FIXING 1st Year Problems. This is Part 9 of 12 Part Series that will help you understand the PRO’S & CON’S of Back to Eden organic deep mulch gardening method with wood chips to composting just Fall leaves. Great start for beginners Tour our secrets for organic soil & growing gardening vegetables 101 documentary with pest control. Looking into soil food web & soil health in a no till organic garden. diy garden. Organic gardening and farming.
VIDEO: Back to Eden Organic Gardening 101 Method with Wood Chips VS F.L. Deep Mulch Gardening Series # 9
FIXING 1st Year Problems. This is Part 9 of 12 Part Series that will help you understand the PRO’S & CON’S of Back to Eden organic deep mulch gardening method with wood chips to composting just Fall leaves. Great start for beginners Tour our secrets for organic soil & growing gardening vegetables 101 documentary with pest control. Looking into soil food web & soil health in a no till organic garden. diy garden. Organic gardening and farming.
Basically the back to eden method is a bust if you are using it the first year. If you are putting in a cover crop then the BTE method is really not being used. Covering the soil with wood chips doesn't seem to be giving the soil a boost. So I believe using the method in part for weed prevention but opening up the planting area to sun and rain and "weeds" free of the chips like one would normally do and using the chips more for the areas next to the farrows. It really isn't like Adam and Eve lounging in the garden waiting for a apple to fall from a tree, we are still growing and tilling by the "sweat of our collective brows".
Thanks! I need your help!! This past October we laid down a thick layer of wood chips 9-12 inches deep from a local tree service! I can tell they haven't decomposed much (we didn't add manure because we have such a large section of our yard dedicated to gardening)… My main question is: HOW SHOULD I PLANT THIS SPRING 2017 (if at all)? I want to build the soil, not JUST plant in the chips, but the chips are deep! So should I Dig a hole down to where the soil is, plant the seeds, and then cover with wood chips when they grow big enough? OR should I plant some winter rye THIS SPRING and THEN plant my garden seeds next year? I'm really eager to start planting though…THANKS so much for responding 🙂
Beautiful Osprey! Probably feeding her babies!
Excellent video ! Thank you for taking the time to make it. I understand the basic philosophy of cover crops which over time will add organic matter and carbon into the soil by way of their roots, but after seeing your hard pan it's so bad and gray.. that one has to ask would it not be better and take the hit to add wood chips and whatever else you have and plow/rototill it into the soil and be done with it once and for all ? I don't want to disturb the soil either but by breaking up the hard pan and adding organic matter now would this be of greater overall benefit ? Is it a case of economics ? Or am i missing something ? Thanks again for your great videos !
Thank you for giving it some thought. My thinking is $$ it would be too expensive to introduce wood chips and other organic matter directly into the soil and plow that in.
I have done this on a small scale when I plant fruit trees which I did yesterday.
For small 5' tall Apple & Plum trees I dig a 4' diameter hole about 2' deep mix in about 1/3 full of wood chips with the soil that was there which is mainly clay and water well this is my 3rd leaf or year in the ground on some and the trees so far have grown extremely well and are pest free. It's all organic but it is time consuming and then the cost for chips.
On the flip side it is a lifelong investment in the trees…I forgot to mention the soil is now loaded with huge earthworms that my soil never had. I did add about a 5 gallon pail of compost that also had wood chips in it and leaves but was not fully broken down. Some will say the chips tie up available nitrogen… to that I say its a small price to pay and I will always get the nitrogen back in time as it breaks down. Hope this helps someone.
Great video's
I am a bit confused…
I have a brand new BTE garden built on very rocky soil. I started it in Mar. of this year and laid cardboard, mushroom compost, then very thick layer of pine tree woodchips. I will be letting it sit until next spring. what I am confused about is when do I plant cover crop and do I just plant into these crops next spring? Do I let them stay or do I cut down at anytime? I will be needing to build soil as the soil out here in Washington, close to mt. Rainier is to rocky to plant in. Thank you for any help
Yes it is a fish. That is an Osprey. Love birds of prey.
i having problems with this method of gardening! im finding the woodchips need to compost for about 3 years before it really can be used in the garden thanks for sharing !!! : )
Hi, Mark. you are talking about the winter rye growing through the winter and building soil, how will that work at -20 degrees? Love what I am learning, thank you.
