WHY ARE YOU USING WOOD CHIPS??? HAVE YOU JOINED THE CULT???

when i finish working this i will be ready to let you guys do it since i've gone bigger with my gardening i really have i just don't like deep mulch gardening in general my annual gardens are not mulched gardens but there is a place for it and i had tons and tons of chips dropped by a tree trimming company and the place that i like to put wood chips is around my perennials my fruit trees my berries my fungally dominated friends something like that so today i am in the grocery roll gardens it is the beginning of january it has been unseasonably warm and i'm out here in a t-shirt and shorts again and i'm going to be doing a little bit of work and clean up on these grocery reel gardens so they get them ready for spring because spring may be here pretty soon and might as well get the mulch going you can tell how warm it's been these are the seedlings of the everglades tomatoes that we planted earlier in the year and they have actually grown back and are blooming in january that's pretty crazy it reminds me of the plot of the greatest novel that was released in 2021 and that is garden heat a jack brockley novel which if you haven't read it there is a link below i know it's crazy to think that some people haven't read that book but some people haven't yet and and it's and i have the sales numbers to prove it so in these grocery road gardens right now i've got these asparagus which have died back i've got some weeds got all kinds of mess in here because it's been a bit warm the weeds have grown back somewhat but still it's kind of a sleepier time of year i usually get other projects done during the winter and the grocery row gardens don't look nearly as pretty i mean look at the pictures from back in spring sometimes in winter and fall i got to look at pictures of what the gardens look like in spring of the previous you know or earlier in the year because otherwise i get depressed i'm like man the garden's a mess and it's all it's terrible and it's awful and whatever you kind of gotta look back at your photos particularly right now especially for you guys that are up north i know uh julie from dirt patch heaven is like i have frostbite on my ears right now and you're out in your garden and shorts i told her she could just come down here welcome to come down we'll make you some sweet tea i don't drink it but that's just because i unfortunately have some yankee in my ancestry if i chop this stuff down and clean this up first it's gonna make it easier to spread the mulch so with these asparagus that i'm cutting back i'm just going to take them down to the ground and cover them up and just i just want them to go to sleep it's supposed to get colder this next week they really should be going to sleep they should be refreshing themselves and taking a nice break and then giving us great big asparagus shoots in the spring i don't know if that's going to happen it's really not the best suited crop i just like asparagus so if i go here through here and i clean this up and i mulch it maybe maybe they'll be good and at the very least we're going to improve the soil even if the asparagus aren't happy and don't do what we want them to at the right time we shouldn't be able to get tomatoes out of the garden in january that's crazy i'm not really complaining though we planted too many peppers so i'm feeding them back to the garden at too many peppers there's no way to eat this many hot peppers what were we thinking i suppose if a riot breaks out we can make pepper spray this chase tree right here could get very big i don't want it to get very big i want it to be controllable i want it to uh make lots of make lots of flowers to attract the pollinators but not to dominate this entire bed this is just sort of an incidental incidental pollinator plant not a not a showpiece all by itself if you put one of these out in your yard it can be an absolutely incredible accent plant and it just brightens your whole yard up it can make a great big ball of purple flowers and deep green leaves with a nice earthy scent and you can make tea out of it or you could stick it in your grocery roll garden and just mercilessly butcher it back every single year like a boss [Music] hot peppers were just too hot this year even our jalapenos what is this what is down here were you hiding what are you doing they were just too hot even the jalapenos were burning burning hot and uh i just i just don't want that i mean the jalapenos were like eye-watering habanero hot it's wrong it doesn't make sense you'd figure i'd get at least one mild pepper out of all the peppers i planted like one pepper that you could enjoy i made pickled jalapeno slices from these jalapenos these beautiful jalapenos that just keep growing and growing and growing and growing and never stopping and those pickled jalapeno slices they looked great they were nice and crispy i put them on a burger i took a bite tasted delicious a few seconds later the heat starts to creep in what are these ghost jalapenos terrible i don't want them anymore i don't know what they are i don't know if it's my soil i don't know if some terrible amount of capsaicin was created so it could defend itself i don't know maybe it's a cultivar all i know is they're too hot for humans to enjoy you know rachel would make these jalapeno poppers with cream cheese and bacon i think it was cream cheese any other delicious you can't make them with these i mean you could if you wanted to send your guests to the hospital so you know i this seems like a terrible thing to do just too hot so it goes back to the soil and we have no guilt at all we're definitely not rationalizing i feel good i feel fine about destroying all this productivity that is way way too hot to eat it's ridiculous i can't take it too much do you see all these it's an insane amount of jalapenos they're molcha pinos chop and drop a pinots drop it like it's hot with grocery real gardening the main part of the system is your perennials so i feed the annuals to the perennials so if i've got you know anything extra that's growing around them or whatever