Back to Eden Gardening with Mark 10 Year Results!

hello back to Aiden film Gartner's we're here at the back to Eden Garden in Gettysburg Pennsylvania this garden was first planted ten years ago this growing season [Music] when I moved the wood chips off in one area I just took my finger and I began to dig and in no time I was down to inches really easily and then in the yard just just off the wood chips I started to try to dig and and and I was you know really stressing my finger to even break the grass let alone break the soil in the last ten years the soil that we've gained has just been incredible let's take a look at the soil now this has been 10 years and I just put a fresh coat of wood chips over the garden this year but let's take a look at the soil under these chips we get down through the four inches of wood chips and underneath we have rich black gold soil oh look at that this stuff is loose it's full of nutrients composted wood chips 10 years worth but it's it that this is so fertile it's growing everything before the future I mean absolutely the health benefits of eating what comes out of the garden that it's going to be immeasurable but also I think that times aren't going to get easier they're gonna get harder and I really feel like the Lord has released this now worldwide wood chip gardening in order to be able to provide for people that don't have the ability to do traditional gardening they don't have the equipment maybe they don't have the space they don't have the understanding of how to do traditional gardening and you can just lay down some wood chips this year and if it turns out that it's ten years down the road that you need to be able to grow your own food that you need to be able to grow your own food like in the days of the Great Depression then your garden is ready and I really I really feel like that's a major aspect of the Lord releasing this at this time is he's released it in enough time for people to get things ready that they need to get ready don't have to be in a panic about it but to be intentional about it to do it now ten years ago we had no idea that we would be finding ourselves in the midst of a global coronavirus pandemic so it would seem as though those that have started Gardens would really be glad about that because now we know we can eat food that's not contaminated and the food is healthy now over here where I did not put wood chips you can see what's growing and the wood chips have been pretty thin right here in this area for years but still the soil is loose they come right out the weeds come right out and the same with this dandelion comes right out you see root and all one of the main problems that I've seen with a lot of people not having success with their garden as far as the weed control is they don't have their chips thick enough you need at least two inches of chips to to affect the weed control four inches is better and you take a look here no weeds come over here we have weeds that are still continuing to come up again dandelion Roach I love seeing dandelion woods that means they're not going to grow again while we're here I learned early through mistakes made more mistakes here than anybody could imagine I'll talk about that a little bit later but I put two inch chicken wire around the fence because as you look around you can see we're out and we're out in the country and we have rabbits we have woodchucks around here they call them groundhogs we have raccoons possums we have all kinds of things that like to get into the garden and eat our vegetables well we don't want that so I put two inch chicken wire two feet high all around the garden and I actually watched rabbits jump both over and through the 2 inch chicken wire so I ended up footing 36 inch high chicken wire 1 inch openings they can't get through that and they don't go over it you can see the post Habitat for Humanity is building some homes in our neighborhood and they had to cut down some cedar trees so I took those cedar trees and I cut them up and I split the trees and made posts they're working great cedar is tremendous because it doesn't rot very quickly which is - something to keep in mind as far as the wood chips because you really don't want to use a lot of cedar wood chips you can use them sparingly but cedar doesn't compost quickly and it releases it toxic so it doesn't really grow things very well let's go inside and take a look so after I put these wood chips on I can go through and I'll make a trough like this basically it's just separating the wood chips away from the soil and then you can take your seeds you can put your seeds right in the trough and take that soil and just cover them over and that's as easy as can be again I just love that rich dark soil or if you're putting plants in like we're going to do right here these are hot choy plants that I started from home and like to put some in here at the garden now one of the things I like to do companion planting pot choy and other brassicas go well next to potatoes they somehow seem to protect one another so I'm gonna put some of these in and then show you some of this other stuff that I have here what its uses are what their uses are so I just make a hole put the plants in you know how to do [Music] these plants will come along put a little water on them once they're in oh they're gonna thrive in this soil they're gonna love being out here my daughter eats a lot of stir-fry so she's gonna really gobble these up in her stir-fry now we'll get these in and I'll show you what this pipe is behind me there we go now if you happen to have your plants in or your seedlings in your seeds have come up and you have little seedling plants and you need more wood chips on your garden this is what I came up with years ago I take this I cut a three inch PVC pipe right down the middle ripped it right down the middle and you lay it over your plants and then you can take your woodchips and whether you use a fork or whether you use a rake or whatever you want to do you can just bring the woodchips right over right over your plants right over your pipe wiggle your pipe pull it up and your plants will be protected they're not covered with woodchips they'll love this and you have your weed control