Tilling in the aisles is one of the best ways to improve the fertility of your soil. We try to till using shovels because the shovels go deep (sometimes as deep as a foot or two) and are very precise - allowing us to till within an inch of plants.

However, tillage with shovels takes a long time and many human-hours. We will be purchasing a spading machine (a machine that will shovel for us with about a dozen shovels at a speed exceeding two miles per hour!) this autumn, but until then, to save time and labor hours, we use a rotortiller. This inferior tillage is sufficient, however, to achieve most of the benefits of tillage in the aisles.

Tilling in the aisles has three principle benefits to your crops:

1) Trimming plant roots. By cutting the roots of your plants (plant roots - even off of taproots like carrots or beets - may travel more than several dozen feet), tillage encourages the plant to send out many more and smaller roots. These small roots eat better than the large roots do, and so the plant can eat more because it will have more roots in the soil and those roots eat best.

2) Loosening soil. Tillage loosens the soil, making it easier for small roots to enter the soil and eat. Now that the plants have more and smaller roots, they have more food to eat - in proportion to their ability to eat it!

3) Encouraging microorganisms. By adding air and allowing water into the soil, tillage helps the microorganisms in the soil improve the quality of food for the plants to eat: now they have better and more food to eat with smaller and more roots. All sorts of important chemicals (including Nitrogen, Phosphorous and Potassium) can be increased in the soil through the actions of microorganisms mineralizing the atmosphere.