Permanent No-Till Raised Beds on Flower Farm help drain clay soil over winter — Winter water pools in the lower pathways on in our perennial field.

June 3, 2023

If you are farming in compacted clay soils, a high water table, and/or have water that drains to one spot on your property and stands undrained for long periods of time, this article will be of help to you. If you’re wondering how to farm in clay soil or how to improve clay soil on your farm, this post is for you!

An overview of standing water and flooding on our farm

2023 is our second year farming on our new property in Burt, NY in Western New York Zone 6b. Our soil is predominately clay, speckled with lots of rocks both big (shopping cart size) and small (fist to pebble size). The property was previously planted as an orchard over 100 years ago, then spent a few decades in animal pasture, then spent an unknown number of years/decades in a fallow meadow state that was more recently mowed several times per year. The soil is compacted, yet thankfully is teeming with earthworms and other soil dwelling creatures.

Due to heavy clay and soil compaction, there are several areas within the planting beds where water stands still and takes weeks to drain after the snow melts in Winter. Huge puddles hold 6-12 inches of standing water for weeks on end after snowmelt, and water continues to stand as Spring rains flood these parts of the field.

Standing water will suffocate roots of most of the shrubs and herbaceous perennials we grow for cut flowers and foliage in our field. In fact, the standing water suffocated the roots of many plants in that area over the Winter, including phlox, astrantia, forsythia, and weigela.

Ways to fix drainage on a farm with clay soil

There are a myriad of approaches one could take to address drainage problems on a farm…

The smartest and simplest option of dealing with drainage is to avoid planting areas of your property that collect standing water. Had we waited a year and observed the land for a longer period of time, I might have avoided planting the wettest corner in particular. You could even dig soil out and turn that area into a pond or “wetland” area that supports wildlife.

Then there’s the option of Drain Tile. Installing drain tile is, perhaps, the most commonly suggested way of dealing with drainage. In our experience, we felt drain tile was not entirely necessary for our property. Also, installing drain tile would have been too costly (we did receive a quote from a local contractor that was fair for the work involved, but overall, didn’t fit into the budget). The planning process would have required too many people to deal with, including the local Soil & Water Conservation District (SWCD) to advise and carry out the plan, plus at least one contractor. We could have gone forward without consulting SWCD, but we participate in Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) programs and I felt it would have been necessary to involve them with a drain tile project for our farm. None of that even addresses the fact that drain tile, to me, seems like another one of those man vs. nature fixes and I just didn’t want to bring that kind of infrastructure into the place.

I was really inspired to deal with drainage by moving soil around when I started reading about the permaculture design method known as berms and swales. If we didn’t need to fully optimize straight rows for efficiency on our cut flower production farm, I would have been completely sold on digging berms and swales throughout the entire farm. Berms and swales is another way of saying “hills and ditches” that have been dug and hilled with the actual contour lines of the Earth. When swales (ditches) are dug on contour, all of the water draining perpendicularly against that contour line will be held in the swale and very slowly released over time (rather than rushing off or draining quickly without the swale). The berm (hill) is created with the soil that was dug out to create the swale, and the berm itself does a good job of holding the water back. Typically water-loving shrubs are planted on top of the berm to help suck up excess water. A permaculturist could do the explanation of berms and swales better justice, but that is the jist of it.

Above is a Squarespace stock image showing a property with an intricate berm and swale system. It’s quite beautiful!

digging furrows with a middlebuster helps with drainage

Taking inspiration from the berms and swales permaculture system, we land on the very practical (and easy) solution of permanent raised beds to deal with our standing water and drainage problem. In addition to permanent raised beds, we have deep furrows (ditches) dug along the highest edge of our field, and also along the sides. These deep furrows help hold excess water that runs off the road and down the first 40 feet of frontage on our property. Essentially, the furrows function as a berm and swale, but the furrow is not on contour. On one side of the farm, we have planted lilac and serviceberry along the back edge of the furrow (direction where the water drains) so as to act like a not-on-contour permaculture style berm.

We dig furrows on our farm using a Middlebuster attachment for our Kubota tractor.

Permanent No-Till Raised Beds on Flower Farm - Annual cut flower bed layout using disc hiller on tractor — A section of our annual field with newly made permanent raised beds.

benefits of permanent no-till raised beds

There are a myriad of benefits to growing in a permanent raised bed system that stretch beyond the drainage focus of this post. A permanent raised bed system is just as it sounds — garden beds that are formed one time are “raised” above the ground level of the surrounding pathways, and stay where they are, permanently.

