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Rototilling Your Organic Garden: More Harm Than Good?
It is tough to break our addiction to power tools, isn’t it? Every spring I have to bite my tongue when I hear yet another homeowner talking about rototilling his garden to get the vegetable beds ready for planting. Certain habits are so ingrained in us from an early age that it’s hard to let go.
The truth is, aside from creating a new organic garden bed, rototilling does more harm than good to your garden. During a growing season, garden soil creates an intricate web of organisms which support each other as well as your plants. This soil food web, a sort of biosphere beneath your feet, is destroyed or severely damaged by the rototiller.
“(Rototilling)…breaks up fungal hyphae, decimates worms, and rips and crushes arthropods. It destroys soil structure and eventually saps soil of necessary air…Rototilling is an extreme disturbance to fungi important in growing annuals and vegetables.” - from Teaming With Microbes
In undisturbed soil, passageways are created by worms and other organisms. These tunnels allow air, water, and the essential nutrients they carry to travel through the soil to feed your plants. Once rototilled, these passageways are destroyed. Also destroyed are networks of Mycorrhizal fungi which form a symbiotic relationship with the roots of your plants, helping one another to thrive. Rototilling also uncovers weed seeds which have laid dormant deep in the soil possibly for years. In the subsoil, the weed seeds received no light and insufficient warmth to germinate. Guess what they’ll do now that you’ve created such nice conditions for them?
“If you’re starting with a compacted, heavy clay soil containing little organic matter, rototilling will improve conditions a lot. A tiller is a very efficient way to loosen and aerate severely compacted soil and to chop and mix a large dose of organic matter into it. But if you are starting with soil that has decent structure and adequate amounts of organic matter, rototilling can easily destroy the worm-welcoming environment that already exists. This is because the pulverizing action of the tiller breaks up soil aggregates, disrupts capillaries, and demolishes worm-tunnel networks.” - from The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible
Once your garden beds are established, save yourself a lot of work and skip the rototilling. You’ll water your garden less because the soil will hold it better, you’ll need less fertilizer because the established bacteria and fungi will support your plants and you’ll have fewer weeds because you won’t be turning deep soil upside down. 
If you haven’t already, you should consider installing raised garden beds, which will eliminate the need for rototilling or double digging entirely. The least disturbed soil is the healthiest soil and the most supportive of whatever you plant in it.
So if you want to create a new garden bed for spring, start in the fall. Dig or rototill the area (just this once), layer it with cardboard, newspaper, compost and mulch and let the worms and their friends go to work on it. When it’s time to plant, only work the area where you plant your seeds and seedlings and leave the rest of the soil undisturbed.
P. S.: For creating a new garden bed, a shovel works wonders, and it doesn’t pollute. You’ll also burn more calories.
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