5 No-Till Gardening Strategies to Try (+ Tips to Make No-Till Work for You)

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In wild meadows and forests, both the plants and the soil are part of nature’s highly efficient system. Soil organisms break down the constant supply of fallen leaves, branches, and dead vegetation, converting them into nutrients for new growth, and the result is an ecosystem that takes care of itself without any tending from humans.

The idea behind no-till gardening is to try and recreate those natural conditions in our garden soil.

When you give them the right environment- lots or organic matter to eat and less disturbance– your populations of fungi, bacteria, earthworms, and other decomposers will grow and improve the fertility of the ground like they do in nature.

Over time, a healthy soil biome can transform your garden. The work of friendly soil organisms adds structure and nutrients to the soil in way that’s more permanent than the improvements you get by tilling and conventional fertilizing. You’ll have soil that is naturally well-draining and rich in nutrients, meaning you can get good yields with a lot less labor and input. And that’s important, if you want to grow food for self-reliance and reduce your environmental footprint.   

In this post, I’ll run through the basics of five popular no-till strategies you might want to try in your garden, with the pros and cons of each.

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First Thing’s First: The Basics of No-Till

As a no-till beginner, you’ll find there are a variety of no-till “formulas,” all with (semi) specific guidelines. But you don’t have to follow an exact set of instructions to make it work, as long as you stick with the two basic principles:

1) you feed the soil with organic matter, such as compost, leaf litter, grass clippings, etc., and 2) you disturb the soil as little as possible.

That being said, learning the specifics about tried-and-true methods is a good way to gain some insight when you’re first starting out. Then, you can come up with a plan that will work best for your garden, based on the materials you have access to and the kind of space you’re working with.

1. No Dig

The No-Dig method was championed by Charles Dowding, an English market gardener who has spent decades perfecting and experimenting with his straightforward no-till strategy. He has also written a whole collection of popular books about no-till gardening, which are valuable resources for anyone interested in the subject.

The No-Dig method is one of the easiest and quickest. You simply put down a deep layer of finished compost on top of your designated garden spot, which will gradually improve the native soil underneath as it works its way in. You can put it right on top of your lawn, or on top of an existing garden spot you want to convert.

Mulch and weed barriers such as recycled cardboard are considered optional with this method, since the deep compost layer should be enough to smother out any weeds on its own.

*Note: in my experience, I’ve found it takes A LOT of compost to choke out weeds. That’s definitely the case if you have stubborn grass and certain perennial weeds. Unless you have enough compost to layer it 6 inches or deeper, I advise laying down a weed barrier first for good measure.

Pros:

-No-Dig might give you quicker results than other methods. Although it’s generally better to prep your garden in the fall or winter the year before, you may have good luck building a No Dig bed in the spring and planting it right away, since you can plant directly into the finished compost layer.

Cons:

-This method may cost you a little bit of money upfront, since it requires so much compost to be really effective. Unless you’re able to make lots of your own homemade compost, you’ll need to buy some and have it brought in.

The cost of good, finished compost varies based on where you live. Depending on that and the size of your garden, it could be a moderate investment or a small fortune.   

2. Lasagna Gardening

A lasagna garden is basically a garden-sized compost lasagna, and it’s just as epic as it sounds! Just like you would in a compost pile, you build your garden bed up with alternating layers of green (nitrogen-rich) and brown (carbon rich) materials, aiming to keep the layers as uniform as you can.

Options for the green materials might include fresh grass clippings, green yard waste (no seedy weeds), kitchen scraps, coffee grounds, and livestock manure.

For brown materials, you could use dead leaves, dry grass clippings, shredded cardboard or paper, pine needles, wood chips, and even small twigs and branches.

It’s best to add the “heavier” carbon things like the last three near the bottom, since they take longer to break down. The top and final layer should be brown material or compost.

You’ll need at least 4-6 layers of compostable stuff. Otherwise, it’s not a lasagna garden- it’s just mulch.

The alternating layers in a lasagna garden encourage quick decomposing. To speed things up, keep your compost lasagna watered in dry spells.

Planting can happen once the layered materials have broken down into rich, crumbly dirt, which can take anywhere from months to a year. If you’d rather not wait that long, some say you can add a final layer of finished compost on top and plant into that sooner. Personally, I still recommend giving it at least three months or so, since the decomposing material beneath will become “hot” and could burn your plants.

