My garden is No-Till for the most part. Any "tilling" I do is by hand because I don't have a tiller. It works pretty well for beans, squash, melons, onions, and okra, and apparently not so well for some other crops, in my experience. I'm currently experimenting with builders' plastic sheeting (black) for mulch. Worked reasonably well last year so I'm doing it again. Some places I use newspaper covered in organic mulch.

I wild garden but I do till everything back under in the fall. I use a collinear hoe that I bought from Lee Valley Tools, it shaves weeds off just below the surface and I get to do most of my weeding from a standing position which is good for my back. I think that's Elliot Coleman in the pic using his collinear hoe, he's the one I got the idea from. His garden is a lot tidier than mine.

I'm a great fan of reduced tillage. My cover crops are part of that process so I use their roots to do any 'tilling'. It is hard to resist an orderly and groomed garden but I've rejected that notion and I garden 'wild'. It does freak people out at times but, as nature abhors a vacuum, nature also abhors a monoculture. I won't remove my dead cover crop. I'll do some chop and drop for mulch and if you think about it, that crop, weeds, and the veggie crop have consumed nutrients from the soil. So why remove the nutrients from the bed? Chop and drop it!

I weed, "Preen" and at the end of the season "Erase"..... Guess I'm an evil gardener.

I will be trying the no till method once the chickens are out of the area that will be my garden. I’m going to heavy mulch it compost and plant. The chickens will do all the work keeping weeds down in till ready to plant.

I am with your son,
I live on sand, so we mulch and compost anything that doesn't move,
the original ground level has never been touched, everything is grown above it.
Yes, my backyard looks like a disaster, but so productive, lots of weeds, chickens eat some, we eat some.
We do weed 4 times a year, garlic and some other crops would get outgrown by weeds, but weeds also get composted,
I am also an ecologist and teach geology as far as soil types go.
I do get rolls of garden edging at times, to try and contain the gardens, but am forever moving them as the garden spread.