No-till can be difficult with lot of Bermuda Grass and other inedible weedy plants. I am going to lay down carpet and burlap for 6-8 weeks as a weed killer. I chose carpet and burlap after talking with a farmer, Les, of Offerings From the Land Farm. He has found it to be a barrier that kills the weeds and weed seeds but not the beneficial organisms in the soil unlike plastic sheeting which kills everything. After those 6-8 weeks I plan on checking the progress. If the weeds seem to be gone, I'll spread the accumulated kitchen compost and lay down a bunch of mulch ( I figure I'll need about 20 yards) and cover it up again for another few weeks. I plan to get the mulch from SMUD's free mulch program as well as neighbors' yard waste piles. I'll start the cover-up after I harvest the winter squash, if there are any!
No chemicals is kind of a grey area. No miracle-grow or "enhanced" potting soil is pretty easy. But there are undoubtedly chemicals in the carpet I plan to use from cleaning or just the material itself. Burlap, a carpet alternative, seems a better option and I've been saving the burlap scraps from work. (ACE sells burlap bags that get wrapped in....burlap!) But the wrappers and scraps are few. Carpet seems way easier to get and comes in big sizes. Another possible chemical source is the yard waste of neighbors and SMUD's mulch (which comes from the whole city). Since the mulch is free and I don't have the money to spend on 20 yards of untreated mulch, SMUD's mulch will have to do.
Low water use will mostly be solved by ollas. I plan to experiment and have them spaced every 3-6 feet about 100 total. Acquiring the ollas seems to be the biggest issue. I can either make or buy them. The cheapest I've found is $20, not good. The team at Global Buckets has come up with an automatic watering olla which involves terra cotta pots and silicon caulking. The caulking doesn't seem great (not chemical free), but I need to research the caulking or find a safer alternative. Making the ollas would be more time consuming but I might be able to recruit some help from my mom, an artist of all types. The other olla-like option I've contemplated is a clay pipe. This would be nice because it would reduce cost and increase plants. There would be less plumbing to maintain the water level and to pipe water out to the plants. The only problem is finding the right type of pipe (unglazed and porous). To get the ollas/pipe in the ground they say to dig to bury it. In order not to dig, I will probably just lay out the watering system between the first and second cover-ups, burring it in mulch, and let the organic matter break down around it.
As far as economics go, I plan to minimize the spending by starting with seeds and getting as much stuff for free as possible, like the mulch and the carpet, and keeping the water bill low. The main expenses will be the clay pots or pipe, the plumbing for the watering system, the seeds, and improving the fence to make human entry easier and dog entry harder.
What to plant is the next challenge.
