Early Retirement Extreme Forums

DH and I have always hesitated to use a lot of wood chips in the garden, due to concerns about soil acidification and nitrogen depletion. Apparently both of those concerns are unjustified:

https://puyallup.wsu.edu/wp-content/upl ... -chips.pdf

Bring on the wood chips!

@vexed, Yep! We have 5 trees that are 100+ years old and probably going on 100 feet tall. Still not enough. We have planted about 20 fruit trees, so down the road we'll have more.

@singvester, Thanks, I enjoy the charts a lot. Glad to know others do too!


@halfmoon, Yea that's the conclusion I've come too as well. Worrying is pretty fashionable.

I might just mulch around the transplants (tomatoes, brassicas, etc..) and leave all but one seed bed un mulched since there possibly is a chance that seeds won't germinate as well. Depending on how that one bed goes, I'll decide if I want to do the rest.

halfmoon wrote:DH and I have always hesitated to use a lot of wood chips in the garden, due to concerns about soil acidification and nitrogen depletion. Apparently both of those concerns are unjustified:

https://puyallup.wsu.edu/wp-content/upl ... -chips.pdf

Bring on the wood chips!

This guy will talk about wood chips all day.

http://www.backtoedenfilm.com/

Kriegsspiel wrote:This guy will talk about wood chips all day.

http://www.backtoedenfilm.com/

Looks interesting! I just ordered it from the library, since streaming video is an unattainable dream in my woods.

@cmonkey, now you (and this link) have got me thinking about no-till gardening. Just have to indoctrinate DH, who is all about disturbing the soil one fork at a time.

Kriegsspiel wrote:
This guy will talk about wood chips all day.

http://www.backtoedenfilm.com/

I got around to watching this tonight and it was great. He's doing exactly what I have been thinking I wanted to do, but I hadn't seen or heard of anyone doing it. Thanks for sharing this.

The key here is not to plant IN the wood chips, plant in the soil underneath them. As the wood chips break down, they become the soil, which you plant into. After 2-3 years, you start building a thick layer of great soil. I loved the part where they were harvesting potatoes by hand! You know you have great soil if you can do that.

Yea. I mean, if this no-dig-lasagna method works. And the Grow Biointensive dig-everything works... how do people fuck up gardens? It seems like anything works.

Kriegsspiel wrote:... how do people fuck up gardens? It seems like anything works.

Well, there is that matter of the apple.

If you go with what he said, it's that man thinks he has better design than nature, which just isn't the case.

Fun fact - the fruit of the knowledge of good/evil is thought to actually be a quince.

I heard that too about the quince. And supposedly they are none too tasty. Hence, nobody's bobbing for quinces.

cmonkey wrote:The key here is not to plant IN the wood chips, plant in the soil underneath them.

I felt the key was to make sure you used plenty of compost/manure. Note the failures where compost/manure was NOT used. The wood chips do their part in moderating moisture which makes the soil soft, controlling weeds, and eventually breaking down, but breaking down won't happen for many years as you could see by the guy who tilled playground wood chips into the ground.

There is also a difference between "wood chips" (all manner of living material put through a chipper/grinder and then allowed to compost) and "wood chips" (forestry waste). The former is usually what you will find for sale as compost, sometimes augmented with manure and often with a black dye added, and the latter is only suitable for ground cover. A weak version of the former, unaugmented and uncomposted, is what you get when the tree service dumps a load of chips and the chips are going to be largish because they haven't been run through a swing-hammer tub grinder which helps randomize & reduce the chip size.

Compost augmented with manure, about 4" applied in two stages, is what I use tilled into the soil to quickly improve soil texture. Then annual 1/4"-1/2" compost applied in succeeding years.

I, for one, am glad they ate of the ToKoGaE. Goddammit, taking the Lord's name in vain ALONE is worth it.

@GTOO, Thanks for some more info. The stuff I have is pretty rough, but lots of different sizes. Some leaves mixed in too. The stuff I put down 2 years ago has completely disappeared, so it does break down relatively quickly. I'm planning to put down other stuff too, basically everything organic. The chips are just the majority since I can get so much.

It was 60+ degrees here today so I spent about 3-4 hours spreading some mulch, and also pruned my pear tree. The single load I have so far will easily cover our north garden, which is the larger. It felt great to get outside.

OMG! So _that's_ what a dry winter garden looks like!

LOL... this week has been, er, moist here. 4" snow/rain on Sunday which melted some then froze Sunday night, another round of snowfall/rain on Monday that kept the depth at 4", 0.5" rain Tues while the snow persisted even though 40F, 2+" rain Wed, and 4.75" rain Thurs. Light showers and occasional hailstorms Friday.

Anyway, I'll be planting first batch of peas on Monday as we get another rain cycle after that and who knows when the next dryish spell will come.

George the original one wrote:Anyway, I'll be planting first batch of peas on Monday as we get another rain cycle after that and who knows when the next dryish spell will come.

Wait, what? Planting peas? I've been assuming that your climate is similar to ours, but we plant peas in April. You do know that it's early February, right? By the way: we had 10" of snow...SO THERE.

Sorry for the hijacking, cmonkey, but I cannot let the snow/pea-planting challenge go unanswered.

Haha! It is far from 'dry'. I couldn't walk in the dirt (mud) until I put down the wood chips. They are beneficial already.

That's a ton of rain!

Temperate (instead of tropical) rain forest. The coast range snags low clouds coming in off the ocean and they spill rainwater. We're 10 miles inland from the official weather stations, so our rainfall is often double the prediction. It is not uncommon for rain to fall that doesn't show up on radar because the precipitation is too low for the radar to pick up.

Fortunately the garden soil drains fairly well, being sandy loam or sandy clay. I can usually walk on it a day or two after these deluges without sinking into muck and by the third day can work it with a fork.

We sit on a very heavy clay and so our soil takes a longer time to dry out. After a deluge like that I don't think I'd be able to get in the garden up to a week after that. I'm planning on the wood chips to break down and lighten the soil over time.

Our old place in Oregon City was clay loam or silty loam, depending on where you were on the acre. I used a lot of compost on the clay areas and even with less rain, it could take a week to be dry enough to fork. Very fertile, though!

Single Catdom Update

Well we officially have half of the operation done. Monty and the one girl can be together and be trusted alone. Monty has been taking the entire thing very well, only displaying mild interest in the girls. No aggression at all. The one he is now merged with only gave some mild spatting a few times. Now she is down to small hisses if she gets a good whiff of him. In time this should pass.

The other girl is going to take a lot longer. She still has not graduated beyond the kennel yet because she still growls a little when she seems him for the first time each evening. She will nap within a foot of him after the first 20 minutes so its coming along well.

Positive association! We haven't let them leave on a bad note.

Registered on the forums to post a warning about woodchip gardening.

At our house in SE Michigan we have a ton of slugs. On rainy nights we can go outside and pick up hundreds of them without putting much of a dent in the population. The slugs are a huge problem in the garden as they will decimate anything green. They're especially detrimental when seedlings are first planted, and we've had entire plantings wiped out in a single night. I have found over the last 2-3 years that woodchips seem to be a favorite place for them to live and breed. I think they'll even overwinter in them, if the woodchips are deep enough. I have also seen this information corroborated on the Permies forum from another individual in SE Michigan who runs a CSA off of his small farm.

I'm not sure how the slug pressure is where you live cmonkey, but I know a few of the other posters in this thread are from the Pacific NW and I imagine the banana slugs out there are even worse than what I see here. Just thought I'd throw out a warning.