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!

What is with this yard?!

 

I borrowed this picture to help illustrate some of the differences between traditional gardening techniques and permaculture, but first, what is permaculture?!  It would take an entire book to explain well, I'll just be scratching the surface.

Permaculture is a term coined by an Australian man in 1978 defined permaculture as  “The conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive systems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems."  Basically, planting your garden to mimic nature.

There are a lot of benefits of permaculture.  I'll go over a few really quick and then tell you about what's going on.  Because permaculture mimics nature the garden is more self sustaining, had more diversity and is less at risk of being destroyed by pests.  Because I am helping nature along instead of working against nature it is also less back breaking working in the garden.

Ok, now on to the question I know all my neighbors want the answer to.  What the heck is with this yard?! I know, it's not pretty, not yet.  I always tell people that my yard is in it's awkward teenage stage. It's unsightly and useless, but give it a few years and it will be beautiful and useful.  The first step in our yard was also one of the most important parts of permaculture.  We needed to catch the water and keep it.  Nope, not rain barrels. Those mounds that look like raised beds are berms, behind them are swales that are filled in with straw and wood chips.  The swales catch all the water we get, rain, melting snow, sprinklers, all of it, and they hold it in the soil, at the same time raising the water table.  It's water storage system that also helps plants grow better.  As you can see from the picture above the swale catches the water as it travels downhill and traps it in the ditch so that it was soak into the soil and be stored underground.  Swales and berms took us an entire summer, but even though it's only been one year I can already tell the difference.  My yard is on a fairly steep slope and dries out very early in the year, around mid April, but with the swales catching the snow melt and rain we have found that our soil is hydrated even in June!

Two more key points  We also needed shade in our very hot, dry yard, especially in the west facing front yard.  To shade the soil we put wood chips over the top of everything.  They don't stop the weeds, but they keep the soil protected, shaded, and hydrated, and they also build the soil.  We also planted a lovely globe willow that will grow nice and big and provide a lot of shade.  After the shade our next priority, and what I have been really working hard and focusing on this year, is perennials.  I am planting as many perennial foods as I can.  My goal is to feed my family and I love not having to worry about finding seeds.  Perennials also usually come up sooner than seeds.

This was just a quick overview.  Stay tuned and I promise to keep you posted as we transform our garden and yard into a permaculture food forest.