No-till Drill-are they all $3000+?

[Darren]

Terry, I've never liked the idea of using a plow. There's a book from before the fifties, The Plowman's Folly that makes a good case for not plowing. No till seems to be the "modern" way of avoiding plowing and the associated soil losses. Bare soil is exposed and vulnerable. The area where I'm located had one of the highest erosion rates fifty or sixty years ago.

Even today there's minimal top soil. If I find over an inch, it's a lot. Even the woods where cattle grazed in the early 1900's when it wasn't forested has little top soil. A forester told me it would take lifetimes to recover naturally. Today I went up to the top of the ridge to get a wagon load of field stone for a wall. Sometime before 1914, whoever owned the land cleared the semi-level land on top of the ridge to grow corn and piled all of the rock in two places.

The pile of rocks hasn't been touched for at least 90 years and maybe way longer. I was amazed at how deep the leaf mold and debris was in places on top of the rocks. In some places it was probably 2" thick. In the woods it's less than that.

 

[micromike]

Here is a link to "Rock and Dirt" used equipment. I noticed a couple of seed drills. Don't know if it's what you are looking for but it has loads of other used equipment virtually everyone here might enjoy browsing!

http://www.rockanddirt.com/perl/search.pl?method=adv_search&db=equipdb

 

[Phred]

Jeff,

I don't know about cost;

However this info may help
http://www.ag.uiuc.edu/~vista/html_pubs/grassroots/notill.html
http://www.agric.gov.ab.ca/esb/afmrc/558.html
Fred

 

[TerryinMD]

Darren,

In some cases you are probably correct. However, if you are working a small garden area, you can amend your soil with green manure, grass clippings, leaves from your or neighbors lawns, and a multitude of other sources.

The key to saving your soil is to amend it as much as possible and to mulch during the growing season. We have approximately 6-7000 square feet of tilled area. We use a combination of straw and grass clippings to mulch. Two purposes - one to conserve moisture and secondly to keep down the weeds. We also have just last year began to use erosion drainage fabric between our rows to keep the weeds down and maintain soil moisture. During last years growing season, we seldom had to water our garden. Even during the dry spell we had at the end of the summer.

There are a many strategies to conserve and build your soil. You need to find out what works best for you in your area.

Now to get back to the plowing. I have found that to work in the green manure effectively. One must work the organic material deep to gain any true benefit. Both my Troybilt and my 3pt hitch rotory tiller only go down about 7-8 inches. Not very far to get moisture far into the ground to promote good root growth in your crops. When we had a small garden that I worked by hand, I would try to turn the soil as deeply as possible to work in the organics. I could get down somewhere between 10-12 inches. With a small moldboard, I will be able to get down about a foot to work all of those wonderful organics deep to promote bacterial growth and also to have those earthworms create a good organic base.

In the 10 or so years that we have worked our garden area. I have had minimal erosion. Most of it was due to a neighbor pumping out their basement after it flooded. My guess is that the property has good drainage and I was fortunate in where we located our garden.

Terry

 

[Darren]

Terry, I'm almost at the beginning what you've done for years. Finding mulch materials in a rural area is tough.
I've been doing green manures using buckwheat and winter rye. This year I'm thinking about planting hairy vetch for natural source of nitrogen.

 

[TerryinMD]

Darren,

This year we used barley. It puts down a heavy grass like mat which has been doing very well with this mild winter. Typically, we get what's available from some of the local suppliers. If it grows, it's a candidate.

We try to get our materials from anyone we can. Since we live an area with a few surrounding homes, we can get grass clipping, leaves, sheep manure, cow manure, and, as a last resort, horse manure.

Terry