To Till or not to Till, THAT is the Question!
Starting a project fresh and excited, our group couldn’t help but picture the final product that our toils would eventually bring us to: a beautiful, butterfly-filled wildflower garden in all its splendour—but it’s the word eventually that quickly put this image on hold. It wasn’t until we attended a lecture by Master Gardener Joan Jolin, that we realized the amount of TLC soil required before a single seed could even touch it. As we explained our intention to have the plot of land tilled to revive the patchy, hard (as soil in Windsor means clay) lot, Joan, horrified, responded with a, ‘BIG mistake.’ Ideal soil is obtained by covering untilled grass with 8-10 layers of wet newspaper covered with topsoil/compost, and leaving it for a year. Unfortunately, time was not something we had; thus, we were forced to use her next option: combating the army of weeds that would grow as a result of the tilling by placing a tarp over the earth. The lack of sunlight and heat generated kills the unwanted plants and leaves us with useable soil for gardening.
