Back to Eden Woodchips didn't work?

the back to eden garden method it sucks it doesn't work i give up i'm not gonna do it anymore is that you i'm gonna tell you in this episode reasons why maybe don't give up on it yet you probably screwed it up stick around [Music] a pet peeve of mine is when someone tries something and they don't really know what they're doing they do it wrong and it doesn't work and then they give up on it and they say that method doesn't work it's bad so back to eden gardening is basically just wood chips on the ground it comes from a semi viral video on the internet from paul gauchi it's basically just wood chips on the ground and we need to understand why that works or why it doesn't work and when we should use it and when we maybe shouldn't use it in order to determine if it's even the right thing to do and then we need to know how to do it if we do it wrong and it doesn't work well does that mean the method doesn't work or does that mean that we just did it wrong and the idea is that we're supposed to simulate and reproduce kind of what a forest does so a forest drops organic matter down it drops leaves down trees fall down they decompose and the mushrooms move in and you end up getting a transition to an old forest soil type a fungally dominated soil type okay so what does nature do nature transitions from dead bare soil exposed soil and it germinates weeds in it those weeds will live and die and eventually their dead material will get deposited down on the ground and then they will form organic matter and feed soil life so that grasses and clovers can come along the grasses and clovers will grow and you'll start to get some slightly woodier style weeds like this lamb's quarter this lamb's quarter will go live and die but it's got a nice hard thick stem and the only thing that can break down these hard thick stems are mushrooms so mushrooms can break the lignin in these woody stocky stems so as that starts happening over the years mushrooms are building and building and building up in the soil that's the perfect time for bushes to come along they want a bit more of a fungally dominated soil so they'll start growing year after year they'll start growing they'll die back when they say current bush is done after a couple decades and it's dead it will be on the ground mushrooms will break it up and you'll start getting bigger bushes and bigger bushes you get more wood falling down on the ground when these things die and eventually you'll get your first trees growing the trees are going to push up through all the other bushes push up through the weeds and all the other things that would out compete other things like this sea buckthorn they'll push up above it and at that point it's unstoppable you're going to transition to old growth forest in no time and the only thing that's causing this transition is the soil microbiology in the ground so grasslands will start off as bacterial dominated soils it's the bacteria that's going to break down and break apart all these green grasses and you know anything soft and green bacteria is gonna be the main thing that breaks that down and then slowly over time you transition from grassland to prairie to scrub land to bushland to small emergent forest to knit wild forest to old growth forest and as you go along that transition road the soil becomes more and more bacterial or more and more fungally dominated it starts out bacterial dominated and it turns into fungally dominated soils so we feed fungus with carbon we feed fungus with wood so what are we doing when we do back to eden wood chip methodology we're feeding the fungus so a back to eden garden method with thick wood chips on the ground as mulch is best done as a tree succession mulch it's going to generate the soil and the soil microbiology that trees want so if you're growing tomatoes and carrots and lettuce under a deep wood chip garden bed you're kind of missing the point and you're not really mimicking what nature does so let's talk about what gouchey does because paul gauchi did deep wood chip method for all of his gardens well this is what gouchey did the thing that they won't tell you well the information's out there is that gauche carted in and transported tons and tons and tons of compost now that works with lettuce and tomatoes because compost again also is very very bacterial dominated so it matches the ecosystem in the ecological succession that the tomatoes actually want so if you're growing lettuce and tomatoes cucumbers you want to have bacterial dominated soil so you want to amend with compost and then you can use wood chips as the mulch layer of it but you really want to have compost going into that garden on a regular basis now i see lots of videos where someone will make a new garden like this and say oh we're gonna try to do wood chip mulch method and then they go like that and then it doesn't really work the next year and they say oh wood chip mulch doesn't work it's bad i've also seen where people basically put down sawdust and then sawdust turns into concrete after a couple rains and then they say the wood chip mulch method the back to eating method doesn't work because our wood chips turn into concrete or they'll try it for one season there won't be much of a difference and then they just say oh it doesn't work wood chip mulch doesn't work i'm going to go back to my old method let's talk about all of those things and unwrap them a bit so this is what good wood chips look like you have sticks in there you have some heartwood chunks you have smaller pieces you probably even have some leaves in there you have a mix of sizes and it's really important that you have a mix of small sizes big sizes everything because that helps break up the wood chips from turning into a compacted dense mat if you just have a bunch of say sawdust or especially you know the smaller sized particles if you have just like a bunch of small stuff like this then what'll end up happening is they'll get wet they'll kind of compact together and then they'll actually all the whole entire map will become hydrophobic and water will kind of sheet off of it so you want a mix of stuff and don't skimp on the sticks twigs branches and all that green ramuel twiggy growth that's in all of this young growth it's a little more high nitrogen and it will help your wood chips break down faster and it'll help it offset the you know the carbon heavy source by adding a little bit of nitrogen inside of the branches of the wood chips itself so here's a new garden area that i'm prepping for next year and i like to prep my beds a year in advance if possible but when you're going to do the wood chips you got to go thick right here it may not look like it but this is roughly 6 inches to 12 probably closer to 10 inches thick of wood chips and it decompressed down it's probably more like six now but when it was applied it was like 10. you can go as thick as you want for the first year if you're just going to kind of let it sit go super super thick and let that soil life build underneath it by feeding on the grass underneath another thing that people will say is that wood chips tie up nitrogen now that's one of those things where