I was able to pin it right back down. I know soil conservation districts have those pins. I think you can also buy them at the big box stores or an urgent garden center as well. Can you describe the weed man itself that you use? So I use weed mat that I purchased from the soil conservation districts. I know it's maybe a little more expensive than something you could buy from Walmart. The first year I tried some, I did purchase it from Walmart and it disintegrated on me in the first year. The weed mat I buy from the soil conservation districts. Ironically, it's the same stuff my parents used when they did landscaping. But it's a woven fabric that really works very well in North Dakota. Mine is five years old and I guess I would get at least another five years out of it before I'll have to replace it. This person has a lot of ground dwelling bees. How can you protect their habitat when you have a no-till garden? I would say in some ways you're actually protecting it a little bit more because you're not working the soil up. I would say if you do know where those locations of the ground dwelling bees are, I wouldn't put your mulch in that area. I would leave kind of an opening and they will kind of work their way out and help make those openings as well. Back to the weed mats. Does that work with a cool, loving plant like lettuce? I have had lettuce in my garden. I planted peas last year. I haven't noticed a lot of extra heat with it. Now I do notice my soil warms up a little faster in the spring. But in the summer because of the moisture that is maintained under that weed mat, the soil doesn't get much warmer than under a mulch layer. How about with those large stalky crops like corn? What do you do at the end of the year? Do you pull them up and mulch them? Because when you pull them up, you disturb the soil, they say. What I have been doing is I actually take a pair of loppers and I will cut my corn off right at the top of the soil. So I leave those roots down in the bottom. Corn stalks are another one of those things that I would put in a regular compost pile and then spread the compost on next year. You could also, if you have a friend with a shredder, you could potentially run them through a shredder and kind of break them up a little bit. How about Calla? Do you have more issues with rodents in a no-till garden because this gardener talks about how they're always bothering their compost and is that a problem in no-till gardening? I haven't had an issue with it during the growing season. I do know at the 4-H camp we did have some mice that got underneath of the fabric in the wintertime. But during the growing season, I haven't seen it be an issue. If you're in an area where you know you have a lot of rodents, that might be something to take into consideration, but I don't know that it would be a big problem. What's your strategy for irrigating the crops when you have a mat situation? Do you irrigate overhead or do you irrigate by plant by plant at the base? So I've actually tried it two ways. At home, I didn't plan out as well. So I use an overhead sprinkler and I water half my garden and then I do my sprinkler in the other half of the garden. At the 4-H camp, I planned ahead a little better and I actually ran soaker hoses underneath the weed mat in kind of a wiggle pattern and I actually plant in between the wiggles. So I'm using the soaker hose to water my plants and it's watering underneath the soil. How about what's the status of the organic matter underneath the mat? Yet that weed mat, are you preventing the buildup of organic matter in the soil unless you pull it up and plant a cover crop? So if I didn't pull it up, I would potentially be preventing a little bit of organic matter. But I do try and pull it up periodically and do a cover crop or spread some grass clippings and mulch underneath. I don't do quite as big of a layer that six to ten inches that I would do if I didn't have the weed mat, but I do try and incorporate some organic matter underneath the weed mat periodically. So pulling it up also lets me rotate my crops a little better because I can move the weed mat a bit around the garden so I spread my vegetables out. So in no-till gardens, you can still rotate your plants. Okay, good. Do you have some tips on where can you get cover crop seed because it's hard to find, maybe this person says they can only find oat seeds in large quantities. So that would be another place I would recommend potentially talking to your soil conservation district. I know a lot of them plant cover crops for farmers and producers, and they order the seed in for them. So they might be an option to order some smaller quantities of seed or if they have a little leftover, you might be able to purchase it from them. Okay, another question cover crops. Let's a good way to kill off the rye in the springtime. Rye in the springtime roundup is actually probably your best option. Just make sure you get the roundup that is doesn't have any residual. I'm not going to be able to use an organic but I would have to look at the labels and see what one might be good strong enough to take care of rye. And why is roundup so good. I don't know that it's not so much. Or glyphosate. The chemical. It's not necessarily that it's good, but it is a tool in the toolbox that if used properly has a lot of good options. I tend to choose roundup if I'm spraying something because it, it doesn't have as much residual. So I'm not going to have to worry about waiting as long before I plant things. Right, that's that's a big consideration whenever you use a herbicide in a garden situation is some other herbicides have long term residuals. And they'll prevent you from planting for months sometimes so glyphosate just after and it's a systemic to will kill the ride all the way down to the roots right. One thing you could do with the rye is put like clear plastic down and let the sun bake it and kill it that way as well if you don't want to use a chemical. Okay. You know when you put that thick mulch in your garden there. Does that delay the soil from warming up. And does that delay your times for sewing. Maybe just a little bit. Looking at the end on station it keeps it cooler. It may be delays you by a week or so but I don't know that it's going to delay