Become Food Independent using Wood Chips as ground cover

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Back To Eden Organic Gardening Film (using wood chips to grow food)

If you buy store bought mulch(wood chips)
make sure it has no added color/chemicals.

The more diverse your supply, the more trace minerals will be in the wood chips, to supply your plants with nutrition.

If you can buy your own wood chipper and make your own wood chips from trees you know where they came from, and that they were not chemically fertilized or poisoned.

Grow food now, or starve later.

Those that rely on Government to survive will die early.

I have been working all day getting the vegetable garden back in working order and ready to plant. We can still have a frost over night where I live, so I don't plant until the oak trees start putting their leaves out.

watch the videos on Back to Eden.

Have not verified it but, he says wood chips give off heat
and help to keep the plants warm.

Oh I'm using my wood chipper alright .

it's not an Easy Street, it is an Easy Garden...

I don’t have a yard, no land.

You can use all those Amazon boxes to cover and kill the sod in your lawn, so that you can plant it later.

Don't agree with all his theology, but this man seems to know what he is doing! Giving this an agreeable

Any organic (plant) material that decomposes will give off heat. Grass clippings, weeds...and will all break down adding humus to feed the soil.

YES. Cardboard is an easy way to kill crabgrass/quackgrass.

I'm doing a huge patch of potatoes using the Ruth Stout method. Similar to Eden but simpler

Yeah I like that guy. Mulch is the key to gardening. Ruth Stout books about gardening with mulch are the best. Mulch is everything, whether it's wood chips or hay or whatever.

Now someone who is doing things intensively on a commercial scale may do things differently. If you are a market grower then you can't do better than to look up Curtis Stone and see what his methods are. But he is in and out of his beds in a matter of weeks with succession crops one after the other. They are never left to their own devices like you probably want to do with your home garden.

Me too, but mine are in garbage cans with holes in the bottom.

The rest of my garden is in the ground with hay. I have already harvested radishes and have corn, green beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, scallions, carrots and red and green peppers coming up now.

This is my first time using this method and although you are not supposed to have to water it, here in Florida, aside for the last week, we had zero rain or dew for months so we have supplemented water as needed.

It's called mulch. Yes it gives off heat, quite enough to warm water if you were running a coiled pipe through it, perhaps.

Wood chippers are good at things besides wood.

I saw the video last year and got a good champion woodchipper last year.
I had piles of smaller trees I had cleaned up just lying around my property.
The first batch of wood chips have decomposed over the winter a bit and should make good ground cover.

Right! Try that in Florida. If it isn't indigenous then it must be grown above ground. That isn't going to happen anytime soon!

Seriously? Back to Eden gardening with store bought wood chips? IF you're lucky enough to find someone who will bring the material to you. Back to Eden gardening is labor and material intensive and not as easy to do as you think.

Awesome!

You can't use store bought wood chips. You have to use wood chips that have been chipped up with the leaves on the branches. He states that in the video. You must have the green with the wood chips. Any mulch will do. He just happens to use wood chips. I followed this plan when I started a new garden in 2017 and had good results. I put 4" of compost over shitty soil and then covered it with about 6" of chipped up tree branches I got free from a local tree company. I was surprised how well it did. But the next year I had to add more compost. It takes a few years to get going, but I agree. No till and mulch your beds with compost. Grow as much food as you can. There are many shade tolerant veggies you can grow too.

That's one thing I hate about seeing people live in tract housing. Wasting time, resources, and water on lawns.

Use Goat manure as fertilizer.

I'm a small scale vegetable farmer. I tried this. It DESTROYED the fertility of the 2000 square feet of garden I experimented with for 3 years running now.

Year 1: Worked ok. Suppressed weeds somewhat. Not nearly as good as the hype. I put the wood-chips 4 or 5 inches deep around established annuals.

Year 2: Despite valiant attempts to plant while keeping wood-chips at surface level, it became obvious quite a lot made it to subsurface levels. ANYWHERE wood-chips were covering, or were even nearby, plants were NOTICEABLY smaller, weaker, and often failed to produce at all, or were dramatically less productive.

Year 3: Raked off as many wood-chips as I could. Plants were still smaller than those in areas I treated as standard.

Apparently conventional science is right in this instance. Decomposing wood (or anything else) takes and holds nitrogen. And based on my results, I would suspect quite a lot of other nutrients.

If you don't like manual weeding (and who does?) I suggest getting a wheel hoe. I prefer the Hoss, but there are several good brands out there. Don't believe this back to Eden crap from people whose survival and future depends on the productivity of their gardens.

I run an 80hp Diesel Vermeer chipper at work. That has got to be my favorite tool I have ever used. My Honda HRX mower may be a close second.

What do they have in common? I build soil with both. I compost all leaves and grass clippings with my Honda, and that Diesel Vermeer chipper takes limbs that would take 5-10yrs to decay and it chips them into small pieces that microbes can break down in only 1-2yrs.

We dump all wood chips from local tree jobs at my bosses property. The local guy we drop some of our logs off mixes wood chips with beef and dairy manure and he composts it to build soil. Its all about the carbon/nitrogen ratio. Wood is carbon and manure contain nitrogen.

As for my organic gardens I strongly prefer chopped straw for mulch. Wood chips are great tho.


MAGA

Good info,

Also look up “Teaming with Microorganisms”

Fairly simple idea, make a bacterial culture from soil of a successful plant you want to grow. Mix the multiplied culture into your own soil before planting. PROFIT

you know what i always find the coolest things. those closed systems they have in some bunkers. where they have fish in water with plants and those feed of something else and that in turn feeds veggies etc. forgot the name
hydrofarm?