The colder the weather when you create the lasagna garden, the slower everything will break down.

 Pros:

-Deep layering gives you a nice, nutrient rich buffer between your plants and your native soil. This is a plus, if you have particularly crappy native soil and need more time for it to improve. Your plants will have plenty of growing medium while it “settles in.”

-Weeds won’t be much of an issue here. Those dense layers of waste material will smother even the stubborn ones.

Cons:

-The planning and logistics for a lasagna garden can be challenging- mainly, figuring out how/where in the heck you’re going to get all that layering material.

-Those layers of toasty warm, rotting kitchen waste might attract mice or other unwanted critters to your garden area. This is less likely if you make sure your green layers are well-covered by the carbon layers.  

-For best results, you’ll need to wait a while before planting a lasagna garden- anywhere from 6 months to a year.

3. Raised Row Gardening

In this method, planting rows are laid out the same way you’d see them in a traditional garden design, with walkways in between for access. But instead of tilling and hilling the dirt, these rows are made by laying down some organic materials like fall leaves, wood chips, or grass clippings, then covering them with several inches of good soil and compost.

When finished, the rows will look like tapered mounds, which can be as high and wide as you want to make them. You can also dig out your walkways a bit and use the removed soil to help build your rows.

Mulch plays an important role in the raised row approach. Since raised rows don’t have borders, you’ll want to keep that soil covered at all times to prevent erosion. Some gardeners plant cover crops or “living mulch” on their rows to give them extra stability and protection. Cover crops can be cut back in the spring before planting, and the clippings provide green mulch and nutrients.       

Pros:

-Raised rows sit higher than the ground, so they’ll have great drainage. This can make a huge difference in your plants’ health if you have drainage issues in your garden.

-The rows warm up faster than the ground below them in the spring, which means you can get a head start on planting. That makes the raised row method popular with folks growing big gardens in places with short growing seasons.

Cons:

-Being confined to rows may limit your creativity in using the space you have to its full potential.

-You’ll need quite a bit of soil and compost to build your rows, which can turn into an expense.

4. Hügelkultur

Traditionally, Hügelkultur garden beds are created by piling up logs, branches and other plant matter, then burying them with soil to plant into. For best results, you’ll need some bigger woody stuff for the base of the pile. Deadfall works great, bonus points if it’s already rotting.

The first step actually does involve some digging. You’ll need to excavate a shallow pit and place the largest logs and branches at the bottom. The trench or pit will supply you some dirt for the top and keep the mound from shifting. Once you have the base of the mound in place, you’ll build it higher by piling other organic materials- both greens and browns- on top. Finally, it’s all covered up with a layer of compost and the soil you dug out for the pit.  

A Hügelkultur mound will settle in over time, as the logs and woody pieces decompose, and it will become a nice replica of that diverse ecosystem found in a forest floor.

One of the coolest things about this method is how well rotting wood holds water. The larger logs at the base of the bed act like a sponge, providing plants with a reservoir of moisture the roots can access during dry weather. This drastically cuts down the need for irrigation during dry weather. For that reason, building Hügelkultur beds is a great way to make sure your garden can survive drought and water shortages.    

Hügelkultur mounds can vary in size and width. Some gardeners make them massive, planting up and down the slopes. Others keep them just several feet tall. The larger the bed, the longer it can hold onto moisture. 

Pros:

-Hügelkultur beds are incredibly water-efficient. You may not need to water them at all, except during extreme or prolonged drought.

-It’s one of the most cost-effective methods on the list. You can find all the materials needed for free, if you have access to the woods.

-Once established, Hügelkultur beds stay rich and fertile for years with little to no maintenance.  

Cons:

-The initial setup involves some heavy lifting and manual labor. Unless you have digging equipment, you’ll be digging the pit with a shovel. Hauling and arranging the logs is also quite a workout.

-When they first start to rot, woody materials may borrow nitrogen from the soil. This is called nitrogen sequestration or “nitrogen lock,” and it can temporarily cause nitrogen deficiency in your plants.

To get around the nitrogen problem, you can plant first year Hügelkultur beds with lighter-feeding plants or nitrogen-fixing crops. Nitrogen fixers can take in some nitrogen from the atmosphere, adding it back to the soil as they complete their life cycle. Peas and beans are both nitrogen fixers.

See this post to learn more about building and planting on Hügelkultur mounds: How to Use Hügelkultur in Your Garden.

