By ANNE RAVER
Published: September 8, 2010

THE garden suffered through another heat wave last week: day after day in the high 90s and no rain. (Didn’t I say that a few weeks ago?) Hurricane Earl roared up the East Coast, without a drop falling on our garden in Maryland.

New York City got lucky in late August, when about three inches of rain fell, and the hurricane brought rain to the Hamptons. But “the Northeast in general has had, if not the warmest, one of the warmest spring-summer combos ever,” said William Syrett, a meteorologist at Pennsylvania State University.

I must be honest: these days, I garden with a heavy heart. The earth is parched, and the leaves of shrubs and trees turn brown early because of lack of water. I water my beloved vegetable garden carefully, praying that our well doesn’t run dry.

But who knows? With the extremes of climate change, you may be reading this article in the middle of a downpour.

And so I go on, pretty much on faith, planting the last of my fall seeds — spinach, arugula, mâche.

I didn’t start my own broccoli seeds this summer, so I was overjoyed to find some transplants — perky blue-green leaves, sitting up tall in their six-pack — on a bench outside Bowman’s, a garden center in Westminster, Md.

I also picked up some cottonseed meal, a good fertilizer if you’re starting a new garden the no-till way — which basically means using newspapers to smother the grass and weeds without resorting to herbicides, and then adding a few inches of compost and planting right through it.

The advantages of not tilling are many. Weed seeds are not brought to the surface of the soil, where they readily sprout and grow. You don’t churn up earthworms and countless other organisms that will aerate and enrich the soil just fine, thank you, if you feed them compost and leave them alone. And since gas-powered tillers not only pour hydrocarbons into the air, but also release CO2 when they churn up the soil, leaving them in the garage is a good way to cut down on your carbon footprint.

I had read about this method in “Weedless Gardening,” by Lee Reich, a soil scientist in New Paltz, N.Y., and in the spring of 2009 had visited his bountiful gardens, which are never tilled and produce abundant fruit and vegetables with very few weeds.

Since my partner, Rock, and I battle a jungle of weeds about nine months a year, this fall we decided to start a little demo garden following Mr. Reich’s instructions for the no-till method from start to finish.

Fall is a great time to start a new garden, even if you are not going to plant until spring. But if you love fall greens, which get sweeter with cold nights, there is still time to plant seeds of spinach, mustard greens, short-season bok choy, claytonia, mâche — even erba stella.

“That’s an edible plantain, which I happen to really like,” Mr. Reich told me on the phone from his paradise in New Paltz.

I had called to ask a few questions about his no-till method, and we ended up talking vegetables, of course. He told me that not only could I plant seeds on the same day I transformed my piece of old lawn, but I could also set transplants, like broccoli or currant bushes, into the beds.

“Just make a hole in the newspaper big enough to plug in the plant,” he said. “But don’t excavate a wide hole, because you would be exposing more underlying soil where there are going to be weeds.”

So Rock and I measured out a small plot — 12 feet by 12 feet — on a sunny section of rough grass (rye, crabgrass and clover) that drains well.

The plot is big enough for two beds, each 3 feet by 12 feet long, with a two-foot path in between and along the sides. Three feet is a comfortable width for a bed, because it can be tended from either side. A two-foot path allows plenty of room for a wheelbarrow, or for two people strolling side by side.

We marked the corners of the beds and paths, and mowed the grass with an old reel mower instead of our gas-powered clunker, which belches horrific fumes into the air. (No, it doesn’t have a catalytic converter.) This little veggie plot was going to be green, all the way.

“I knew I was saving those newspapers for a reason,” I said to Rock, as he rolled a cartful from the barn. (We have enough newspapers stacked in there to blanket the turf at the Augusta National Golf Club.)

I started laying down the newspaper, four sheets thick, as Rock went off to dig some compost — rotted leaves from one pile, aged manure from another — and mixed it together in a wheelbarrow.

I used the garden hose to wet the newspapers, to keep them from blowing away. But also because wet newspapers will decay faster, and roots from young plants will be able to grow right through to the soil below.

That’s the theory, anyway. The last time Rock and I tried this on new ground, for a potato patch, the newspapers had not decomposed by spring planting time. But I think the layers were too thick. I had probably figured that if 4 sheets were good, 12 would be better. I was wrong: less is more, stick to four.

I forgot to sprinkle cottonseed meal over the cut grass, before laying down and wetting the newspapers, to give the young seedlings a boost of nitrogen. But maybe I’ll scratch some in, around the broccoli plants and other seedlings, once they start to grow.

After wetting the newspapers, I shoveled about four inches of compost onto the beds (Mr. Reich suggests at least two inches), because we have plenty of black gold. Then, I planted the broccoli seedlings, without having to dig a hole through the newspaper.

I am thinking of planting a few currant bushes, however, which would mean experimenting with Mr. Reich’s technique: just dig a hole the size of the root ball, and in they go.

We are still undecided about what to use to mulch the paths. I’m trying to find some oyster shells, which would suit our bay state, and would look handsome, too. But we may end up with wood chips, which are cheap and easy to come by. (If you decide to go this route, make sure the wood chips haven’t been sprayed with pesticides or other chemicals that might leach into your food garden.)

For now, the paths are covered with fresh hay, a no-no in Mr. Reich’s view, because of potential weed seeds. But we’ll get those oyster shells as soon as possible.

When weeds do grow — as they inevitably will, blowing in on the wind, or sprouting from less-than-perfect compost — Mr. Reich suggests spritzing them, while they are still sprouts, with a homemade solution: a gallon of vinegar mixed with 2 tablespoons canola oil (other oils will gum up) and 1 tablespoon liquid Ivory dish detergent.

“I just spray on a regular basis,” he told me. “You have to starve out the roots, so don’t wait and let the weeds get big.”

We used the sheet-composting method on our blueberry patch as well, which was plagued by weeds and lack of water this summer. Also, as we discovered from a soil test, the soil is not acidic enough.

So we laid down those four sheets of newspaper in between the bushes, wet them down, sprinkled some sulfate all around to acidify the soil, then added compost to feed our stressed plants. Now all I need to do is add a layer of pine needles gathered from the woods to cover the compost with an acidic mulch.

If I keep those blueberry bushes watered during dry weather, maybe next summer I’ll have a harvest to brag about to Mr. Reich, who did his graduate work in blueberries. (He has a master’s degree in soil science and a doctorate in horticulture.)

“We harvest about mid-June, and we’re still going strong,” Mr. Reich told me last week. “I’ve gotten 180 quarts from 16 bushes.”

I’m tempted to go out and share that with my blueberry bushes, but I don’t want to add to their stress. I’ll be happy if they flourish now, under their blanket of compost, and put out vigorous new growth next spring.

Ninety quarts would be just fine with me.

(Source: A version of this article appeared in print on September 9, 2010, on page D1 of the New York edition.)