I’ve been getting a lot of messages about no-till flower farming bed preparation. For ease of quick reference, I’m outlining below the cardboard/compost mulch system for no-till flower farming bed preparation that I used in the 2020 growing season. I will continue to tweak the no-till flower farming bed preparation and other systems at my farm this season, but this will give you a good start. Generally I love this cardboard/mulch system and it’s been great for most crops. However, there have been some hard lessons learned along the way. I have a very detailed blog post written last summer about those critical lessons. Be sure to read it too so you can skip some of the trial and error at your farm! And give the No-Till Flowers Podcast a listen for more valuable know-how!
Steps to No-Till Flower Bed Preparation Using Cardboard and Compost
1) Cover crop (a mix of rye, vetch, triticale, and clover) that was sown in late fall and grew vigorously when the weather warmed in the spring was maintained with bi-weekly high-deck mowing until a given bed was ready to bring into production, at which point, the cover crop was “scalped” with a mulching push mower.
2) Four foot wide woven black landscape fabric was put over the freshly mown bed and pinned in place with landscape staples. The fabric remained on the bed for about 10 days to weaken the cover crop.
3) A single layer of 36″ wide corrugated cardboard was placed on top of the bed. The cardboard was sourced in rolls from a packing supply company, which made it very easy to place on beds.
4) A 2-3″ layer of well-aged compost was spread on top of the cardboard the full length and width of the bed.
5) Five lines of drip tape are placed on top of the compost. Lines are spaced 6″ apart and double as a guide for planting transplants in a straight line.
6) Transplant into the bed, spacing plants 4” to 6” apart, depending on the crop. We found that a long screwdriver was actually the best tool to pierce the cardboard easily and wiggle a little hole open for the transplants. Root balls must have immediate access to the native soil below the cardboard.
7) Water in the transplants well with a solution of KNF inputs, kelp, molasses, and fish emulsion. Make sure to keep them irrigated regularly with the drip lines for the first two or more weeks while their root systems are expanding into the soil.
Jennie – thanks so much for spelling this all out for us! I love these blog posts! I am super curious about you mentioning that you have perennialized ranunculus in your zone. I live in a similar zone, but I’m out in Utah. I almost left some ranuncs in the ground that would have been in a low tunnel but ended up digging them up, and now I’ve pre-sprouted them (so far so good) but I’d love to leave them in the ground this year. I’m curious how they are doing for you (I believe you have them in a high tunnel) and if you think they’d survive in a low tunnel. Will they last indefinitely, or do you only get a couple of seasons out of them? This is something I’d like to try along with your no dig tulips next year. Do you intercrop anything with them during the summer? Again, thank you so much for sharing all your wisdom! I’ve loved listening to the podcast!
The ranunculus I have perennialized are in an unheated high tunnel. They are robust still and going into season 3. The only downside I have seen so far is that they are starting to multiple and probably will crowd themselves out in another season, but I can dig and divide at that point. In the summer when they are dormant, we direct seed celosia or zinnias in the bed. As for ranunculus surviving in a low tunnel out at your place, I am not familiar enough with your local climate to know the odds of that, but it can’t hurt to experiment. If you are a member of the ASCFG, you can find a great research presentation in the members-only section about growing ranunculus in low tunnels in Arizona (I believe) that proved they were very cold tolerant.
Wow I’ve been wondering if you could crop over ranunculus the same way Bare Mtn does daffodils. So excited that it works. I was afraid they may rot from the cropping over. Are there any special preparations you do to the bed. Daffodils are planted at a lower depth than ranunculus are right? I figured because of that that prevents them from rotting. Do what is the depth you usually plant your ranunculus?
So much good info here! Do you wait at all between laying the compost and transplanting the seedlings?
Nope. We plant straight away. This is why it is so important to used a well-aged and screened compost for making beds. If you use compost that’s too “hot” (not decayed enough) or really chunky, you’ll not be able to plant into it for quite awhile. In that case, you might want to consider making your beds in the fall and letting them sit all winter before planting into them in the spring.
Jennie – your information is so helpful and I’m soaking it all in! I have new beds I’m starting from backyard lawn. There is weeds mixed into the grass too. Would you recommend the same process or tarping for longer before adding the cardboard and compost on? I’m a total newbie to no till and really to gardening in the last few years as well. So much to learn!