Hii Sir
i am so move that you would really spend time to share and experiment all these to us.. you are doing wonderful work.. thank you. we appreciate it.
i saw the leave mold doing wonderful work.. and wood chip get too moist that causing plant to stunt.
the world never work in one thing alone. what happened if you put the thick layer of leaves (leaf mold) on the soil and put a thick layer of wood chip on top of the leaf mold … ? will that solve the problem (instead of doing raise bed). since leaf mold doesn't cause drowning of root… and chips reserve all the moisture better than leaves..
you guys are really blessed to live in a country with big land and good sun. i am no in Germany… expensive land, terrible language that i can't extract info or understand their law about farming and land (so much crazy laws).. and no where to get wood chip… not that i know of..
i know you get wood chip from tree removing company, where did you get the leaves from then ?
truly
andrew
germany
+I AM ORGANIC GARDENING, you have inspired me to go to my nearest park to observe nature! I couldn't believe the amount of tree branches and leaves there are on the ground- I thought this would only be possible if done manually but no, nature has heavy mulch too! I think I've made an observation and I could be wrong on this. If a forest is young, very little wood material will fall- thus a new, young soil probably has mostly leaf mold as its fertilizer. Could this be true? Have a good day sir.
Your wood chips look to large. Are they from a trunk? Paul says to use branches with their leaves shredded well. It breaks down faster and when it rains it produces compost tea to feed the soil below.
one thing i see everybody over looking is that paul has a wood oven and heats with wood and when he cleans out his fireplace he put the ash and charcoal in the chicken pin and it become active biochar which holds water and nutrients and micr biochar can last for up to 600 years before it brakes down so the wood chips covers the earth and creates a moist area for bugs, worms, fungus, and mycro life and his biochar catches the nutrients and water and stop the nutrients from running off just my thoughts Paul is such a good man God bless
Appreciate and enjoy your videos. Disagree with your statement about the 16 minute mark though. I believe I have seen great improvements in soil underneath mulch? I started mulching fruit trees 15 year ago with grass clipping and since I stack hay during the summer months, I started asking customers for any hay/ straw they wished to get rid of. It prevented them the liability of disposal, and gave me a great benefit of mulch as well as compost. Have tree services bring me wood chips as well. Been ran over with more than I can consume! So I tried to use a lot around my trees. Guess they call this area the great American desert? SE Colorado.
Like I said I started simply, and increased fast. Huge amounts of bad hay and woodchips were given to me. Now I have hundreds of tons/cubic yards of composting organic waste. Four years ago we had a very mild fall, with an arctic blast when leaves were yet green. Killed many trees that I replaced the following fall. This area is called a sandy loam by the NRCS, It is far from it! I'm far enough away from any flood plain or glacial activity, it is mostly a hard tight compacted clay. Shovels of soil had to beat down into smaller pieces for the original plantings.
When I replaced the trees, it was a completely different soil type! And all from heavy mulches. Aggregational, is that a word? Much easier to dig into, much easier to break and replant, and darker. Probably twelve years plus after adding the first mulch. I tended to believe it was due to the increase of soil activity under the mulch? We were in a severe drought at that time, but noticed all kinds of surface activity when I watered which I equated to a good environment.
Am I wrong?
So my understanding before was woodchip/leaf mulch: 1) keeps soil moist at all times (good for soil life) 2) keeps temps moderate most of the time of the year – prevents summer sun scorching and reduces winter freeze period (good for soil life) 3) earthworms would feed on the bottom decomposing layer of the mulch, bringing the organic materials deeper into the soil – improving soil structure, reducing compaction, building soil, etc.
However, you are saying without living roots the hardpan below mulch will remain the hardpan. And with the lack of sufficiently decomposed mulch material you have to resort to raised bed and imported soil because no roots want to live in the soil under the woodchips as it is now?
Excellent. I can't tell you how many times I've watched other gardening videos which make the claim that good mulch eventually turns to "soil". Arghhh…. Good description of this distinction between soil and compost. I'm also using more and more wood chips and leaves to conserve moisture in out large gardens. Even here in the Pacific Northwest, the summers are getting hotter and dryer. I haven't had to water several blueberry fields that have had several layers of wood chips. Thanks for your accurate videos.
