Fall tilling and next year thoughts

Today, amidst snow flurries and light rain, I finished the fall tilling of next year's garden plots. I'm normally not a fan of fall plowing, as I don't like the erosion, but our soil is a heavy clay, which has been in hay for a number of years. No organic matter has been put back in the soil, and there are some large alfalfa and grass roots well established in the soil. Years of farming and tractor traffic have packed the soil. So, I decided to work up the soil with my rotary plow to let it "mellow" over the winter, and hopefully use the thawing and freezing to help break up the soil and the roots. In the spring, I'll have to work the soil up again.

I'm still tinkering and will probably experiment with how I want to approach tillage and planting in the future. In the past, I've had quite a bit of success using a type of heavy mulch tilling, which generally involves keeping the soil covered, especially in the fall/winter, with leaves and grass clippings, and building compost heaps in the gardens themselves. I found this method really helps keep the weeds down, and the soil was so nice and loose--seed ready--when I pulled back the mulch in the spring.

However, this method requires a great deal of organic matter, I've heard it can eventually result in imbalanced levels of certain minerals--potassium, I think--and does seem to create a breeding ground for certain bugs that like to live under the moist mulch if you keep it on during the growing seasons. I'm not sure how feasible this will be on the size of gardens we have (probably 3/4 of an acre or better this coming year), but we do have lots of hay that I might clip and simply fork on to the gardens like we did this year with potatoes. I also want to experiment with organic material out of our woods--the top 6 inches is often really nice, broken down compost. The important word is "experiment" this year. I'll leave some of the garden in more traditional style, and will till and hoe the weeds, but I want to try different things.

Attached are a few updated pics that show the finished garden plots, or nearly finished plots.