Welcome to gardening, Amanda! If you are growing on your backyard lawn that’s been mown up until now, the weeds are likely fairly puny and just doing the cardboard and thick layer of compost this spring so do the trick. If the yard wasn’t mown regularly before this (say you left it grow up into a “meadow” for awhile), then you’ll likely have some tougher weeds and tarping would be advisable.
Hi Jennie! I’m wondering if I do prep my beds in the fall for a spring planting, do you recommend covering them with some type of fabric or straw? Wondering best way to get them thru the winter without leaving ‘bare soil’. Thank you for all your wonderful information sharing!
Mulching them with straw or leaves would be great.
If I’m starting my first production in the spring (I know, not ideal), and I didn’t have a fall-planted cover crop, should I just start with the cardboard and compost?
Also, I am fortunate to get a space for free at my family farm, however they are not using the same growing practices as I am. Therefore, if/when spray happens on the large-scale farm, do you have any ideas for what I can use to prevent spray from getting on my flower crops? I don’t have room really for a buffer zone. Would row covers help at all? Thank you for all your helpful posts and information you’re passing along. It is an invaluable resource (your podcast too!).
Jennie,
When using cardboard and a thick layer of well aged compost to start new beds, do you find that you need to add amendments or fertilizer to the compost based on a soil test?
I do soil test and add amendments if needed. At this point, after more than a decade of growing organically and thoughtfully on this farm, my soil is very fertile and I don’t have to add much. When adding amendments in this deep mulch system, the amendments get applied to the soil directly prior to the cardboard and compost going down. Since the plants are ultimately rooting into the soil (not the compost), it’s important to have the fertility in the root zone.
OK! So, this is what I’ve been looking for. I just got the No-Till book and I haven’t gotten too far yet. I prepared one of my beds doing the double dig method outlined in Lynn Byczynski’s book……annnnd my back:( I’m 44 and have had 4 kids. While I understand No-Till to be better for the soil, I think I’d be doing it for the preservation of the body! This is my first year and I’ll be starting an urban/micro flower farm on about 1,800 sq ft.
I want to do No-Till but I was having a hard time wrapping my head around bed prep over soil that needs ammending. My soil is very sandy and is lacking in nitrogen, potassium and boron. You say that you should place soil ammendments on the ground before doing the cardboard/compost mulch. So, just sprinkle on the sod? Half of my beds will be going on previous lawn and half in last year’s garden that I lightly tilled with a little hand held claw/tiller tool that was left behind at my house from the previous owners. Would it be worth it to put some compost down under the carboard as well or would that just be a waste? In my mind I’m envisioning the lawn, with grass cut, and sprinkling the ammendments and some compost down and then doing the layering method of cardboard and compost.
Also, I see that you also answered my question of whether or not the plants would be planted into the compost or do they need to go through the cardboard. It makes sense that they would need some help getting through the cardboard.
I am guessing that over time the cardboard and compost decompose and create that fertile soil that you are talking about!
I’ve been enjoying the podcast and your blog!
Hey Jennie! Thank you so much for sharing all of your knowledge, it definitely has been a help to us! I have a quick question about this topic though, I was watching your video online with the Flower Podcast guy and in it I believe you said to mow down the cover crop, then put cardboard, then poke holes in the cardboard, then plant right into that. Because of the living root system. Does that still work? I am wondering because I was going to do it that way this season (I have a cover crop of vetch and clover). Should I do it this way or put a tarp over the cover crop first? Just want to make sure I don’t do it wrong! lol thanks for all your help! -Jayme and Taylor
Check out Step #2 in the post above. I use woven landscape fabric to weaken the cover crop after mowing it down. Usually the cover crop needs to be weakened prior to putting the cardboard and compost down, unless it is a more tender species like buckwheat that won’t push up on the cardboard as it tries to regrow. But I always put some fabric over my cover crop coming out of winter into spring as the winter rye and triticale are super robust and will keep fighting for the sun if they aren’t knocked back for awhile. I just try to not fully kill a cover crop (as in not brown and crispy) prior to planting the bed with the cash crop because I do want the biome that’s been attached to the cover crop root system to be thriving still when I put the transplants in the ground. Hopefully that makes sense. This blog post is pretty precise about how to I do bed prep at this time.