5. Back to Eden (Deep Mulch)

This strategy, made popular by Paul Gautschi in his documentary on the subject, takes inspiration directly from the natural mulch that builds up beneath growing things in the wild.

In Gautschi’s Back to Eden style garden, wood chips imitate the heavy layer of organic matter on the forest floor. The chips are spread at least six inches deep on top of the garden plot (often deeper), where they’ll choke out weeds, hold moisture, and feed the soil as they decompose. Some gardeners choose to put down cardboard for more weed suppression.

While it’s optional, a layer of nitrogen-rich green material or some compost beneath the wood chips can speed up the rotting process.     

The important thing to get right when planning a Back to Eden style garden is the type of wood chips you get. If they come in bags, they’re not the right kind.

Pretty landscape mulches are often dyed for curb appeal. Even if they aren’t, they’re likely made of hardwood that’s meant to last a long time without rotting. You don’t want that for your no-till garden.

For your Back to Eden garden, you need to find some arborist chips, or what’s left over after a tree removal company chips a tree. These are green and roughly shredded with leaves and branches included. They’ll decompose and feed the soil more quickly, since they include both green and brown materials.

If you can’t find a good source for arborist chips, you don’t have to use wood. The key to the Back to Eden method is insulating the soil and creating a habitat for mycelium and beneficial microbes, and any carbon mulch does this. Dried leaves, grass clippings, pine needles, or straw will work just fine.  

The Back to Eden method is a frugal approach to no-till that will produce better and better results with each year of planting.

Pros:

-Virtually free, if you’re able to get your hands on arborist chips, leaf litter, or yard trimmings. Since they’re no good for landscaping, tree removal companies are often willing to give their wood chips away to the first taker. Several of my local companies will deliver them straight to my yard whenever they have a job in my neighborhood.

-Back to Eden style gardens are low-maintenance and highly sustainable once established. You’ll rarely need to water, since the heavy mulch layer keeps the soil from drying up. Wood chips (or a thick layer of any other carbon material) will feed the soil for years, since they break down slowly. All you’ll need to do is add another light layer from time to time when they start to look thin.

-Any weeds that do manage to root in the deep mulch will pull up easily.

Cons:

-This one also requires patience (seems like a reoccurring theme, right?). Wood chips take a long time to break down and make good dirt. If you’re working with poor native soil, it might be several years before you see real results.  

-Deep mulching attracts slugs. They like to hide in it during the day and come out to eat your plants at night and during rainy weather. This might be particularly annoying in places where slugs are already a nuisance.

-Wood chips may temporarily steal nitrogen from the soil. The science says nitrogen lock isn’t an issue if the mulch is placed on top and not mixed in, but here’s the reality: it always ends up working its way into the first few inches of soil, whether from rain, foraging birds and animals, planting, etc. Nitrogen deficiency is mainly an issue when direct sowing seeds, since the new roots develop at the surface.   

-Speaking of direct sowing…it’s hard to do with six-plus inches of mulch in the way! The usual solution is pushing the mulch back to plant, but it can still fall back down around your seeds pretty easily.

Tiny surface-sown seeds like lettuce and carrots especially struggle in heavy mulch. Some Back to Eden gardeners recommend creating a small “trench” in the mulch, then filling it with soil or compost as a planting medium to give tiny seeds a better start.

I’ve had awesome results using the deep mulch method, but personally, I like to use containers or raised beds that aren’t deep-mulched for crops I need to direct sow.    

Making No-Till Methods Work For You

If one of these five methods is a perfect fit, great! Otherwise, you can use them as inspiration to experiment with your own ideas.

For our in-ground no-till beds, I use a combination of ideas from the No Dig method and the Back to Eden deep mulch method. They get a little more compost and little less mulch than a typical Back to Eden setup, because that seems to work best for our garden.  

When planning a no-till garden, consider which resources you can most easily get your hands on.

One of the main points of no-till is to garden more sustainably, so you don’t want to choose a system where you’ll have to spend big bucks or haul materials in from far away. For example, if you live in a suburban place without many trees around, a strategy using arborists’ wood chips probably isn’t the most practical.

Also, think about your climate and the space you’re working with. Since raised rows warm up more quickly in the spring, they’re a good choice if you live somewhere with a short growing season and have plenty of room to lay them out. But if you’re working with a small space in a hot climate, hügelkultur or no-dig makes more sense.