Permanent raised beds are part of a no-till farming system (if we tilled the beds every single year, they wouldn’t be permanent, would they?) No-till farming is scientifically proven (and recognized by the USDA) to increase soil microbial life; increase tilth, porosity and soil water holding capacity; increase nutrient exchange due to more water held and microbial life saved… the list of benefits of no-till farming goes on and on. So, in a permanent no-till raised bed farming system, we’ve decided to nurture our piece of Earth in the most loving way possible while encouraging her to not drown our plants. Win-Win!

how our permanent no-till raised beds help with drainage

As you can see in the photos below, the standing water on our farm succombs to gravity and does not flood the perennials planted in the raised beds. Water will always flow to the lowest point. It is simple physics why these raised beds work so well!

How to build no-till permanent raised beds on a farm

I use the word “build” loosely here. We do not actually build raised beds using wood or other materials, then fill them with imported soil. Those types of beds would be cost prohibitive on a farm of our size, not to mention, totally unnecessary and not the way I prefer to farm. Backyard garden, sure. 2-acre farm, no way!

using a disc hiller attachment to build raised beds

Using a Disc Bedder attachment on our Kubota tractor, we hilled up the soil beds to a 30-inch width in 2-3 passes. This implement is sometimes also referred to as a garden bed hilling attachment. The Disc Hiller has been an essential tool on our farm for building raised beds and reshaping the beds in subsequent years. If you can drive the tractor straight, your beds will be straight!

Disc Hilling the beds with the tractor not only provides the benefits of drainage but it’s also an efficient way to lay out new farm beds really quickly without having to use the string method to mark new beds (tie string to plant marker, pull string down entire row, try to get straight, fix 100 times, you get the picture). The Disc Hiller will work better if the soil has been recently tilled to a depth of 4-5 inches — it will not work well on compacted soil.

This is where I will take a moment to reflect on the idea of mindful tillage. A lot of times, when starting a new farm or large garden, it is necessary to till the soil to get it going. Till it once, make your permanent beds, then never till again. That’s how we’ve successfully got our new flower farm going!

Related: Why is Tilling So Bad?

If you do not have a tractor, or have a smaller garden, you can dig your pathways out (2-3 inch depth) and add the soil from your pathways onto your beds, to achieve a similar effect.

After hilling the soil, we raked the beds out flat using a Flat Rake. We did not rake the paths flat due to lack of time, but I would recommend doing so (many of our paths are uneven and there are many rolled ankles in my future). Once the beds are raked flat, now is your opportunity to improve the soil using cover crops.

We cover cropped most of our newly raised beds using buckwheat cover crop seed. It was June/July when we were creating these beds and buckwheat is a tried and true heat-loving summer cover crop. It matures in 30 days’ time, so after the buckwheat fully grew and flowered to 3 feet in height, we chopped it down with our 80v electric hedge trimmer then mowed it down further, leaving all of the plant matter on the beds to decompose. We covered the buckwheat pieces with a 1-inch layer of compost and planted perennials directly into it.

After the hilling, cover cropping, and adding compost, our beds are raised about two inches up from the paths, which has proven to be a good enough raise to prevent Winter/Spring water logging on most of the farm. The particularly wet corner has deeper paths and we’ve replaced a lot of the plantings in that area with water-loving shrubbery such as native Winterberry. The Winterberry will do just fine in the Winter/Spring soggyness.

It’s wise to remember that you should plant for the conditions the plants require. There are plants that like wet feet (Winterberry, among many others). Planting for the plant’s favored conditions is one extremely simple, smart strategy I’m utilizing to deal with our wet areas.

Permanent No-Till Raised Beds on Flower Farm. Regenerative no-till flower farm in Western New York. Buffalo ny flower farm. — Our perennial field in Late May. This is the same field as in the first flooded photo! We removed all of the landscape fabric.

Maintaining permanent raised beds for perennial plantings

It’s not realistic to assume the raised beds will forever hold their shape on their own. Overtime, the soil will depress because soil microbes will consume organic matter within the beds and some soil will inevitably be lost to erosion. We can prevent all of this by consistently adding organic matter, planting living mulches, and mulching the beds with organic materials. Good mulching materials include woodchips or a combination of cardboard with woodchips on top (for perennials only), straw (if you have a seedless source), leaf mulch, or a thick layer of compost. I have preferences and thoughts about these mulching options in this post about winterizing garden beds.

Mulching adds organic matter to your beds, but doing some or all of the following will provide other good sources of food for soil microbes…

chop and dropping weeds and other non-diseased plants,
adding liquid humate to your fertilizing routine;
topping your beds with a thin layer of compost every year or side dressing perennials with compost on a yearly basis;
transplanting with alfalfa meal, kelp meal, bone meal, feather meal (etc) that will be decomposed by soil life — see this post for our favorite fertilizers for organic flower farming;
leaving roots of plants in the ground all winter to feed soil microbes;
growing living pathways — these extra roots will also suck up more water in wet months!

Cheers to the ease of growing in no-till permanent raised beds! Leave a comment with your no-till bed prep techniques that have worked for you… I’d love to hear!

Fran Parrish