like it all anything extra goes in if i have ugly looking turnip greens if i've got spent pieces of potato greens or whatever they go around my perennials my perennials are the center of the system so this blueberry gets mulched with these jalapenos that i don't want anymore these marigolds which are about to get frozen down in the next week or so will probably re-seed through here but they also get fed to my perennials chop and drop it's like a hedgerow food forest somebody commented the other day why don't you just do syntropic and follow the rules so it makes sense something along those lines well i read about the syntropic system i was influenced by this entropic system but syntropic agriculture is very tropical it really relies a lot on bananas as a center part of the system it also is not really a backyard type of a system so as i was designing the grocery roll gardening system yeah i took some ideas from syntropic but it also has way too many roles for me i don't like tons of rules i like to chop and drop i like to have food forests i like to plant whatever i want whenever i want and see what happens and throw things around trying to plan everything out on a calendar and get it exactly right for maximum productivity i i would rather have more food for less work and your personality may vary on that but the grocery real gardening system is definitely its own thing even though it's been influenced by its entropic agriculture it's been influenced by stefan subcowiac permaculture orchard but it is a backyard system and i wrote a little book on it grocery row gardening explaining how the system works and inviting people to come along and build their own all the way through the temperate areas instead of just making this be a tropical thing i'm in zone 8 here my brother is going to be growing a system like this in virginia other people have said they're going to do it even further north and we've got people further south as well so if you want to join in all of that and figure out how the system works and plant your own i think you'll enjoy it there's a lot of anarchy involved and there's a lot of room for experimentation but there's also a really solid underpinning plan of an orchard overlaid by vegetable gardening and flowers and other various perennials so check it out grocery real gardening i'll put a link below if you want to learn more about the system i only have six grocery row beds i i just i can't imagine covering this size garden with a foot deep of mulch as i'm shoveling this into the back of this truck that i borrowed and then driving the truck down here and then shoveling it out i realized like how many bed loads of mulch i would need it's horrifying and it's too much work i love my wheel hull i think i don't know i there's a lot of things i would rather do other than throw mulch like with a wheel hoe i just walk down the road but this motion of bend and twist and bend and twist and then do it over and over and over again and you see this slow incremental change and then you think gosh i've only put down two inches of mulch i should put down six to ten twelve inches of mulch it's horrifying great for a small space builds the soil really nice and crumbly and beautiful but man alive it's not fun i don't like it don't do gardening that you don't like i will condescend to mulch my perennials and my fruit trees because they like it very much but uh yeah i would rather just pile all this mulch up and mix in some high nitrogen material with it and let it go down into compost and then spread a lighter much smaller amount of compost through when i put my beds in in the spring then uh then have to throw all this mulch i'm just i'm already tired of throwing this mulch this little i should have my kids throw this mulch maybe maybe mulch gardening is better if you have your kids do it and then you can talk about your your your mycelial connections and your and your fungal domination and whatever else while your kids are out slaving but i i tell you my kids would rather wheel hoe too i'm not going to make them mulch all this area i'm just going to make the mulch 95 of it that i don't do on this video because otherwise it would be cruel so i have these four foot wide beds with three foot wide pads so what i do is i come through and i clear whatever wants to explode out into my three foot wide pathways which happens a lot and then whatever grows out of here gets thrown back in like these tomatoes which are so crazily alive right now these are the everglades tomatoes that uh are just they're just the unstoppable tomato and this is actually the second generation of them this year so i don't actually want to kill them we might find that these guys actually get through the winter or some of them do so i'm just cleaning them out of the path and i'm some of them i did mulch because there's tons of tons but this mess right here i'm just gonna leave and see what it does it may be that some of these have the ability to uh go right through the winter and are a little more cross tolerant some of them may be tough enough to do that we don't know we'll see what the genetics allow but you know i mean it's a green cover if it all gets frozen down and dies and looks terrible and i want to turn it into a mulch and feed something else that's fine but for right now it's the pathways i'll leave this area and i'll mulch the other parts of it and just get what's out of the path out of the path oh thank you [Music] so first that's where we are with the grocery row gardens right now if you want to learn more about the system of course check out the little book grocery road gardening i'll put a link below gotta finish wheel hoeing the pads through there and then there's tons and tons of mulch to throw around so i better get to that have a great week and until next time may your thumbs always be green [Music] you

Channel: David The Good

Views: 81,433

Keywords: David The Good, grocery row garden, grocery row gardening, permaculture, chop and drop, mulching, deep mulch

Id: 6ZdqGYrDGus

Length: 19min 47sec (1187 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 05 2022