Here are some tips I’ve learned from my own experience doing no-till, which you’ll hopefully find helpful no matter what strategy you go with:

–Get creative to cut costs. Improvise, use what you have, and look for ways to get mulching and compost materials for free.

A lot of the things we no-till enthusiasts want for our gardens are considered trash by other people. Chances are, you can find a few neighbors who would be happy to let you bag up their leaves when they clean their yards up in the fall. We have mostly pine forest on our property, so I use a ton of pine needles for mulch in the garden.

Also, restaurants and coffee shops can be a good source of free green waste- think bags of nitrogen-rich spent coffee grounds. Have a friend or family member who runs a lawn business? Tag along and bag up some grass clippings. If you or someone you know raises chickens or livestock, you can use old straw from stall and coop cleanouts for mulch.

Again, if you’re in a rural or sort-of rural area with trees around, chances are you can find a tree company that will happily give you their woodchips. There’s even an app called Chip Drop you can use to request a wood chip delivery (I haven’t personally used it).

–Get your amendments and mulch put down in the fall before you intend to plant the garden. This gives everything plenty of time to begin decomposing and attracting soil organisms. This is especially important if you’re starting from scratch and have never amended or grown stuff in the patch of ground you’re working with. 

–Never let your soil become exposed. Since mulch breaks down over time, you’ll need to add more periodically to keep the ground adequately covered. Definitely don’t let it get thin enough you have patches of bare or nearly bare ground, as it exposes the soil to harsh weather that can cause compaction and is not ideal for soil life you’re trying to build. You’ll probably need to top off the mulch once or twice per year.

–Try to shorten the fallow (unoccupied) period in your garden beds. Obviously, many of us are unable to grow crops in our gardens year-round because of climate. But the longer you can keep something growing in your bed(s), the better it is for the soil biome. Even in areas with cold winters where plants and trees go dormant, there are always living roots in the ground in nature.

One way to approach this is to stagger plantings and grow some things you’d usually grow in the spring/summer season in the fall, instead. This has other benefits, too, since some crops like cabbage, many root vegetables, and lettuce varieties grow better in the fall than they do during the heat of summer. Plus, it frees up space to grow more food.

You could also look into cover cropping, which means planting something to keep the soil active while it isn’t in use for a main crop.

Cover crop selections usually benefit the soil in other ways, as well. Some add back nitrogen depleted from previous crops (legumes such as peas and clover), some mine other nutrients like phosphorous (buckwheat), some have deep roots to help aerate the soil (mustard, alfalfa), and some are even believed to help rid the soil of pathogens that cause disease (daikon radishes).

Some cold-hardy cover crops will grow well into the winter, and other heat-tolerant ones are great for places where you can’t really grow much else during the intense summer heat. There’s pretty much a cover crop suited for every circumstance. With a bit of research, you can find the perfect fit.   

See this post to learn more about cover crops and how to use them to their full potential: How to Plan and Plant Cover Crops to Improve Your Garden Soil.  

-Be mindful of possible herbicide contamination in the amendments you source from outside your yard. Sadly, persistent broadleaf herbicides carrying over into garden amendments is a common and devastating situation in the US these days. Many of the materials needed for no-till garden methods fall into the high-risk category, including straw, hay, manure, and purchased compost.

To avoid introducing persistent herbicides to your soil, you need to either know the history of an amendment you want to use or perform a bioassay test to make sure it’s safe. Read this post to learn more about protecting your garden from these destructive chemicals.

-Learn how to make your own compost. If you have a large garden, it will likely be impossible to make all of the compost you need at home, but you can definitely take a big chunk out of the bill by making as much as you can. A compost pile requires some commitment and regular attention, but it’s a rewarding process to watch your scraps and yard waste transform into black gold for your garden.

-Be patient. While some methods may produce noticeable results faster than others, any no-till system takes a while to make significant changes to your native soil’s texture and fertility. That’s because a healthy and diverse soil biome doesn’t develop overnight.

During the first several years, you may not see huge increases in yields, and you’ll probably deal with some of the specific challenges that come along with getting a no-till garden established.

It’s definitely an investment that doesn’t come with an instant payoff. But when you stick with your no-till plan, you’ll eventually have a garden that provides you with bigger harvests for less labor and input down the road.

Have y’all tried any of these no-till strategies? How did it work for you?