Living Pathways: A Complete Growers Guide

hey nerds so I get a lot of questions about our living Pathways like what crops do you use how do you keep them from creeping into your beds and what in the world were you thinking so today I'll do my best to answer those questions and give my general thoughts and guidance on what I do and don't like about our living Pathways so let's do it [Music] okay so I would venture to say that the majority of Growers just leave their Pathways bare or at least the bulk of their pathways are kept in simple bare soil that they cultivate regularly to keep the weeds at Bay but here in my region Kentucky Zone 6B we get a lot of heavy rain events which effectively complicates the idea of leaving Pathways bare one they erode rather easily which eventually means the beds will erode with them two with a lot of water and a lot of erosion comes new weeds being uncovered and germinating all the time which means a constant need to cultivate three mud four also mud and five bare Pathways don't add anything to the Garden no nutrients no habitat for food or beneficials they add nothing really but work these issues with bare pathways are especially pronounced on our farm because we don't have great naturally draining soils most would probably describe our soils lovingly as compacted clay so if not bear Pathways than what you really have just a few options one compost which no I don't like throwing money away if I don't have to that said if you hover your beds with compost the compost will eventually mulch the paths as it blows or washes or just falls off the bed that's what happened on our last farm and I've heard other long-term no-till Growers like Jay armor of Four Winds Farm say the same thing option two wood chips I do like using wood chips in the pads on level ground but since we're on a slope for most of our Gardens the chips tend to wash out or wash up on top of the beds neither of which is super helpful that said wood chips are my second favorite option to living Pathways but in many parts of our garden they are simply not an option at all because like I said when the water rushes down the slope of the paths the wood chips go rushing with them and no inoculating the chips with wine cap strafaria or whatever doesn't really change that it doesn't hold the wood chips together at least not on any meaningful level in my experience in a heavy rainfall environment they will still wash out also I like to harvest and plant from my knees and wood chips are flat out jerks to knees you could also use straw or hay but the seeds that come along certainly complicate that and it's not super easy to spread hay or straw into small areas we do have hay in some of our paths but that's really only because those plots have hay on the beds and it's just easy enough to mulch the bed and the path at the same time but we don't use hay or straw everywhere so we can't put it in every path though those mulches do stay put far better than wood chips or bare soil in terms of some additional pathway options shredded leaves could work shredded because they stay down better that way but even shredded leaves do blow around quite easily and there's nothing harder to get out of of a lettuce mix than that paper mulch or cardboard mulch is fine too but like the hay and straw it's way easier to maintain and put down if the materials laid out over the entire bed and then also just into the pathways moreover you will need something on top of it to pin it down and complement its weed blocking abilities just use common sense here actually common sense is profoundly unreliable Instead try looking to professional Growers around your area to see what they're using then I guess you could add things like plastic to the list like landscape Fabrics but I'm just not a fan of dealing with that stuff it gets muddy weeds grow through it and it slowly shreds apart creating microplastic pollution in your soil I'm not denigrating anyone for using Plastics here though because things like landscape Fabrics can certainly help get weeds in check and warm the soil in the spring especially in the first few years and we do use silage tarps so don't think that I'm perfect but I try to avoid landscape fabric as much as possible because I just hate dealing with it and that brings us to living Pathways which became the logical option when we contemplated every other pathway management strategy because they do not erode in the Rain the living pathways are soft to work in they feed the soil and they require very little work on a week to week basis but they are not like any pathway system without their challenges [Music] all right so let's get into the establishment portion of this video first you have to decide on the width of your Pathways the width of your paths can be determined by the mower you already own if it's not too wide and won't gobble up too much of your growing space or it can be determined by the mower you intend to buy a small electric or gas mower is fine as long as it ejects back like backward and not to the side so it's not to fling grass clippings onto your lettuces or baby plants or whatever I also like being able to collect the grass clippings from the pathways ourselves and use them in compost sometimes the paths have plants going to seed so composting them is really the only option but I suppose you could use that mulch like a juicy hay mulch as well green grass makes an excellent fertilizer for gardens I have not found a push-powered mower without the wheels being on the side of the actual deck of the actual blades because you don't want those Wheels running over your beds or running over plants though I could see potential for that on a small scale also they do not make a flail and edger combo one that mows and edges at the same time which would be super cool that said since they don't make it it's not a bad idea to also own or purchase an edger this is certainly one of the downsides of living Pathways equipment is super important and every other pathway management system the equipment is basically just a hoe or a wheelbarrow maybe a wheel hoe in living Pathways it just needs more mechanization anyway we bought the Greenworks 17-inch Mower and their edger but I hesitate to even tell you that because I have not done a comparison or anything to other mowers those are just the ones I bought and they seem to work fine one thing I will say is that I would identify the mower that you want to use first and design the pathways around the width of the deck our pathways are roughly 70 18 inches that is because that's the size of our mower make sure the deck of the mower goes all the way to the edge or past the wheels of the mower because you don't want a wheel space there you basically just want the deck to fit the pathway okay so crop selection there are two ways to approach this first you could just keep whatever is there whatever is in your native field build beds with mulches and a strong cardboard weed barrier and just go for it we did that in a few spots and it works fine at least in our climate where the seasons are long and the weed flushes come in multiple stages nature will to some extent decide what's in your Pathways anyway because there are very few crops that enjoy all weather all year I find that white and red clovers are the best option for us because they do pretty well in the winter and if allowed to grow tall they do pretty well in the summer and they mow decently well I use primarily New Zealand white clover for this job mostly and broadcast has some in the late summer and early spring every year in spots that look relatively bare sometimes I get asked about tarps and how I use those in conjunction with the pathways and for the most part I don't use them where I have living Pathways but it does occasionally happen the living pathways are in our height rotation plots where beds are really never out of production for very long but in the case that I use a tarp it is rarely in a place for more than two weeks so the tarp effectively germinates and terminates the weeds if I'm allowed a little bit of a rhyme but not so much The Perennial pathway crops the path is yellow when you pull the tarp off but it will recover and I usually just broadcast a little extra white clover to cover for insurance are there crops that need no mowing at all well possibly if you took a season to really get all of your weeds in check and really established a good non-mo cover crop then I could see it working we did try Roman chamomile which is you know a creeping chamomile for that reason and it smelled amazing I would happily work in chamomile all the time but eventually it got overtaken by the other crops we just have way too long warm and wet of a season to reliably do anything like that here that has been my experience kitty cat what's up I know you love these videos stay there you can watch if you've tried a non-mo cover crop or have good ideas for one put them in the comment section or just path crops in general what do you think or know would make a good pathway crop anyway yeah weeds just seem to get through whatever we put down uh maybe if we were further north or just spent a lot of time cleaning our Pathways of the weed seeds of any weed seed that was there it could work but at least At first I wouldn't Bank on that avoid stuff that's too aggressive obviously like Bermuda grass but perhaps stuff like perennial rye grass could work could be used in that situation or I don't know TEF or creeping time or I don't know lots of different stuff you could try could you use a winter kill cover crop I'm so glad you asked even though you didn't yes and we've done that with peas in the fall in the past and it works fine but again the mulch from winter killed cover crops is insufficient for long-term weed suppression though the beds may love the burst of nitrogen from the past in the spring who knows but again the goal with all of this is to pump carbon into the soil keep the soil in place and make your farm very wild to look at if the neighbors don't think you're out of your mind you're doing it wrong but also you do want these paths to be manageable which brings us to the next topic management for the last few years we've been mowing every 10 days or so and this year we decided to pull back on that even more and only spot Mo so like just most spots that need it or Mo as the paths start to get out of hand like kind of tall we've also started to mow the paths very high like leaving close to six inches or more growing I wish our mower would mow higher than it does I think it goes like four inches but the reason for the high mowing is that we've found that mowing too low and too frequently seems to convince the plants that they need to go to seed mostly the grasses which causes more issues in the beds but not mowing as much and mowing higher keeps the plants growing and in general that's the best way to build soil like that's just similar to management intensive grazing where you don't want to cut the grass to the ground you want to take the top third or half and move the animals off in a management intensive grazing system in this case the animal is the mower so anyway it's even more wild in our garden this year for the taller Pathways but the paths look great and we're seeing fewer weed seed heads in general like I mentioned we are also taking the trimmings from the beds to the compost pile which is not the most efficient thing admittedly but it is a nice nitrogen source for our compost pile which is often like wood chips and not enough nitrogen one important thing of note I've mentioned this elsewhere but we've stopped buying bulk compost for mulches the cost has gotten too high to justify and the risk of persistent herbicides is too dangerous with the compost that we have access to so as the Mulcher layer that we originally established breaks down weed seeds are becoming more and more of a challenge in our garden your weed issues will almost always be directly proportional to your mulch layers meaning as your multi-layer decreases your weed pressure will increase and so if you are getting more weeds or even more Creepers out of the pads you will find more of those weeds in your beds because the mulch isn't there to protect them hi Kitty no I don't Kitty Kitty now after we mow we like to Edge and this year because we're mowing less we've started to actually Edge the beds that we didn't mow so we'll Edge even if we didn't mow a bed now we've done this with a simple hook hoe before the edging part to good effect we got this cocoa from Hoss and it could work on a smaller scale but the most effective thing we've found out of everything that we've tried is just the electric catcher it severs the creeping stuff and then you can simply cultivate or rake out anything that kind of fell over into the bed and yes it looks similar to tillage but before you rush to my comment section about that it's only going an inch or two into the soil the main benefits of the pads and the primary soil life are always around the rhizospheres like four to eight inches down keep that area safe and you're good to go in terms of soil health and benefits we are doing some soil testing but I haven't I don't really have much data or anything interesting to share at this point this is only season three on this plot and only my fifth season with any amount of living Pathways um observationally though at drier times the paths have not seemingly stole moisture from the beds and the crops on the edges seem to consistently do better than those in the middle whether that is due to spacing and sunlight the paths or a combo is not really clear but at very least it suggests that the pads aren't harming the growth irrigation can be frustrating if you do sprinklers because the lines have to be moved so often if you're doing drip then the lines would just be on the ends of the beds and in the middle which would be easier to manage because you're not having to move them out of the pathways you can also move your sprinkler lines to the middle of the bed but we've found that difficult because then they don't reach the sprinklers don't reach as many beds similar to irrigation moving row cover or shade cloth is kind of an obnoxious thing as the paths will grow through it that said most covers are only there for a few weeks so it generally works out it just gets kind of messy and the pathways go bananas I really love the aesthetic of the living Pathways but not everyone will a lot of people like things to be cleaner I don't care about the chaos but some Growers like more control and I get that the risk they present with the weed seeds is the bigger concern than the work they require because living pathways are the cheapest and easiest to maintain of all the path options in my opinion they're so software walk on and work in they make the place feel like a one giant Park the paths can be a bit wet in the mornings from Dew which is not super fun to work in but I just throw on my grundins and look super fly and get to it for me wetness is still and will always be better than mud I have not seen any uh upticks and pests only pollinators on the clovers and things like spiders some have said that they would be concerned about venomous snakes which is not a huge issue here in Kentucky we have a few but not they're not very common especially if you maintain your black snake populations they're non-venomous and very territorial so that's another just contextual consideration I would probably not do this style of path Management in a drier region because it does require some amount of water to maintain them like plants need water as with any big farming ideas start small see if it works in your context and then slowly grow it out if you like it we started on our Old Farm with three Pathways and then expanded to about half of our full acre here on the new property and sometimes I will allow stuff to grow in our slow rotation plots and just keep it mode because once you're used to living Pathways that's an always an option in your back pocket last thing and to that point I want to encourage people to embrace a little more wildness in the world a huge percentage of our herbicides and habitat and diversity loss are purely the cost of a sanitized controlled aesthetic but Aesthetics are cultural decisions we have decided that clean and crisp is beautiful and that flowers and plants are messy and unkempt so I encourage you to embrace a little wildness maybe just spend more time planting flowers than weed whacking okay well that should at least be enough to get you started like this video If you like this video If you're not subscribed to this channel make sure to hit the Subscribe button and if you are subscribed you're awesome pick up a copy of the living soil handbook or a hat or other merch from notillroarers.com to support our work become a patron at patreon.com no-till Growers to support our work or just hit that super thanks button that also goes towards making these videos super thanks for watching we'll see you later bye foreign hey if you've watched this so far I wanted to tell you that I will be taking the next couple months off of making videos while I work on another awesome project uh but worry not thanks to your support thanks to buying a book and all those things we were able to send my partner at notetelgros.com Jackson uh to some of the best no-till farms in the Northeast so expect some good old-fashioned nerdiness on the channel over the next little while you'll still see me but just less and probably fewer dad jokes okay thanks again bye y'all [Music]

Channel: No-Till Growers

Views: 192,300

Keywords: compost, compost making, composting, improving compost, regenerative, agriculture, small scale, no till, no dig, farming, gardening., pests, garden, bugs, bug free, flea beetle, soil health, cucumber beetle, squash bug, horn worm, armyworm, cut worms, damage, no tillage, transition, organic, living soil, strip till, strip no till, grass paths, clover

Id: _KOxwfHhDXM

Length: 17min 25sec (1045 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 09 2023