I think that soil building is by far the most important aspect of what we're talking about doing. It's that even though I'm an entomologist, I'm just fascinated with what's in the soil and what you can have in the soil if you understand the advantages of no-tilling and mulching. It is the single most productive thing you can do. Now in order to build the soil, we need organic matter and there are lots of forms of organic matter that you can use manure, animal manure, compost, leaves, grass clippings, coffee grounds are great, tea leaves are great, fruits and vegetable scraps, newspaper, wood ashes, cardboard, mulch chips, anything. Anything that's organic you can use as long as it's not contaminated with some type of chemical that would undo your objective of having a... And most of the ink now newspapers is soil-based so that's not a problem as far as being organic. You'll need lime, lime adds calcium and corrects pH and I won't even say it. I think we're going to get that point across and then stop tilling and I'm going to hit that some more. Stop tilling. Why stop tilling? If mulching it greatly reduces weed so you have a lot less work, you'll be surprised how much easier it is to garden. Natural undisturbed soil is a living community. It's all interdependent. Each part is interdependent on the other. There are literally thousands of micro which means two small to see or macro which means large enough to see flora which means plants or fauna which means animals. You know that all living things are divided into those two large groups. Then their jobs are primarily to break down and recycle nutrients for the plants. Also tilling reduces wind and water erosion and nutrient leaching. Major advantage in that. To think of this community in the most simple way, everything works from the top down and you've got your top dwellers, middle dwellers and lower dwellers. That's really an oversimplification but your top dwellers job is to take what's on the surface and get it into the soil and they chew it up a little bit. Then they come down to your middle dwellers and they work on it some more and it comes on down to the other guys and they work on it some more. In truth they're really all mixed up together. It does work somewhat that way. It's a little oversimplification but it does give you an idea that you've got trophic levels that organic matter goes through before it becomes available to the plants. Tillage of course destroys the structure of their home. That's why we talk so much about stoptilling because when you go in there and mix it all up which we think we need to do, we don't because they're doing it for us. You destroy their home and it drastically reduces their populations like 90 to 100% reduces their population because they need that structure that they will set up in order to work. It'd be like taking a bee hive and throwing it up in there and letting it come down and bust and just going all over the place because you've destroyed their home and they can't work anymore. So I refer to it as living soil and living soil benefits. One of the main benefits is better soil tilt and that word is correct, T-I-O-T-H. And the definition of that is the physical condition of the soil relative to plant growth. You want it to be better and not tilling gives you better tilt. You have more organic matter because tilling causes it to get too much oxygen, it burns up and it goes away. You get more humus which is the black organic matter that's broken down is what makes soil good, rich soil look black. You have more porosity, the soil is looser and more open. Therefore you get more air into the soil and therefore more oxygen for the plant roots. Did you realize the plant roots need oxygen and not just the upper part of the plant? You get better water infiltration because the soil is more porous, better water holding capacity because it's more space in the soil for water to be and you get better water drainage when you have an excess of water. The first thing to do is to get as many leaves as you can and put those in your spot where your garden is going to be or where it is if you already have one. I went down to Wake County where they collect leaves in the fall and just got truck loads. This is after I have put in the leaves and the manure and everything else I wanted to put in there and tilled it in good, then I bedded it up in a row bed and covered it up with more mulch. My mulch was grass clippings and more leaves and so forth. The approach that I talked about is to quick start. You can do it without tilling and a lot of people advocate that. Tilling once will get you a much faster start and that's really why I do it. You can do it either way. It's up to you. But start off by adding one to two. This is for a thousand square foot garden. It's 25 feet by 40 feet roughly. And start by adding one to two full side of the loads of organic matter like leaves or leaf mold. Leaves are great because tree roots go deep in the soil and pull up a lot of minerals that we don't necessarily have really available in the upper parts of the soil. So tree leaves are great. For a quick start garden you'll need a high source of nitrogen because that is the fuel that's going to make all this happen. And the best high source of nitrogen I think is a chicken litter. If you want to be strict organic though you may need to find out whether or not the chickens were fed pharmaceuticals because they often are. They're in very crowded conditions and they tend to be susceptible to diseases. So in their feed they get pharmaceuticals. You know some other form of manure if you can get some manure where the animals were not treated in any way would be good. Chick manure happens to be higher. It's litter too. It's got all those wood chips in there that break down and it gives you a lot of organic matter. You know that we can't rely on it to be organic. You need about 150 pounds of lime. You need to make sure it's dolomitic lime but I think all lime is now. It used to be farmers who get food sometimes and it wasn't dolomitic which means it didn't have magnesium in it. Then you want to tell well and deep one time. And build your raised beds or raised beds. Some people like the whole garden to be raised. In my case I just raised beds which means your row is raised and those rows stay there forever. Moch? Did I ever mention moch? In the late fall you may top it off with some more manure and that reminds me there is commercial composted chicken manure. And I believe there are organic sources of that from the organic catalogs. I'm not positive you always need more nitrogen because I think the cycling is probably handling a lot of it but you may find that you do. If you find out you got a weakness or is it possible to do that nitrogen is the weakness. So there you go with the composted chicken manure. And remembering that the system works on the top down that's why we keep moch, one of the reasons we keep moaching, adding food to the top. And then when I went to plant my small seeded plants I actually used a little pearlite because the small seeds I felt like we would have trouble getting up to the soil. So I put a little pearlite in the furrow and put my small seeded plants in that. For larger seeds you don't have to do anything but this. The point that this slide makes is don't disturb your moch any more than you have to. Just cut a little slit down the top of your row bed and leave your moch right there beside of it. And then when your plants come up go in and you probably be adding more moch because every time I move my grass I put it in there adding more moch. As soon as your plants come up you can pull that mulch back up around the base of them and that will shade out weeds right there. So the less you disturb the soil the better. I think we're probably well along now and getting that point across but just keep adding mulch because that is the source of your future nutrients. It keeps the soil more moist. It shades out weeds so you really do not have much of a weed problem when you're not disturbing the soil and you mulch it. A lot of people use newspapers first and then mulch. I've never done it but I think that probably is beneficial. And that's what I carried to the kitchen one evening and my wife decided to take a picture of it and show you what a no-till organic garden can produce. And I did my flower bed the same way.