hau, Lori As you have discovered, compaction of soil creates lots of issues for the plants we want to grow.
No-till is a method which requires observation and application of corrections, especially when it comes to tilth (amount of compaction) of the soil.
Broad Forking, is one method to loosen soil and get air down into the soil. Using certain cropping patterns will also help with this without the need of physical exertion.
On our place we had compacted, rocky sandy loam (actually we find a red clay one to two feed down). We have started the following regimen to cure the particular issues of our
land.
We plant daikon radish, rape, alfalfa, crimson, white and yellow clovers on new areas that we are turning into garden areas. These plants are put in the first time around the end of august to the middle of September.
After first frost these spaces are chopped and dropped, left to over winter as mulched areas. The deep root vegies (daikon and rape) rot over the winter, this leaves humus in the soil as well as looser soil from the action of the roots as they grew.
The clovers replenish nitrogen over the winter.
In the spring, if the soil is not to our liking, we replant the winter crop and add buckwheat, cereal rye, oats, and some food crop plant seeds. As the season goes along, the daikon and rape are chopped at 8 weeks, the clovers are cut every five weeks.
This method allows us to continually add to the
mulch layer, loosens the soil and adds humus deep into the soil. Usually by the next spring we have very friable soil in an area we use this method on.
We have pasture areas for our guinea hogs, where we use daikon, rape, turnip, alfalfa, buckwheat and oats. When these plants have reached 8-9 weeks old we turn the hogs into the newly replenished paddock for about 4 weeks, then the hogs are moved on and the used paddock is left to rejuvenate for around another -9 weeks. Our hogs do not eat so much of the plants that they can not regenerate in that time frame but as we add more paddocks, each one will have a longer rest period. We keep a small flock of chickens in the same paddock as the hogs. Everyone moves as a group from paddock to paddock.
The only area we have that has been tilled is our root vegetable garden space, this one 5' x 20' area has been triple dug, sifted for rock removal and humus amended (
straw from the straw bale gardens and used potting soil(from sweet potatoes that are crate grown) are the normal amendments) we use these most everywhere we want to improve the soil. Our orchard
trees have a 4-6 inch deep mulch and these get
compost on top two to four times a year. Our compost contains 20% spent
coffee grounds and everything we don't feed the hogs and chickens. We use hot
composting methods then let the heaps cool before we sift to remove unfinished components (these go back into the new heaps). The finished compost then gets an addition of mychorrizal inoculant and allowed to "ripen" for about two weeks before it is placed around the trees/ garden plants. The areas of our land that are being used for animal and food production currently have a very nice composition and contain at least 10 different fungi that are beneficial to our plants and trees.
By the way, we have been at this for only two years now, the first year was entirely spent on reclaiming land that had been previously cleared prior to going fallow for seven years.