Back to Eden?

There are people who garden without cultivating the soil. I read an article about using wood chips and then dumping them in your garden without tilling. They even made a movie called, Back to Eden. I am glad for their success. The Back to Eden movement believes that disturbing the ground destroys the useful microbes. They grow in wood chips and have success.

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2014/06/21/back-to-eden-organic-gardening.aspx

Where I live, I have to cultivate. Do you see that little trench I made. Look to the lower right, see those rocks? Now look into the trench to see all that light colored clay. Do you really want to grow plants in that type of soil even if it had a few inches of wood chips on top?

Do a test, get a bucket. Add clay, rocks, a little topsoil and then add some chips on top. Give it time to age the chips ( maybe a year) and then grow something in it without adding potting soil. I think you would find that your bucket would grow weeds better than a garden plant that has long roots.

I hate digging trenches. But you only have to do it for the first year. By next year, you will be scooping out rich mulch from your old growing trenches.

I suggested in one of my books to get a small garden excavator or rent one. It would be nice never having to dig another trench.

Cultivating the ground is Biblical, "And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground." Genesis 2:5

In Hebrew the word for till is cultivate. Someone (Gardener) has to remove old roots (from weeds), loosen the compacted earth and remove rocks. You just can't cover them up with tree chips, unless you have a billion of them.