you a ton. And if you really want to get in you can always go and scrape that mulch back from the areas where you want to plant and let that area warm up a little bit faster. How about kind of gardener use peat moss as a source of mulch. And if you do how much peat moss should you use as a mulch. So your peat moss would fall. Oh, I would say maybe an inch or an inch of peat moss in a layer. You want to kind of keep those layers a couple inches an inch to a couple inches thick. Definitely be a good option. I believe you would use it where you like in the compost layer. So first layer on top of your cardboard. You know in your strategy for new gardens and existing gardens you started both strategies and fall. Is there anything people can do in springtime to get the ball rolling. If you have an existing garden you could go ahead and start it this spring. The main reason for starting in the fall for a new garden is to make sure you kill off your grass or weeds that are you're trying in your garden spot. But if you have a garden or a raised bed that you've been using you could go ahead and start this spring. I just maybe would say eight inches of mulch instead of six. It's not going to break down quite as much. Okay. Gardener has a question, but have you ever used a tarp to cover mode grass? Oh, if you're wanting to kill it off. Yes, that would work really well if you have something. And you, you want to get a head start on killing it before you put the other compost and layers down. Would you use like a black mulch to prevent it from getting sunlight or would you use a clear mulch to like solar rise and just burn the heck out of it. I would, if you still have pretty warm days, I would say a clear mulch would would help kill things faster. If you're getting towards the end of the year, or you have things that are really hard to kill, your black plastic will probably heat things up a little bit more. How about, you know, when you plant a row in a no-till garden, do you tilt where you set the roll or do you work the area up at all? It depends on what you're doing. Like, for me, I would use a hoe and make a row a couple inches deep if I was planting peas. If I'm planting potatoes or something like that, you're going to have to work it up with a shovel a little bit more. Once you start, in theory, you shouldn't use a tiller, a rototiller again in the garden. A shovel, a trowel, or a hoe would be probably the only things that you would be using. Okay. How about just going to throw out some more questions. We're doing a, you got it pretty much all covered here, but maybe a few more here. How about, have you ever used Milorganite? I have not. Okay, I have used Milorganite and the question is, is it safe to use? This is a Milwaukee sewage sludge, and it has been, you got to be careful with the label. It's a great lawn fertilizer. It can be used in vegetable gardens, too. Check the label, but they're processing it, so it's safe to use in vegetable gardens, too. Where are we going here? Have you ever used a cattle panel for keeping the weed mat in place? Actually, yes. At the 4-H camp, we use cattle panels to keep the big furries out, and I have the edge of the weed mat pinned under the cattle panel. Okay. See, we got all kinds of questions here, I tell you. How about, can you use oak leaves for mulch? I would say yes. I would stay away from using anything that's diseased, obviously, but I don't see a reason why oak leaves wouldn't be okay to use as a mulch. Anita, we answered your questions about slugs in private, because slugs more of a problem in a no-till garden? I haven't really had any issues with diseases or insects since I started with my garden. My biggest problem has been herbicide drip. Yeah, that's a big, you can't control your neighbors, can you? Do you, and there's a question, you wouldn't want to keep the weed mat down permanently, would you? You only use it to kill the grass, it would interfere with drainage. Oh, I see. I think that if you put the weed mat, it does allow for water infiltration, doesn't it? Yeah. The first couple rains, it doesn't soak through quite as well, but after kind of that initial film gets washed off, then the water soaks right through it without any problems. Okay, and with this, this person is ready to go. They got a big plot of garden, but it's got a lot of large, thick weeds. They want to dry now and they want to plant, they want to get planting already. Well, what do you think about planting St. Patrick's State Gardening again, huh? It's a strange year. How about for this no-till garden, would you recommend that they cut the weeds down like with that loppers you mentioned, or would you pull them out? If they're really thick, I would for sure cut them down. You could pull them out if you want to, but if you can chop them off, that would probably be the best option. And then the follow-up is, should they put down a layer of cardboard with mulch on top? Yes. When they plant. Yep, the cardboard will help keep the extra weeds from coming through. Okay, I'm just going to throw in another one. Can they put kitchen scraps that would normally go into a compost bin into the lasagna layers? Yep. There'll be no issues with them breaking down. No, it'll just take a little longer than a normal compost, but they will break down. Yep. Where can you get a lot of compost? People love compost. Where can you get it? That's a good question. I know some towns have it where you can come and get some. Otherwise you might have to start making your own or purchasing it, unfortunately. Yeah, that's, you know, we have that in Bismarck. They have a place where you can get compost, but there are issues with all the herbicides being used to make the compost, like with the lawns. And there's a great risk of having persistent herbicides in that compost that you introduced your garden that can prevent plant growth for her broadleaf plant growth for three years. So be careful if you get a, I would test any compost that I got from a municipal site. Yeah, I would. Compost of manure is probably your best option if you can find someone in the area that has some. That's right. Okay, sounds good. Cal, thank you. We learned a lot about an hotel gardening and thank you for your presentation tonight. Thank you. Welcome.