Heavy tillage breaks fungi, worms, and structure

Threads, burrows, and sticky crumbs are the soil's plumbing. A tiller used wet or used every week tears that plumbing. Air and water then move badly, and roots meet a crust.

Sometimes you must open a pan or mix a first load of organic matter into heavy clay. That is a job, not a weekly ritual. Afterward, maintain from the surface with cover and roots.

Disease pressure often rises in powdered, biologically poor beds because the neighbourhood that competes at the root is gone.

If the same strip needs tilling after every rain, the structure — not the weed list — is the deeper problem.

In this series

• Treat soil as a living web, not an inert bag of fertilizer
• Roots feed microbes; microbes then feed roots
• Compost feeds life, not just NPK numbers
• Keep soil covered so organisms can work
• Heavy tillage breaks fungi, worms, and structure
• Trees like a more fungal system; annuals like faster bacterial cycling