Jubilee Family Center
The Children’s Garden at Jubilee Family Center
As volunteer educators working for Virginia Cooperative Extension Service and Virginia Tech, Hill City Master Gardeners have developed and cared for the garden at Jubilee for over 20 years. Our primary objective is to work with the children to help them learn about the natural world and how plants and vegetables grow. Our secondary goal is to provide the children and their families with fresh, healthy vegetables. Master Gardeners (MGs) meet with the children once a week to plant, care for, and harvest our crops.
It is said that the best thing to put on your garden is your shadow. Working in the garden only one day per week (with some additional visits) leaves us with a variety of problems, especially lots of weeds getting out of control. For that reason and because the base clay soil was hardly improved after years of plowing, we tried a “no till” garden five years ago.
At its most basic, no-till gardening involves the use of mulch and natural materials piled on top of the soil and allowed to decompose to create planting beds. This process goes by many names, including sheet mulching and lasagna gardening. At Jubilee, we marked our planting rows and paths, covered the entire garden with cardboard and newspaper, and then piled our organic materials in the rows. For the first two years, we were fortunate to have donated horse manure which was covered with lots of shredded leaves provided by Lynchburg Public Works. For the last two years, we have covered the rows with shredded leaves. Rows are sprinkled with cottonseed meal for nitrogen needed by the plants. To discourage weeds in the paths as well as to protect the children’s shoes, we have recycled old carpeting.
Starting Your Own No-Till Garden
Before starting any garden, be sure there is adequate sun and water available for the site. Get a soil test from your Virginia Cooperative Extension Office.
One of the easiest ways to begin a no-till garden is to cut any grass or weeds in the garden area as close to the surface as possible. Cover the soil with a layer of cardboard or several layers of newspapers to eliminate the light which weed seeds need for germination. Decide where the planting rows and paths will be. Cover the planting rows with 12 to 18 inches of organic material.
In our community, the most readily-available material for covering the garden is autumn leaves, preferably ground up. (Lynchburg City will deliver truckloads of leaves to City residents in the fall.) Grass clippings, kitchen wastes (vegetable only), compost, shredded paper, straw, sawdust, composted cow or horse manure—many natural elements may be added. As the rows are covered, layers of materials high in carbon (leaves, saw dust, wood chips) should be alternated with layers high in nitrogen (manures, grass clippings, kitchen vegetable wastes). This process is best started in the fall. The layers should be well watered. Then let the worms and soil microbes do the work to create beds ready for planting in the spring.
Advantages of no-till gardening are many. Rebecca Finneran, Michigan State University Extension, and Pamela Bennett and Denise Johnson, Ohio State University Extension (February 11, 2015) describe it this way:
“For years farmers have utilized the no-till method for crops, realizing the benefits of erosion control, soil moisture conservation, fewer weeds and building soil structure and health. Excessive tillage destroys the soil structure which is the foundation for healthy plant roots that interact with the living component of the soil.
“Adding organic matter also enhances soil structure by encouraging microorganisms to act as a conduit for nutrients to enter plant roots. The no-till technique leaves crop residue on the soil surface which increases the organic matter content of the soil while enhancing the environment for the living component….
“The sheet-composting method mentioned above can be used to prepare the bed the first year. After that, organic matter such as compost should be added to these beds each season; organic matter breaks down over time and needs to be replenished. One to 2 inches of compost may be all a garden needs for the season. It may take a couple of seasons to build your no-till beds, but once they are established, adding additional organic matter is all that is necessary. Using an organic mulch such as straw or wood landscape mulch will help prevent weeds from growing and can serve double-duty as organic matter; it’s an important component in the no-till garden.”