Growing SOIL in How to starting a No till Organic Garden 101 and Food Forest. Gardening for beginners with Composting Fall Leaves & wood chips for a deep mulch garden. How to plant strawberries. Permaculture is a great start. This will Build your soil health with no till gardening. How to make a food forest. Part 5
VIDEO: Growing SOIL – How to Start No till Garden or Food Forest for beginners 101 with Compost. PT 6
Growing SOIL in How to starting a No till Organic Garden 101 and Food Forest. Gardening for beginners with Composting Fall Leaves & wood chips for a deep mulch garden. How to plant strawberries. Permaculture is a great start. This will Build your soil health with no till gardening. How to make a food forest. Part 5
So glad you are talking about rye. That is what we used around a lot of our fruit trees and here in zone 8b it has grown all winter and we are always cutting it. It does better than anything else we tried.
I am a beginner again.
A friend was getting her yard re-landscaped after putting a circular driveway. She asked how much more to plant no-mow ground covers vs. grass. Price was outrageous . She ordered thousands of strawberry plants and had a Saturday "Green Thumb Party." She served lunch/snacks/refreshments and her friends planted the strawberries. Afterwards, all the neighborhood kids were welcome to come over and graze fresh strawberries anytime. (If she needed any for herself, she'd pick them during school hours.) After plants multiplied she made the old plants available to friends as a YOU-dig 'em gift. 5 years later every home in the neighborhood was beautifully planted . Many had their own vegetable gardens. A few had "English flower gardens" instead of front yards. My friend took lemons and made lemonade .
Thank you Mark-will try the rye cover and all the best gardening! One question…….how did/does your raised bed round cattle panel work out?
The picture is my husband. I'm not adroit with this form of communication so I don't know how to change the picture. However, your channel and a few others are very educational. I'm the one who asked the question under another of your videos about getting leaf mold from the woods and by the wheel barrow or truck load carrying it to a site that we want to establish a garden. Thank you for your answer to my questions so far. You said to only take off a half inch of the grass and weeds and then go ahead and lay the leaf mold on top. Cover with leaves and plant directly into it. Did I get that right?
Looking at the above video where you go over your nice winter rye one time and then come back for a second swipe – Is this what we should do with a lawn mower and not a roto tiller, or, do we use a roto tiller with the blade barely breaking the top of the soil?
When you pull back the soil with your spade to plant the strawberry plant the soil is nice and soft. I don't expect the soil underneath our grass and weeds will be so soft. Before we put in a lot of hard work and spend a lot of money on seed I want to make sure that we are not going to loose our investment.
So, if we lay down about four or six inches of leaf mold on top of our new garden that has just been scraped like the above video, the vegetables we plant are going to provide the roots to make next year's garden even more profitable than this year's, but we will still reap a reasonable harvest of this year's sowing. Did I get that right?
In the fall should we plant winter rye, peas and sunflowers in our new garden beds to prepare next year's garden bed?
You can tell that I'm having a hard time stepping out in faith and not tilling the ground and adding a lot of amendments – even after watching all of your videos.
Thanks for sharing! So happy it's finally warm.
Your own dibble invention by using a shovel. For longer bare roots, I've used a spud bar. Good luck with the plantings, and apreciate the peach tree update
thank you – good info – just got me garden done – yep 87 or more rest of week here
be well and good luck
1000 strawberry plants?!! Big operation Mark. Nice legs :-0)
Hello Marc,
Thank you for sharing your knowledge with every body. I have a question for you; I have some used potting soil from last year and want to mix it with equal amounts of finely shredded leaves to re boost them and use the mix for planting in about a month. Do you think this would work or the leaves going to rub nitrogen out of soil to brake down and I have to wait longer?
Thank you very much,
Whew. That soil is to die for!!
Mark I'd like to know do you plant by The Almanac
Hey Mark, another great video, thanks for all you do we certainly appreciate it. I noticed you planted strawberry crowns instead of plugs like last season, I did as well and am amazed at how fast the started budding. Do you plan to cut or pinch your first buds off, lol that's a lot of work? Last season you planted in clover, how did that work out for you? Thanks again 🙂 Don
Mark I've been watching your videos for years and I have COPD really bad and I was trying to plant my tomatoes and my old Garden and in the past I've used the almanac but it doesn't seem like there's any days in May to plant corn to the almanac my back to Eden been in the ground for like 4 years so it's really compost I think I think I'm going to run my tiller about 1 inch deep
So just go ahead and plant it I got beans a little bit of everything
I've been trying to pull the weeds out of it right on top of the chips I've never seen so many worms and all my life I think there's enough worms in their to feed it but I do have chickens I'm going to throw some of that on top 2 so it should grow like weeds everything
Amazing soil. Dark, spongey and loose. every thing a gardener wants.
Hello Mark,
Thanks for the demonstration on planting strawberries.
I adapted the method for planting potato in my raised bed, after cutting down my winter rye as close to the ground as I could using a hedge trimmer.
Thank you for your inspiring videos and instruction.
It's good to see you back with a new season of videos.
Be really interested in seeing the process of planting! My back and knees wear out quickly when I'm on the ground.
Beautiful soil, you should be proud
your soil looks amazing!
We are in zone 6b as well, this is our first year gardening. We rent so limited on what we can do. Raised garden beds, the dirt in the yard i think is called shale. Thank you for these videos, we are looking for a place to buy. I am almost positive we will inherit the same dirt. Turning it into soil will have to be are first job.
I want to plant winter rye but have someone with Celia's disease that's worried about it. I could find any info on how long it takes before winter rye develops seeds. Do you have any info to share on that?
I have just the opposite soil than you have, Mine is sand. My wife says if it rains the water is in China the next morning! I'm wondering just how to go about growing the soil to make it more productive. I have applied some wood chips in the last 2 weeks around most of the tomato plants and they seem to be flourishing. Since I have just discovered your channel I did not do anything to the soil last fall, and tilled it all this spring. Would you suggest just continuing with wood chips, or should I do the winter rye thing this fall to start it off. I plant both seeds and starts and have only tried wood chips on the starts so far.
Intriguing. I'm pondering the use of broilers (chickens) to go through the rye and do the digging.
will there be any way to still use deep rooted cover crop (barley or rye) in a well establish strawberry patch? I understand strawberry roots are much shallower compared to those of cereals. Also strawberry roots don't die off annually to create air channels and worm food in the soil.
Is that a snake in front of the lawn mower