you have your your help to keep moisture in the soil so that's what this is for this apparatus over here actually was discovered quite by accident I do contracting I had a customer that wanted me to make a 100-foot slide going from his barn window to the swimming pool he'd always joked about with his sons that they wanted to put a slide in from the barn to the swimming pool I said no way I can do that not something you can get in he said I don't care if you can't use it I just want it to look like a slide so I took half-inch PVC pipe and I made these frames and I put them all together I used wire to hold them together in the same curve for all of them and then I took a blue tarp and I cut it into strips and then attached the tarp to the pipe and put it up against the barn well it did look like a slide a hundred-foot slide going to the pool when the wind caught it you better not be holding it but I thought when I was finished with that what do I do with these and then I realized these would be great plant covers where do you have bugs and you lay these down and you can put your bug fabric over this and they can't get at them and you can be bug free I'd like to show you some tools that the three main tools that I use one tool that I use the least is the good old shovel the only time I really use a shovel there's the plant potatoes because we plant potatoes deep and oftentimes we plant them in the fall before the next spring and I like to plant them deep and I just put that shovel in part the ground drop the potato and we're good to go I also will use the shovel if I have to dig a deep hole that I want to plant a tomato plant deep because that you can you can plant those roots really deep and plant up the stem and that stem will grow roots and sometimes I like to do that as well the other tool that I use a little more vanish perhaps is a mulch fork now the only time I really use that is to spread woodchips on the garden and then the the main tool that I use is the garden rake and this one is a wider head off which I really like but this is good for everything from parting your chips to make trenches to pulling out weeds to just raking out the garden to be smooth now I'd like to show you the wood chips that are surrounding me here these are slightly composted they have some compost that's good stuff that'll actually that'll actually grow things now behind me we have some very fresh woodchips they were put here last fall on this backside and these are not composted at all in fact they're there pine wood chips they're white pine and a lot of people would say well white pine wolves will destroy the soil it really does not destroy the soil and here to my left we have wood chips that have been here for a whole lot of years look at that soil man that'll grow anything that's tremendous stuff right there when planting a new garden I will take some of this and put this down and maybe put some manure on top of it or under it and then put fresh wood chips over it you have a ready-made garden ready-made soil when you do that late last fall I brought a friend of Mines tractor down and scooped up a bunch of chips and dropped them inside the fence at the garden and then this spring I spread them out and I took a break while doing that one day sat on one of the piles of the chips and I just began reflecting over the 10 years and reflecting about 10 years ago and the issues that I had and it was so difficult to get anything to grow because I was trying to grow in the woodchips and not in the soil and I was just kind of spending some time with the Lord with that and said Lord you must have really gotten a chuckle out of all the mistakes I made and as clear as anything in my spirit I heard the Lord's response to me and his response was not one of laughing almost it was a thing of I would never laugh at you he said I didn't laugh I was so proud of you that you didn't give up and I was really impressed with that and I thought about that and and isn't that the Lord's character he would never laugh at us he never would because he doesn't do that but to be proud of us and to want to do things with us and be with us in the places where we're struggling and when we are persistent and we don't give up then God really likes to get involved in those places and he'll he'll impart wisdom to us and through those mistakes and he really did that so I just did when I look at the last 10 years I think man here we put down chips 10 years ago as a covering under that covering now we have tremendous fertile soil I hope that in my life I have allowed the Lord to do the same thing in my life that I could become the fertile soil under his covering the parallels are incredible but if my life could reflect the fertile nosov the soil and what it produces I'd be overjoyed with that and I think that is one of the things that the Lord just loves to do with us he loves to have that fellowship with us and he's all about the joy of the journey and so I'm thankful for that a scripture that has is really my life scripture is Matthew 11:28 and one of my wife and I met I found it was her life Scripture as well and I actually grew up at a address of 11:28 and that says come unto me all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest take my yoke upon you and learn from me for I am gentle and humble in spirit my yoke is easy and my burden is light and that's what the Lord wants this to be he wants us to walk with Him he wants to walk with us if we are yoked with him the burden is light when we try to do these things of our own strength of our part of our own understanding then it becomes burdensome it becomes heavier he will always lead us in success and it's astounding to me the great joy that he has and he expresses to us and we share that joy when we walk with Him when we're together yoked with him well here we are in the Berlin Gettysburg at our home every year I put the lid on the cold frame and underneath we grow spinach and lettuces and I'll show you what we have under here now here we have lettuce and spinach and beets that have wintered through I have put some new plants in and there as you can see they're doing really great they like that warm temperature under there but we've been eating these for a couple