Wood chips

 

        I wanted to talk about woodchips.  You might have noticed that we have a lot of woodchips going down in our yard.  My neighbor pointed out that it won't stop the weeds, how right he was, but that wasn't our intent.  Woodchips help discourage weed seeds from germinating, but they definitely don't stop weeds, for that you need a layer of cardboard underneath.  So why the woodchips?  Wood chips help to protect the soil.  Soil that is exposed to the sun dies, all the tiny microbes that help soil to be healthy get killed off by the radiation from the sun, that's one reason plants are so eager to grow and cover the soil, they want to protect it.  Wood chips shade the soil and protect it from the sun and also help stop erosion from water because they force the water to move more slowly across the surface of the ground.  Wood chips also help to moderate the temperature of the soil, cooling it in summer and warming it in winter.  As the wood chips break down they add nutrients to the soil and help it hold water better.  As you can see, wood chips have a lot of benefits, but I wanted to talk about my favorite one, water conservation!

        I live in a desert, not only that, but my yard has basically no shade.  I do have a few small trees in the back, but they aren't big enough to really shade anything.  My front yard faces full west and in the summer it get HOT!  It gets so hot, I thought growing anything in the front would be nearly impossible.  It turns out I was right.  It's so hot that plants wilt and die very quickly.  If I want them to stay alive I have to water pretty much every day, not ideal for a desert state in the middle of pretty severe drought.  When I noticed that my beds with a thick wood chip mulching only needed to be watered once a week I added wood chips to the top of my front garden beds.  I was skeptical that it would help that much in the front, but I figured it would help at least a little.  Monday I watered nice and deep, did a quick weeding job with my kids and we piled on the wood chips.  Here we are at Friday and I pulled back the wood chips to see...the top of the soil was still wet.  I was pleasantly surprised.  To illustrate the difference, this is the bed that I had to water every day and it was still dry an inch down!

        So what are the draw backs to wood chips?  First of all, as they break down they pull nitrogen from the soil, that's not good for plants.  However, there's an easy fix.  If you look at this picture just above us there are potatoes and clover side by side in that bed.  The clover helps to add nitrogen back into the soil as it grows, it's one of the nitrogen fixing plants.  A few other options are peas, beans, vetch, soy beans, or lupine.  I know there are more, those are just the ones I am using right now.  One way to add nitrogen is to plant a fall cover crop of soy beans, they can help protect the soil as they add nitrogen.  I like soy beans because if I plant them in the fall they don't have a chance to grow all the way before they are killed off by frost and then I use a pitch fork to turn over the soil and the plant decomposes all winter long.

        The only other draw back to wood chips that I can see is that they might make it harder for plants to self seed.  I am testing that right now and will add a post when it figure it out.  They also require you to water more deeply to reach the soil, but that is helped by leaving a little gap around each plant and, honestly, considering that I water just once a week instead of every day I'm still saving time, water, and money. SO worth it!