Hi Jennie,
When you say to poke holes in the cardboard so transplants have immediate access to the original soil, does that mean you are actually planting the transplant that deep? Or just into the compost layer and the roots having access as they grow?
Thanks!
Kat
The roots should touch the native soil so they need to go down through the compost and cardboard. We grow large transplants so they have a large enough root ball to allow for this.
Hey Jennie,
Thanks for much for the information. I was curious how long it takes the cardboard to breakdown. Do you use this method on the same bed year after year, or just when you are initially making a bed?
The thin corrugated cardboard we use now breaks down within a month or two and is all gone by the end of the season so we use it again each spring to get the beds going. When I used recycled heavy carboard boxes, they took much longer to break down.
where do you get rolls of corrugated cardboard?
I have seen corrugated cardboard on Uline.com
Hi Jennie. I’m loving your blog and podcast. I’d like to start a no-till dahlia bed. Do I simply place the tubers on the compost covered cardboard? How much compost should cover them? Thanks for any tips you can give.
Hi Jennie, thank you so much for your posts and the podcast. I feel like I remember you talking at some point about using essentially using any crop as a cover crop. I have beds where my anemones and ranunculus (and a healthy dose of weeds and random sweet peas) have grown this spring. I don’t want to save the corms; I don’t have space or time for that. I was wondering if I covered the rows with fabric/tarps for 10 days, as you suggested, that I could then do the cardboard/compost method and plant into the beds? I wanted to flip them for my annuals and have a couple weeks before I’d need to have them ready for use. Thanks for any advice!
You can definitely do that. And guess what?? Your anemones and ranunculus are very likely to come back in the fall! They don’t need to be dug up to be saved. I leave mine in the ground all summer and just plant annual summer flowers over them. 🙂
Would this method work with applying seeds directly instead of transplanting plants? I filling in a 40ft by 40ft space with rows of zinnia but the area is compost of extremely dense dusty crusty dirt. I was considering getting an order of nice compost in and just sort of mixing it in about 3 inches down into the native soil. Do you have any thoughts or advice? I would love to hear them!
Generally speaking, we do not have much success with direct seeding into our beds here because the compost isn’t the right consistency for tiny little seedlings to make a good start. We do pretty much all transplants here at Love ‘n Fresh .
Does the a mix of rye, vetch, triticale, and clover grow at all through the winter as well? Also….do you ever recommend doing the cardboard compost method in the fall over grass, Planting a winter cover crop into the compost and then hacking that down in the spring to make a mulch of sorts?
I recently came across this and was pretty upset- I use a lot of cardboard. What do you think Jennie?
https://gardenprofessors.com/the-cardboard-controversy/
I believe that each grower has to decide what works best in their own context to control weeds and build soil health. There is no perfect solution that is one-size-fits-all. Cardboard use in the no-till farming context is usually used to suppress weeds instead of leaning on heavy cultivation/soil disturbance/tillage. Regarding the info presented in the blog post you linked to, cardboard allowed for better gas exchange with the soil than woven landscape fabric or black plastic mulch. So if you need to suppress weeds early on in your no-till journey, I would personally choose cardboard over those other two. The thin single-ply cardboard rolls I’ve used at my farm the past two years is actually not the same type as the author of the link blog post is writing about. It is not smooth and it breaks down fully within a few weeks. We poke holes for planting every 3-6″ so there’s heaps of air exchange happening via those planting holes. Earth worms are certainly getting plenty of oxygen. Having said all of that, now that my planting beds have been no-till for several seasons and weed pressure is drastically reduced, next season and thereafter, I won’t be using cardboard any more. It was a great intermediary step and one I’ll continue to recommend based on my own experience.
This is my first year flower farming and I did the no till cardboard method to prepare my beds. I am located just outside NYC so I have a pretty small yard . I used the cardboard to kill off the grass over the winter but found that my plugs had a hard time becoming established and took a very long time to start growing. Not sure why but I figured my soil was shitty. The beds were made with mushroom and lobster compost along with a bit of top soil . I think a lot of the success depends on how much time you can prep . I started killing the grass off in October and prepped the beds in March. I wish I killed and prepped starting even earlier. The compost settles so much after you plant . If you need 9 inches make it 12 . I switched to raised beds this year because we have tons of animal issues. I hope to use this method again if I ever get a bigger space. Plan early!
