What I did to Build my food forest without tilling first I based on my front yard where I had trouble growing grass:
1)Low sun
2)compacted clay soil
3)I was lazy about raking leaves.
In the areas along the chainlink
fence bordering the side yard and back yard where leaves tended to pile up from wind, the soil was pretty good once I finally did rake the leaves away, it was dark, loose and weeds came in as soon as I cleared the compacted leaves and that's what inspired me to build my food forest right on top of lawn bermuda without tilling it at all.
What I did was collect strangers' leaves they had bagged and left on the curbside for trash collectors
In Tulsa, OK we have an excellent mulch facility that accepts tree branches, the
city or county set up after a big ice storm that wreaked havo on the trees, and they coty or county didn't want to fill the landfills up with that, so they built a mulch facility where residents (based on zipcode) can drop off unlimited amounts of tard waste for free(a portion of the water/sewer bill pays for the facility so residents get free access to the mulch facility)
They had a problem with leaves and grass clippings, the plastic trash bags made a mess, we herd to open without making a mess of plastic, and mowed products often have plastic and other inorganic materials in them shredded up by lawnmowers, so they don't accept that.
And you can'r get any of it there.
The bagged yard waste is BURNED at a "sustainable" plastic to energy incinerator(microplastic problem is coming fom those)
I poach them off the curb and use it to build soil(both leaves and grass clippings)
The candy wrappers, weeed whip cords etc if not immediately identifyable when I dump out these bags, eventually works its way to the top and is easy to find.
And you can often see if a bag of leaves or grass has trash mixed in before deciding to throw it in the back of my pickup.
So here's what I did:
6" leaves topped with 3" horse manure. Right on top of bemuda lawn.
Magnolia leaves are great because thet lay flat and Occultify(there's a term for removing light like occultification, solarization is when you put white or clear plastic and cook it, but I didn't want to cook it, just wanted to starve it of light, and let the grubs eat it.
The three inches of horse manure ensured full darkness, and the bacteria in the manure eventually DIGESTED the leaves.
So I had isopods, worms, cicada and junebug grubs in there from the getgo.
I have to mulch regularly to keep the bermuda from coming back in, and eventually I resorted to polymer landscaping fabric for borders.
But what I did with those is just unstake them once a year, and flip them back and then peel the bermuda tendrils out of it, stake it back down. Mulch on top.
A bit more next post.
I'm TRYING GARLIC now as a border plant.
Also I got free wood for my berms from the Tulsa Mulch facility. They separate the large hard woods for FREE
FIREWOOD.
I used that to build my berms.
https://www.cityoftulsa.org/government/departments/streets-and-stormwater/mulch-site/
(I got the horse manure off of craigslist for free, most of it was already composted, but my sources dried up after I shared what I was doing and at the end of the day I ended up with some fresh that had hookworms in it that infected my dogs(I had to worm them)
LOL
More in a sec, GARLIC from SEED is my new border strategy.
(You need fresh garlic seed and cloves from home grown garlic.) So if you aren't growing garlic plant some soon.
I'll explain next post.