What’s your gardening style? The way we garden can determine whether we are increasing or decreasing greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. Carbon has been on my mind lately following the release of ...

“Be ye not afraid of doing something your venerable ancestors did, for the benefits to your aching back may be many” (Author anonymous) We all know that gardening involves a lot of hard work: hoeing, ...

Benefits of no-till gardening Soil aggregates are important because their variation in size creates large and small pore spaces in the soil, which are used as pathways for water, oxygen and plant ...

In the wild areas on our planet, trees, bushes and grasses grow on ground that has continual additions of new layers of dead and dying plant matter. Leaves fall from trees and shrubs, grasses dry in ...

At bottom, gardening is all about dirt — its care and feeding, its microbes and fungi, bacteria and earthworms. Science has gradually recognized that the soil’s vibrant but delicate food web must be ...

Given the vagaries of what passes for springtime in western South Dakota, we are prone to channel Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “To plant or not to plant, that is the question: Whether ‘tis time to seed and ...

What is 'no-till' gardening? Is it better for my garden than traditional digging and tilling every year or not? What are the advantages of this method and how can I start using it? This method of ...

In school, most people learned that gardening involved planting a seed in soil, making sure it had the right amount of water and sunlight, and watching it grow. Of course, there’s a lot more to it ...

Now is the time to plan your no-till garden for next year. “The crux of no-till gardening is to pile on enough mulch so that weeds don’t germinate and grow up through it,” said Barb Fick, a ...

It used to be an article of faith in gardening that you must begin the whole enterprise by turning the soil, either with a shovel, spade or the frenzied paddling of the rototiller. The rationale was ...

John Quesenberry moves deliberately along a straight row in his garden. "This is my tiller," he said as he pulls the point of a pick. His line is straight, but his only guide is experi- .....ence.