What did you do in the garden today?

[lazy gardener]

Thanks for the video! I've been looking for wood chips to start my BTE raised beds, but not having any luck. Today I decided to just use leaves for my cover. This video makes me feel better for using them. Thanks Bee!

Today I got my raised bed ready. My bed level had lowered a bit from last year, so I added some top soil and a bag of peat moss I had gotten for the chickens to dust in. I picked up the wrong kind. The one I usually get, Lowe's was out of and I didn't realize this one had fertilizer until after I got home. I put down my layer of cardboard, some manure and topped it off with some leaves/pine needles. I still need to add some more leaves and hope to get that done tomorrow. I also got an area ready for my tomatoes and other taller plants. These won't be in a raised bed, but along the back side of dh's shop.

I'm hoping to put in a couple more raised beds this year if the money is there to purchase the material. DH's is wanting to redo the porch. When that happens, I will have some wood that I can repurpose as my bed borders. This probably won't happen to late summer, so I'll have to wait and see.

Henless, if you have more muscle power than money, you can get those raised beds done without input from the latter. Look for wind fall trees, or any other free materials to make the sides of your bed. You don't even need to put sides on it! Just start building it, leave a nice walkway between beds. If needed, you can scalp the soil from the walkways to layer into the bed along with all of the free organic material you can get your hands on. You may need to rent or borrow a truck or trailer, or find a friend who will trade an afternoon of hauling materials for you for free veggies as they come available in the season. If you live in town, you'll have to import more materials from outside your land, but... they're there, you just need to find them! Look for folks who have horses, goats, cows to get their stable litter. Save all your grass clippings, let all of your friends, neighbors, relatives and enemies know that you're looking for mulch materials. Check out "Lasagna Gardening" by Patricia Lanza. If you want the "neat appearance" of a raised bed with wood sides... just make the raised bed anyways, and put up the sides later. In the meantime, you can lay flakes of hay to cover the sides, or you can even plant lettuce or other low growing veggies on the sides!

 

[henless]

After calling and personally going and talking to many tree services~and I mean, I stopped along the highway and talked to crews working counties away, inquiring as to where they were dumping their chips that day~at their offices and out on their work sites, I was drawing a huge zero. I did find some really poor quality chips dumped a couple of counties away~just by driving by the site and begging the landowner for some~ and was able to get some of those but they will take forever to compost~huge, stringy, mostly evergreen stuff.

I even made a huge sign and placed it out by our mailboxes, directing any tree services to dump chips on our land.

Finally, someone suggested advertising for chips and, as implausible as it sounds, a lady called me and told me of chips that had been dumped illegally on her land by the neighboring state park and said I could have any I wanted. I got some of those, then my neighbor had an electric right of way cleared and those chips came my way. With all of that, I finally got 4 in. on the garden, so added more depth with 250 bags of leaves gathered in town this fall.

I went back to the place where the lady said I could have chips and the state park had removed the chips and leveled off the piles...I was still able to scrape and scoop a little more from the site, but my supply of chips is no more.

For what it's worth, you might advertise for chips....you never know what will happen. Tell everyone you know you want chips, you just might get a lead on some. My sign at the road almost netted me the motherload of chips....a fellow in a semi tractor truck stopped and wanted to dump his whole load of chips but couldn't get his big truck back our switchback driveway.

I hope you find enough to get you started. Remember, they need to mulch down for several months before you will be able to get the best results out of them...at first, the wood chips rob nitrogen from the soil where they come in contact with the soil, so there are nutrients locked up until those start to mulch.

I haven't seen anyone around my area doing any chipping, but I have the word out. Maybe some will come my way eventually. I'm really wanting some to have to put on my soon to be orchard.

I do have a question about the BTE method. Do you need to put down newspaper or cardboard every year? I know you need to replenish the chips/leaves and add manure yearly or as needed, but the cardboard/paper I don't know.

Henless, if you have more muscle power than money, you can get those raised beds done without input from the latter. Look for wind fall trees, or any other free materials to make the sides of your bed. You don't even need to put sides on it! Just start building it, leave a nice walkway between beds. If needed, you can scalp the soil from the walkways to layer into the bed along with all of the free organic material you can get your hands on. You may need to rent or borrow a truck or trailer, or find a friend who will trade an afternoon of hauling materials for you for free veggies as they come available in the season. If you live in town, you'll have to import more materials from outside your land, but... they're there, you just need to find them! Look for folks who have horses, goats, cows to get their stable litter. Save all your grass clippings, let all of your friends, neighbors, relatives and enemies know that you're looking for mulch materials. Check out "Lasagna Gardening" by Patricia Lanza. If you want the "neat appearance" of a raised bed with wood sides... just make the raised bed anyways, and put up the sides later. In the meantime, you can lay flakes of hay to cover the sides, or you can even plant lettuce or other low growing veggies on the sides!

I have thought about going ahead and laying out my bed areas and just working it like an in ground garden this year. I'd have to use leaves for my mulch, but if I put some pine straw on top of the leaves, it might help keep them from blowing away.

It's not that I want "neat" beds, but its for me. I have RA, and some days my joints really give me fits. Having raised beds makes it much easier on me to tend my garden. The bending and stooping really aggravates them. It doesn't stop me from doing stuff, it just slows me down and I have to make adjustments. What most people can do in a day, takes me a week or two to get it done.

