Your son might not understand how this works.
And before anyone gets too critical, I go through this every year. My father comes over and tries to talk me out of watering once a day, or trying to get me to not fertilize. Especially he does those 2 things because he knows the more successful I am then the more work is for the family. He hates gardening and wants to only help his other kids and his wife. So he'll somehow try to talk us out of doing things that I know will help us. And I have enough experience to know that he's full of crap and just doesn't want to do it. You have to anticipate this that sometimes people in the family have this mentality that they can just go to the store to buy whatever...
People will try to do this in our families.
But it doesn't work that way. The store food isn't as healthy. Its often chemical stuff too. A lot of stores are closing now with so much economic damage also. And the ones that aren't are having their prices explode to compensate.
So do as much as you can.
...
Now,... for more on your question;
Tilling can be hard. But you have to do it. There's many many impacts of tilling. You want to do it. First, even without any nutrients added in, not counting minerals and stuff in the soil, the extra bio matter, carbon in the soil helps keep the soil from getting too hard. This helps the roots expand. Have you noticed how plants can't expand very well in the soil in clay soil? The clay gets in there and its too hard for them to push through it. Well wood stuffs, mulch, etc tilled into this helps prevent that.
Then there's also the idea of getting nutrients in there for microbes to grow. This is a 2nd point.
And then the third point of getting soil nutrients in there for next year's plants.
You need all of this.
Its more important than ever to be self sufficient. There's a lot of trouble in the country and unstable markets. People are starting to see that you can't always rely on the store also.
Also every year, I try to do like 80% vegetables I know I can produce and that I can produce a lot of food with. Then I try to do an additional percentage of both new stuff and experiments. Every year try to do something an experiment to help you learn how to do more. I try to have the focus on stuff that can produce food volume to actually help me; so you want a focus on retaining core percentages of what you know works. And the new experiments can be anything that will help you do that and some new things.
Another thing is to also learn how to can and preserve what you grow. It helps if another family member can do this because its too hard to be both the 'Grower job' and the 'preserver/canner job' both.
Feel free to post if you have any follow up questions again on this.
