To Till or Not To Till....That is the Question

My husband and I have been going a few rounds around here about whether to till up the new garden space that is currently grass. I got it fenced off this past week and he promised to till it by Sunday. He's a till and straight row kind of guy; while I find myself feeling increasingly wild and whimsical on the subject of gardening.

The truth is, I don't want it tilled. I've been doing some reading about all the benefits of NOT tilling or digging, and quite frankly neither one of us have any desire to be running off to the chiropractor, so no-till sounds like a good option to me.

I was doing some nosing around on the web this weekend and I came upon a blog called In Lee's Garden Now which was really interesting to me. And I kept thinking, Lee Reich, Lee Reich, why is that name so familiar to me?

Because I already own one of his books, Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden.

Duh.

Check out his website. His garden is GEORGEOUS.

So much so, in fact, that I bought his book, Weedless Gardening, and it arrived promptly today, autographed, no less, which was really nice.

I went straight to the chapter called, In the Beginning: Readying the Ground for a First Time Planting, where I found this comment - "On the other hand, a sorry patch of lawn will quickly expire beneath less than four layers of newspaper".

Boy is this the book for me.

Encouraged and armed with a book saying that this is the way to go, I headed outside this afternoon and broached the subject with my husband again, and this time he expressed his reservations, but agreed to let me go the "weedless gardening" route this spring.

Turns out the answer is "not to till", so I am psyched.

In preparation this afternoon, I gathered up a bunch of scrap lumber that had been laying around and started kind of marking out where I want to have paths and where I want to have beds for the large area of grass that will be potatoes, melons, peppers, eggplants, tomatoes, corn and lots and lots of flowers later this summer. I'm going to start bringing home materials tomorrow and working on one bed at a time, starting with the potatoes, which will have to go in about mid April. Gives me about a month to kill of the grass....