Originally Posted by elchivito

I stopped tilling years ago. If you think about the way a rototiller works, it's fluffing the top 6 or 8 inches of soil, but where the blades hit the bottom of their rotation they're actually compacting the soil, creating a hardpan down there that, depending on your soil type, can get so hard that plant roots can't bust thru it. When we're cleaning livestock pens and the poultry house all winter, the cleanouts get spread out on the garden and raked flat. Over the winter, it waters in and composts naturally from the bottom. By spring it's about 6 inches deep.All we have to do to plant is dig little holes and set out our new plants that are started from seed in flats indoors. The cleanouts are a mixture of waste hay, straw bedding and manure. The newest, top part forms a mulch, so there are virtually no weeds.
Before I stopped tilling, I rarely saw any worms. Now we have them by the thousands. No other fertilizers necessary.