they're technically correct but for all intents and purposes they're actually so incorrect that it doesn't even matter here's why you shouldn't necessarily even worry about wood chips tying up nitrogen first and most obvious retort to that is if carbon material deposited on the ground depleted forests of nitrogen do you think that we would have any forests so what you will get is a little bit of nitrogen tie up but the affected area is like a millimeter on the surface level the plant roots when they see that nitrogen depleted one millimeter thick layer at the top at the interface between the wood chips and the soil the plant roots just go okay i'm going to exist a millimeter below that now this is an area that's been wood chip mulch deep wood chip mulch for about four years now and one of the signs of nitrogen depletion is yellow plants fully yellow plants does it look like anything here is struggling for nitrogen it's not everything is super super healthy and fertile another thing i'll see people do or say is that they'll say that it didn't work because they were nitrogen depleted but then when you actually go into what they do as a practice they're tillers so if you till wood chips down into the soil then remember how i was talking about the affected area of the wood chips is like about a millimeter thick well now if you bury that wood and you put it right into the soil a millimeter around each individual wood chip particle is going to be nitrogen depleted until it's roughly broken down it might take maybe two to five years to break down and what they actually did was they made a huge culture bed they made a wood core garden bed when they till wood chips into the ground those beds can be very fertile and they can have tremendous water storage because of all the carbon and wood chips in the soil but it takes a couple years so they'll go after the first year see weak struggling nitrogen deficient plants and they'll say back to eden wood chip method ties up nitrogen all my plants were weak and nitrogen deficient back to eden doesn't work what didn't work is the fact that you tilled wood into your garden and when in doubt what do i always say to you guys look to nature and what does nature do and replicate and mimic that when a beaver lops down a tree and makes the tree fall or when a tree just falls of old age does it fall down and bury itself underneath the soil does it till itself in it doesn't it falls down and it rests on the surface so your carbon-based mulch should remain on the surface and when we plant into it the next year we pull back the mulch we access the ground level we try not to till wood chips in we plant and then we cover back the plant up around the side so that the plant can get up above the wood chips but the wood chips stay on the surface and they don't get tilled into the soil last thing nature works slow it doesn't work at the pace of an impatient human being with a time scale of like one season it takes a while to build it will get better year after year after year and let me tell you i've been doing it for four years and my soil underneath the wood chips is unbelievable i pick it up and it's just this black gold so it works but remember what it really works for it works to build a fungal micellar network that's going to grow trees wood chips is all about growing trees and even though it's best applied for trees if you want to use it as a mulch layer for a tomato garden feel free to do that but make sure that when you plant your tomatoes you pull the wood chips back when you plant the tomato into the new soil you add some compost or you pull the wood chips back in like in a large area and then you smatter on an inch of compost everywhere and then re-mulch your bed with the wood chips that'll keep moisture in it'll keep weeds down but most importantly the compost itself or the manure if you want to put manure it will actually inoculate the soil with the bacterial heavy life that the leafy green plants want and that goes back to the fact that grasses want bacterial dominated soil bushlands will then come up by they want a little more fungus then trees will start growing they want even more fungus and that is the ecological succession of the way that the world works so match your plant to the soil microbiology that it really wants to live in because that's where it evolved and grew up in and just remember one last thing that the engine that drives all of the plants is photosynthesis so having a back to eden wood chip garden bed with not a bunch of plants planted in it is not ideal your long-term goal is tons of solar panels so this here would you believe me that this is a back to eden garden that you're looking at you're looking at a mat of wood chips but the strawberry plants have planted pushed up through it and let's maybe see if we can poke our head in here and fix the camera and take a look at the soil so this is leaves on top of wood chips this whole entire area is a wood chip back to eden method garden but it sure doesn't look like it and in permaculture we talk about layering on efficiencies stacking efficiencies we do that in engineering too it just makes sense so in terms of shading the soil we want wood chips as the protective layer but then we want actual plants to shade the soil we're going to build in two levels of shade onto the soil so that the soil microbiology doesn't get baked it can grow it's got lots of water because of the wood chip acting like a water sponge and it can multiply water equals life you know this stuff is very very basic but it's funny how sometimes we'll do the opposite of what we need to do but if you stop and think about it maximize water maximize life maximize plants it makes a whole lot of sense so if a wood chip layer will help preserve the water and stop the evaporation at the surface level it just kind of makes a lot of sense right so thanks for watching to sum it all up again make sure you put the wood chips on super super thick make sure you don't till it in make sure if you're planting green leafy plants that you add and amend compost or manure to get that bacterial component up and make sure you give it time it's not a one year experiment if you want to run two beds experimental beds that's awesome good idea i love running experiments but make sure that you run that experiment for at least three years and then you'll really really start to notice a difference and then every year going forward it'll be a blowout for wood chips thanks for watching and i'll see you guys on the next one [Music] you

Channel: Canadian Permaculture Legacy

Views: 129,443

Keywords: permaculture, cold hardy permaculture, canadian permaculture, food forest, cold hardy food forest, canadian food forest, self resiliency, garden, gardening, cold hardy garden, back to eden, woodchips, deep mulch, sustainability, self sufficiency, homestead, homesteading, climate change, solving climate change, fixing climate change, Carbon Sequestration, Pond, ecosystem pond, aquascape, aquascape ecosystem pond, no till, no till gardening, charles dowding no till, fruit trees, trees

Id: B5NbybtxG7Q

Length: 16min 42sec (1002 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 17 2020