of months now the spinach anyway looks like we really need to get eating more it's nice to have these things early in the spring and this is one of I want to show you one of the things that I custom-made and I think it's really great because it's a tomato cage and a lot of the tomato cages by the store they're small and when the tomato plants get big and heavy laden with tomatoes they fall over in the wind you can stake them up but they're still not big enough to hold the tomato plants work very well what this is is this is concrete remesh and it comes in five foot by eight foot sections or five foot by 10 foot sections and I simply cut it in half and after cutting it in half I bend it around and why are the ends together in the circular motion a cylinder and you can put this in and then use a metal or wooden stake drive it in the ground and zip tie it or tie it with string and it'll metal withstand just about anything and it does a great job of holding your Tomatoes we have because it was such a mild winter this year we had Swiss chard that actually made it through the winter I decided to leave it in last fall and see what happened well here's one plant here there's a whole lot more over there and around the corner but the Swiss chard winter Dover I did put some new seeds in and the seeds are coming up over here we have some beet seeds that I planted in the beets are just starting to pop up through the wood chips these are carrots the carrots have been in all winter and they've done quite well the tops tend to die off in the winter time but then when spring comes around they begin to grow again and there are tremendous carrots let me pull one out here if I can get a hold of it down there there's one now there's a winter carrot clean that off that'll be real sweet it's not real big yet but that'll be real sweet and they are really sweet I think the winner had colder munch helps them to be sweeter anyway check oh look check out this Swiss chard over here just amazed how well this did through the winter so we'll be eating Swiss chard now but this is our little front yard garden plot we have a mixture of vegetables and herb here and flowers and over against the porch we have more of the concrete remesh and against this concrete remesh we will grow pole beans in the summer when it gets warm enough in season so the pole bean plant will wrap right around the porch and make like real copy cozy little cubby area and you can see down in here right now there's a snap pea vines that are starting to come up and they'll come up early when they begin to die off I'll plant the the pole beans and we have through spring and summer we have we have vegetables growing right here one year I grew cucumbers here and the vines grew up the downspout they went up on the roof and I actually had to go up on the roof to pick cucumbers that's crazy let's go to the backyard take a look at the things in the backyard here we are in the backyard and this year I expanded the size of the garden here in the back and what I did is I took a layer of manure and I laid that down on top of the ground and then a layer of calm posted woodchips which is tremendous soil in itself and then I put four layers of newspapers now that four layers of newspaper is really important because if there are any weeds or seeds or roots in that composted material that you put down they will come right up through your woodchips depending on what kind of seed it is and you can see here that the newspaper separates that composted material that may or may not have the seed and lead in it and keeps it it smothers it out on top of the paper I put some older woodchips and then some new ones I just topped it off with new wood chips but this paper is really either easy to rip through and to plant your seeds or to put your plants in and what we have back here is we have buttercrunch lettuce we have broccoli kale I put some choy in here some spinach plants that are coming up from seeds lettuces that are coming up from seed more Pok choy cabbage more broccoli and we have a stray asparagus coming up oh boy we love asparagus and that's about eight feet away from our asparagus bed I don't know how that happens but we also have our herbs over here and we have the rosemary and and onion and cilantro oregano I buried pretty much most of the oregano so I put a new plant in and of course the onion so far in this year in the springtime it's now behind me you'll see a lot of firewood we tend to be a little bit unusual here in the Burrow and we heat with fire we heat with woods and we had a neighbor that I was out here barbecuing some venison on the grill one night and she said boy you really are displaced hillbillies and I chuckles I thought yeah okay we'll accept that over here we have the asparagus and we seem to have asparagus before other people do in the area because here in town it's warmer and I think what's happening is that we have the sidewalk on one side and then you know the art gear on the other and it's just warmer the ground the soil is warmer here and so this Paris is coming up our family loves asparagus but each year I put about four inches of manure over that asparagus after I cut the ferns down and then top it off with a little bit of woodchips and we're good to go next spring it starts to come up again so we're really looking forward to having this year's asparagus well look at the size of this one that's huge so over the years I know Paul has had a lot of people tour his garden and in the Washington and I've had a lot of people come to Gettysburg garden and want to see the garden there and they've had a lot of questions so we'd like to offer this that if you have questions ask them email me you can find my email address on the website or email the back to Eden film and we'll work at answering your questions over the course of the year thank you and have a good growing season you

Channel: Living Life 11:28 Home & Garden

Views: 68,010

Keywords: Back to Eden Garden, Back to Eden Gardening, Organic Gardening, How To Garden, Wood Chip Gardening, Mulch, Mark McOmber, Vegetable Garden, God, Gardening with God, DIY, Harvest

Id: KXd3Q3_ZGno

Length: 25min 49sec (1549 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 28 2020