Tillage

I hope to use this for a while this winter to talk about some of the production methods I am thinking about and the experiments we did this year.  

Jo and I just got back from a farmer conference in Manchester NH, and our heads are spinning with new ideas about soil health, tillage, and high tunnels.  We hope to do as much experimenting as possible this year.  Today I was thinking about our sweet potato to garlic to brassica to winter squash rotational sequence.  Right now, after the sweet potatoes have been harvested, we plant the garlic and mulch it with leaves (the leaves are new this year, usually we use straw or hay, hopefully it will work!) when the garlic is out, the beds are plowed and harrowed, and we plant brassicas, after a couple weeks, we broadcast rye and vetch and hoe it in, next spring, when the rye and vetch are tall, we mow them and plant winter squash into the stubble, not bad, but not as good as I want it to be.  What I hope to do is eliminate or reduce the tillage between the garlic and brassicas, and was thinking that as long as the mulch on the garlic is thick enough, and there aren't too many weeds to deal with once the garlic is out, we could come through with the chisel plow, with the shanks moved so that only the bed is being plowed, unfortunately the wheel base of the tractor is wider than the beds, so that never works as well and we want it to, and I have never tried doing that in the summer with beds that still have mulch on them, we have always raked the mulch aside, which I worry will be too much work for the middle of the season, but if we don't rake the mulch aside, I don't know if direct seeding will be possible.  I wonder who else is thinking about this sort of thing.  Katie