Hello, any particular thickness of cardboard that you prefer?
You can use any thickness of cardboard, but we prefer to use thinner corrugated cardboard that comes in rolls. The thicker the cardboard, the longer it will take to break down. Thicker cardboard offers longer weed suppression but can also hold too much moisture in the soil. So the best thickness to use for your own growing beds depends on your context and goals.
Hi there! I live in Tulsa Oklahoma where the soil is very clay rich, therefore it retains a lot of moisture! Do you think your no-till method would work in such an environment? I’m worried about drainage and root rot. If this could work though, I’d be so thrilled! Thank you so much for your advice, what a lovely blog. Cheers! From a fellow gardener, Tara
No-till beds are especially great for heavy clay soil since tilling creates long-term compaction which greatly impedes drainage. So no-till is actually beneficial for drainage in your situation.
Hi Jennie,
This coming spring will be my first year raising cut flowers. I am using no-till methods for my beds and am needing more information on how you lay the drip tape once the beds are made? Have you written about that in another post? Thank you for all of the great information that you share.
Stacy
Hi Jennie,
I’m planning on doing this method for a grass lawn. Would you plant dahlia tubers into this system? Would I just plant them just below the cardboard or would that make too much of a hole for the grass to come back?
Vanessa
I would not use this method for planting dahlias into beds just made from lawn. Dahlias are heavy feeders that will need the soil amended. Lawns generally are not very healthy soil and have low nutrients. You may need to till in some compost for your very first dahlias beds. After it is tilled on time, you can move forward from there with the no-till system. Other annuals with smaller root systems (in contrast to the larger tubers of dahlias) will do fine with a no-till bed made right from lawn.
Hi Jennie, thanks so much for the great content! Stupid question, it just to clarify, you don’t cover the compost/drip tape with landscape fabric and plant into holes in the fabric? Do you worry about weeds starting in the compost? Second question, you said after doing this for ten years your soil is so good you won’t use cardboard anymore. So how do you prepare the beds for planting? Tarp a few weeks then broadfork? I’m a new flower farmer just starting out and it seems like every class I take or book I read has slightly different advice, but I love your podcast and respect your approach very much. Thank you!
Hi there,
I am curious since you mention starting with a cover crop and mowing it down, what method/equipment did you use to sow the cover crop in the first place? Did you use a seed drill?
Cover crop seed is simply broadcast by hand. We don’t use a seeder here at my farm. 🙂 There’s a blog post here all about cover crops for flower farmers that goes into detail about sowing and terminating.
Hi! This is so helpful! I am very new to this and am wondering. Do you also use this method while planting bulbs? Or just transplants from seeds?
Thanks!
Hi Anne – We have another blog post about planting bulbs. 🙂 https://lovenfreshflowers.com/2019/11/05/no-till-tulip-planting/
hey jennie, planning to go no till this fall. We’ve been using a plastic layer but i hate how it’s wrecking soil structure. We tilled old crop in but the weather hasn’t been cooperative so would like to try to switch to no til and do this above. I have plugs … do
you still need to poke a hole through the cardboard or no? I could’ve sworn you said it breaks down and didn’t need the holes in later research. Thanks
You’ll need to poke holes in the cardboard so the plant roots can get down to the native soil and root in. The cardboard breaks down after a 6-8 weeks, but your plants will need access to the soil sooner than that. 🙂
Thanks for all the helpful info! Do you plant and hardy annuals in the fall…wondering what the cover crop or bed prep would look like?
Yep, we plants lots of hardy annuals. No cover crop in that case. We just remove the previous cash crop and plant directly into the bed without any additional preparation.
I’m really curious if shredded paper could be used instead of cardboard, just plain old copy paper. I would love to be able to recycle what I have available to me.
I don’t think shredded paper would work unfortunately. The point of the cardboard is to block out light and sort of seal the top of the bed so weeds won’t poke through and outcompete your desired plants. Shredded paper would let in light to the soil below and weeds could germinate and poke up quickly from there. Also, shredded paper would probably decompose within a month. Cardboard sticks around for a couple months and continues to help with weed control.