Garden 2010: No-till maize trial & other experiments

This year we will probably be in Vienna for a large part of the summer, and we've just found a community garden for growing some vegetables. But because I am interested in agriculture and not only in gardening, I started an experiment with maize in a no-till system. No-till consists in growing crops without plowing the soil, and keeping a mulch at the soil surface. It gained popularity in conventional farming where herbicides can be used instead of tillage for controlling weeds, but it is still marginal in organic agriculture.

24-25 April 2010:

Despite the no-till ideals of not touching the soil, the first step before planting was to remove the grass growing on the plot. The field had not been prepared during the winter with a proper mulch, so that very much grass was growing:

I delimited ways of 20cm large, between the beds which are 1 m large and 6 m long. It took me not less than 8 hours to prepare these 18m²...:

At the back of the 6m beds, there are 4 control plots (see next picture) which were:

- up left: plowed and no mulch

- up right: plowed and double mulch layer

- down right: the grass was just cut and not uprooted, and

- down left: nothing was done, seeds were planted in the growing grass

Planting.

I tried different methods: (1) planting maize at home and transplanting after it has reached 15 - 20 cm, (2) making seedballs, and (3) direct seeding into the soil. For each variant (particularly 2 & 3), half of the seeds were covered by mulch, and the other half was not covered (5-10 cm around the seed was free)

First, the seedballs which were prepared by encapsulating each seed in wet soil:

The rest was planted at home:

13 May 2010: transplanting.

We sadly discovered that slugs are a really nasty pest (some tomatoes and other things were quite eaten), so we decided to use Iron-Phosphate which is allowed in organic production (at least in Europe) in order not to lose all our crops.

20 May 2010: evaluation of crop sprouting and health. It is here obvious that direct seeding into the soil is better than the seedballs. Among the control plots, nr. 3 (grass cut and mulched) is the best for the moment. There were only 2 lines planted on the controls, 3 planted into the soil (left line) and 3 in seedballs (middle line). The part where seeds were not covered by mulch (upper block) also seems to do better.

 

The transplanted part has not been evaluated yet but it does not look good:

8 August 2010

It's been a long time since I took pictures.Generally during the growth, the plants which had been directly seeded were the strongest, although the transplanted ones recovered quite well too. Due to lack of time I didn't evaluate the different treatments more into detail.

Some of the maize is now ready to be harvested for eating fresh: