This is Why I'm NOT Gardening with WOOD CHIPS this Year

what's going on growers James yoni coming to you live from Jersey we are in the heart of the growing season and the gardens are in full production so today I want to answer a question that a lot of you have been asking and that question is why am I not growing in woodchips this year let's go if you've been following this channel then you know eight years ago I put this food forest in and to start it off I laid a thick wood chip mulch in the ground and then over the years the wood chips have broken down they built an incredible soil and they've grown big healthy perennials overall I'm very happy with the results but I did stop using wood chips in some areas in my garden why have I stopped using wood chips in some areas of my garden well it's because I think wood chips are an excellent garden tool when used in the proper scenario but I don't think what chips are perfect and ideal for every single scenario in a garden for instance when I put this food forest in the wood chips were excellent for what I wanted to do because they smothered all the grass they helped retain a lot of moisture for the trees and the wood chips slowly break down which helps build good soil over time one of the main things that the wood chips do too is they build a soil that's dominated and fungal activity a lot of you will notice when you put wood chips down that mushrooms start to grow like you have right here these small mushrooms and that will just happen naturally because these mushrooms are what we call the teeth of the forest these are what break down the wood chips it's not that green and brown composting process that's going to break down the wood chips it's gonna be the mushrooms one year layering the wood chips like this and that's what we want this is so important because a fungal dominated soil is so good for your woody species because woody species love a entries love when you can have what's called the mycorrhizal Association this is a symbiotic relationship that goes on between some fungi and the roots of your plants so having these wood chips it can help create that perfect environment for that fungal relationship that mycorrhizal Association that's why wood chips are so perfect and so ideal when you're growing perennial species woody ones like fruit trees blueberries stuff like that but if you want to grow annuals in your garden and you want to direct see them things like carrots and lettuce I don't think that a woodchip mulch is gonna be ideal for that situation and this is why when it comes to growing in wood chips you can't just direct seed into the wood chips the wood chips are a growing medium they're simply just a mole so what you have to do is pull back the woodchips like I did in this section here and then plant directly into the soil one of the issues that I've had is when I've done this with things like carrots or lettuce sometimes the wood chips will fall into the section and then cover that stuff up and the lettuce these are just a little too small to push that wood chips out of the way carrots too and you can just pull the woodchips far far back if you want really far back but the thing is what chips take a long time to break down which is perfect for woody perennials and big trees because they last long time the wood chips but if you're growing annuals and it takes a long time to break down your soil might not be adequate to grow some your annuals just yet then something Jeff Lawton said gave me an aha moment he said that your woody species your perennials like a fungal dominated soil and your herbaceous plants your annuals Lake like a bacteria dominated soil which made so much sense to me then I realized what Paul Gow she was doing also Paul Gow she wasn't growing his annuals in wood chips Paul was growing his annuals in the bacteria dominated soil that his chickens created in their chicken pen so I realized all that stuff and I said I want to create my own soil that's dominated for bacteria to grow my annuals so I said let's do that in a square foot raised bed garden that's what we have growing here now I grow my carrots like this and I've had the best carrots that I've ever had they're looking fantastic in here we're growing so many let's see if we can grab a couple and see if tuck maybe want to try a few talked about a carrot boy want a carrot tuck he's laying over there he's getting too hot you may not want one right now but we'll see if do bring one over if he wants one maybe so you can see this section right here I'm just growing a bunch of carrots and stuff and they're doing real well we're getting excellent germination and the shape of the carrots are nice because we've got this nice soil that we built in here dominated again with a bacteria dominated soil that's so important I'll grab a couple more carrots just to show you looks like Chuck showed up I think I got a different variety over here want a carrot boy let me carry it so when the carrots are tuk approved we know they're good and bringing in this compost it may have costed me just a little more I actually had to pay for it so what I ended up bringing in was I think about a yard and a half of mushroom compost and the mushroom compost had costed me about $45 for yard so I did have to invest more but I know that overall I'm going to be getting more food so it's gonna cost me more to grow it but I'm going to be getting more out of it so what chips are perfect if you want to do something on a really cheap almost like free budget I started a garden in here for free a couple years ago and it's not hard you just got to pay for the season stuff but you're not gonna get a super high level of production unless you add some of some of that fertilization or your soil is really good already there are some annuals though that I still like using wood chips for like these Tomatoes right here you'll notice I just recently put this wood chip mulch down and in the beginning in the season in the spring I didn't have any mulch down because I wanted the soil to heat up quickly and actually to absorb a lot of the moisture that was coming in with the rains in the spring now that it's super hot and we're in the middle of summer I'll cover that soil up to retain the moisture and then also make sure that the ground is staying cooler so now we've got this widget most down here just behind me I've got Tomatoes growing in my natural soil using the wood chip mulch and they're growing fantastic right here again I didn't put the mulch around the base of the plants until the plants were in the ground transplanted and relatively large this way the woodchips don't knock into the stem and you know poke some of the stem and damage the plant when it's super young these again in natural soil just with the wood chip mulch are growing real well so it really is situation when it comes to wood chips there's nothing really in gardening that you can say works for everything you got to make sure you're analyzing every situation and then attacking it with the knowledge that you have and trying to make the best of the situation when it comes down to it I'm still going to be using wood chip mulch is all the time and if I could go back and redo the food forest I would have done it the same way put it down a nice thick wood chip mulch the only thing I would have done different is I would have grown my annuals like this in raised beds in a more high intense production system kind of marrying these two ideas of high production with a self-sustaining self-replicating system kind of getting the both of the best of both worlds so that's why I want to share this video with you so you guys could try to take advantage of the things that what chips can do that are great for you but then also try to avoid some of the disadvantages of it getting the most out of wood chips to sum it up a wood chip mulch is ideal for going perennial woody species because it helps build a fungal dominated soil while on the other hand if you're gonna grow a lot of annuals and stuff a soil that's high in bacterial content is really good so you're gonna want a lot of compost and stuff you'll notice right here we've got a perennial woody species blueberries we've got a lot of thick mulch down and look at the size of these blueberries on this variety these things are monsters so we've been eating some already and there's none ripe right now but some of them are just ripening and we love these ones so much but again we've got this thick wood chip mulch underneath this this perennial woody species and you can see how much is helping to retain the moisture down there build excellent soil and it's already wet when you have a huge garden like this you can't just be out here all the time watering everything that's one of the reasons that the thick wood chip mulch works so well but again it's different for your annuals that's why you want to make sure you're always going after things with a circumstantial mindset not just saying oh this will work or that'll work it's worked before that's why journaling again is so important for a gardener - as opposed to the blueberry the woody perennial where we were just that this situation right here is completely different as you'll notice a lot of the peppers and the tomatoes have started to form little fruits so what I did was I came by just a couple days ago and I made my own soil this is just dominated in compost and it has some organic fertilizers fertilizers in it and I went around and I just did a top dressing around all these plants this way when we water and it rains the nutrition will go down to the base of the plants and help feed them because it's in the middle of the season we want to make sure we're giving the plants enough fertilizer and enough adequate nutrition to have high high production so now that it's the middle of the season I topped rest and it's getting very hot out what I'm gonna do is use an annual mulch for my annual plants so I've got some rotted hay here and I would have liked to use straw because it has no seeds but I couldn't get any this is rotted hey this is from over a year ago so none of the seeds should sprout so we'll use that as a nice annual mulch because this won't poke into my lettuces and soft plants like this if you use thick heavy woodchips they could poke into the plants and damage them this hay it's very light so the seeds can pop through too it'll also break down quickly you can also use leaves like I'm using right here just simple leaves just from your own backyard just take these leaves and run them through the lawnmower so they dice them up and they're nice and small because you don't want huge big leaves or they will mat the ground out you do not want that if you're gonna use leaves makes you dice them up it's pretty simple that when you think about it the way I'm doing it now is for my annual plants I'm making sure that I'm using an annual mulch for my perennials I'm using that perennial mulch like the woodchips breaks down slow lasts a long time I don't have to keep replacing it here the annual mulch is perfect there's a permaculture way of looking at things where we learn all these different techniques like how to mulch and companion planting and how to build a swale and they're all tools and we have these tools in our tool chest and when we walk up to a situation we need to find the grab the proper tool for the proper situation and apply that so when it comes to watching mulch we need to make sure we're appropriately applying it for the situation that we're walking into because when it comes down to it we all know that the right tool for the right job makes all the difference and yesterday's video growers thanks for watching I hope you enjoyed it I hope you got something out of it if you did enjoy the video hit the like button hit the subscribe button share with your friends don't forget to check out their merch down low and remember to use our Amazon affiliate link whenever you're doing your shopping talking these James way back to you again real soon we [Music]

Channel: The Gardening Channel With James Prigioni

Views: 554,159

Keywords: gardening, how to, wood chips, organic gardening, wood chip gardening, back to eden garden, back to eden gardening, paul gautschi, how to garden, james prigioni, epic gardening

Id: d2lwqbtpav0

Length: 10min 9sec (609 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 12 2020