How are you building your soil?
Most of us do not have 2 acrers for growing trees and large plants.
that is an osprey I believe.
Wood chips do help in the formation of soil in that they mainly decompose into carbon dioxide leaving water soluble minerals behind these minerals are used by plants and life below the surface. They are readily accessible to microbes and fungi that make what is called good soil. Wood chips when applied hold moisture keep the sun off the soils surface and slowly release what minerals they contain. The workings of a mature forest prove this but in the garden it can take many years of adding them to the surface before they are fully occupied by the correct type of soil life to brake them down and without the shade of the forest canopy in the hotter months the correct soil life that goes with the wood chips may not migrate to your garden in large numbers. Paul Gautschi has been perfecting his use of wood chips for many years Just takes time for the system to mature and pay back dividends on the investment.
Woodchips need to stay in a pile and hot compost before spreading them out. The longer the better, a month atleast. Six to 8 months is better.
Really interesting and making me question my current thoughts about compost being king. I have raised beds in an urban home, how do you grow a cover crop in the wood chip? I’m confused as to how the cover crop grows on the wood chips, or are you pulling back the chips, growing the cover crop…then recovering with chips?
Ruth Stout!!!
I remember several years ago, I was watching your videos, and I felt really overwhelmed and confused. I was living in Ohio at the time, raised there.
Fast forward to now, crazy turn of an events and I ended up moving to Hawaii. I've been working on organic farms on Big Island for a year. Impulse decision actually.
Your videos came to mind today and I looked them up. It all makes sense now!
Thank you!
In Quincy, Illinois, our yard was yellow clay (probably from digging out the basement) in which you could see the cracks between the blades of grass. The grass roots and mowed clippings did not seem to be improving the soil. Our town composted yard waste, screened it, and let people take the finished black product home. (pretty awesome!!) I put it on top of the clay for my flowers. In a couple of years I found 2 things: 1.) No cracks and digging down through the clay subsoil was relatively incredibly easier to dig through than it had been originally, which I thought was caused by the leaching down of fulvic and humic acids being released by the top layer of compost going down into the clay and doing some kind of softening (understanding the chemistry is beyond my knowledge set, but I read it somewhere); 2.) the other thing was really fun to look at and I wish I had taken pictures. Earthworms came to our yard and crawled up and down taking black top compost downward with them, so now bringing up a shoveled slice of clay revealed polka-dot-pudding with round black circles throughout the yellow slice!! So in my experience, the top layer of compost, such as what eventually would form under the wood chips, CAN contribute to the softening, draining, and aerating of the subsoil. I should say I am pretty ecumenical in many aspects of my life and in this case also embrace encouraging mycorrhizal fungi with year-round roots of plants that host the same kind of fungi (usually endo), using activated biochar, heaping our compost pile up in our chicken yard, etc. We use tillage radishes in the mix when cover cropping to get ready to turn some of our compacted barnyard ground into garden area. Even though they don't host mycorrhizal fungi, they punch very nice holes through the compacted dirt leaving behind some earthworm friendly organic matter.
My back to eden is going great but I’ve got a ton of wild violets taking over. Should I work to take care of them and if so, how could I even manage to get rid of them without hurting garden woodchop area.
What do you do with the winter rye in the spring since back to eden / fall leaves is a no till system? I wasn’t able to find that info in your videos. Love the info. Thanks!
pulling pepper plant -did you see the foot long root on bottom of root ball.
Have you ever used winter forage peas? They work well in zone 5 and 6. Plant them in the fall and they will winter over and grow in the spring.
Incorrect….Compost does leech out nutrients and microorganisms into the soil as rainwater trickles through (worms/bugs also eat compost and carry castings into the soil). Try soaking a bucket full of compost in water (making "compost tea") then add that "tea" to any nutrient starved area and you will see remarkable improvement in plant growth…up to 4 X's more growth.
Growing cover crops obviously does add life to the soil. Use both compost and cover crops for best results (just like both the Eden and the Fall Leaf methods do).