There’s never time to weed tomatoes, so for 40 years I’ve mulched the plants. What worked well in my organic suburban yard in Town and Country, MO, was a 4-inch thick layer of last fall’s leaves topped off with a 2-inch thick layer of wheat straw, all barrowed in after cultivating around the bushel size plants in June. Now I am using an old milo field I bought in 1997, which needed lots of organic matter to lighten up the clay. A landscaper dumps vacuum truckloads of free leaves in fall and winter in a 10-foot wide row right inside my deer fenced half-acre garden. In May, after the winter rye and hairy vetch have been mowed down and the soil has warmed up some, I push the leaves around with the loader on my 37 HP tractor until they are about four to nine inches thick in the third of the garden that is given over to solanaceae: tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and potatoes.

I’ve tried digging individual holes for the plants, which works, but takes a long time. This year I made a furrow through the leaves with my 8HP tiller, hiller/furrower attached, then use a little Honda minitiller with a 6-inch width to churn up the clay in the bottom of the furrow. Then I plant the little plants, being careful to pull up the leaf mulch between plants and around each plant so no bare dirt is visible. No staking is done, though in a wet summer some of the fruit rots where it touches the wet autumn leaves. The plants are extra productive, I do not pinch out growth tips or prune away any leaves. The carbon dioxide given off by the rotting tree leaves adds to the health of the tomato plants and the sweetness of the fruit. There is no chance of blight spores splashing on to the lower leaves from rain on bare ground,
The only drawback to this system that I can think of is that I get lots more late tomatoes and fewer or no early fruits. So sometimes I plant a row of tomatoes next to the leaf row, in warm dry ground, cultivate and wait to mulch until the plants are basketball size. That fruit ripens sooner.

I’ve tried using the same leaf mulched area two years in a row, but usually the leaf mulch, now sheet compost, thins and weeds come up. So I weed and fork on some more leaves. If I can figure out how to do it efficiently, I’d like to treat the whole garden in this sustainable, no-till fashion, so the soil food web improves each year.

Ray Weil, soil scientist at the University of Maryland, College Park, says that even modest mulch or cover crop coverage ( 10 percent to 30 percent) substantially improves rainfall saturation and erosion control.

Louise McKeon Belt market gardens in Wildwood, Missouri. She can be reached at Lmcbelt@aol.com.