 

[Beekissed]

You don't have to put down newspaper at all and I don't know where folks out there got that idea...probably one of those things where people like to complicate very simple things. Trust me, after a thick layer of chips has been on the soil, all the grass and weeds are thoroughly dead within a few months, no matter what time of year. The same way they suppress weed growth, they kill the grass where you place them.

What I didn't do properly was wait upon the Lord to supply me with chips. I worked WAY too hard trying to get them on my own and getting them placed when I should have waited on God to drop them in my lap, like He did later on in the process. The same way He did with the leaves this year.

 

[Guvnah]

You don't have to put down newspaper at all and I don't know where folks out there got that idea...probably one of those things where people like to complicate very simple things. Trust me, after a thick layer of chips has been on the soil, all the grass and weeds are thoroughly dead within a few months, no matter what time of year. The same way they suppress weed growth, they kill the grass where you place them.

What I didn't do properly was wait upon the Lord to supply me with chips. I worked WAY too hard trying to get them on my own and getting them placed when I should have waited on God to drop them in my lap, like He did later on in the process. The same way He did with the leaves this year.

When I was growing up, my family used to put down paper in the garden before laying mulch. Granted, our mulch wasn't wood chips. This was in the vegetable garden beds, and we just used grass clippings -- and we never had enough so they were spread thinly.

Fast forward 40 years. I've been gardening my own veggie plots for the past 35 years I've been a homeowner. I have never used paper. Just tons and tons of mulch. I just make sure I get enough to suffocate anything underneath. It's how I roll.

I will say this: in some places there ARE "superhero"-level weeds that will grow through anything. If that's the case, THEN consider something more solid -- newspaper or cardboard.

Example: At my place of employment we started a company garden as part of the Employee Wellness program. People learned gardening. They had opportunity for mental therapy in the middle of the day by "playing in the dirt" for a while. And the produce all went to Care And Share. It was a big success. The garden was started on soil that was essentially prairie. For some of the plots we did no-till, so those plots would essentially have some very well-established and TOUGH flora trying to spring up from beneath. We started those beds with a layer of cardboard before we put the layers of compost, leaves, straw, etc.

But here's an interesting observation: We matted all the aisles with 4 inches of "slash", which is essentially chipped up brush, leaves, sticks, clippings, etc. No cardboard there. Just slash. The only places where the prairie succeeded in poking through the aisles was where we spread the slash too thinly. (And a bucketful of new slash on those renegades usually took care of the persistent ones.) I don't know what would have made it through the looser, lighter layers of material in the no-till beds though, had we not done the cardboard. We needed it loose enough for potato shoots to get through, for instance, so if they could get through, then why not a thistle?

Moving forward, those beds are established, the cardboard is decomposed, and we will not use more cardboard. It was a one-time thing.

 

[Beekissed]

Interesting account! We used to use newspaper in the garden many years ago too and it was a real pain in the patooty. When I saw folks trying to use it under the chips in all the vids on YT about BTE, I kept thinking "hard, fiddly work and all for naught". No way I'd go back to that kind of struggle.

Deep mulch seems to be the ticket. I intentionally let some kind of joint grass into one corner of the garden this year where the wood chips were very thin, just to see how difficult it would be to pull them out. For the first time in my life I had great fun weeding a garden...loved the sound it made and the feeling of being able to pull them out of the ground so easily. HUGE clumps of the stuff came up with ease and that stuff usually has to be chopped out with a hoe and you still can't get the roots out.

Took three wheelbarrows like this out of the garden, a mix of those weeds and tough grasses that I had allowed to grow in the corner and some garden refuse.



Here's what the soil looked like under them and that was only 5 mo. into having the wood chip covering on the soil.




This is what my soil usually looks like...and this is after it has been tilled 5 times as deeply as possible and a couple of rains will pack it down like it had never been tilled. I'm a big gal but could only get the fork in that far with all my weight. Now, I can throw that fork across the garden and it stabs into the soil down to the back of the tines.




This was my experimental weed patch, mixed in with flowers and a few dead veggie things. Looks like a tight mat of grass that is firmly established...but came up easily with one hand and slight tug... a sucking/tearing sound that was quite satisfying!

 

[politicalcenter]

Quote:
That looks great! I guess we will have to go with leaves and pine straw in our garden because wood chips are hard to come by. We got a whole bunch of carrots and they look and taste pretty good. We grew them in rotten hay left from the big round bales we feed the livestock. It turns really nice and black also.

 

[Beekissed]

I went and got a truckload of chips today...these chips are very mulched down, so look like black gold. Distributed those in many places on the land and even a little on the flower bed in front of my son's rental apartment. Going to give him a sweet one million to grow there next to his front porch and will likely plant him some flowers as well.

Was gratified to see the deeper color green leaching out of the areas where I had piled leaves under my apple trees, with grass sprouting where only moss grew before. And those leaves haven't been down long at all, so imagine how well they will be adding to the soil by spring.

 

[jerryse]

Got Salmonberry seed , Formosa raspberry and thimble berry plants recently . I have orders in for rootstocks for pear , apple and plum . Grafting scion wood ordered .

 

[appps]

Well think I solved the mystery of why the fruit fly are so bad in my Veges this year. Was sitting surveying my hard work when I noticed a swarm of something on the nearby compost heap. Went and had a look and it seems I had created fruit fly heaven 10 feet from my tomatoes duh. No wonder they have been so bad, I've been calling every fruit fly in the area with the delicious smell of rotting fruit and Veges. I covered the whole thing with a bag of leaves I had lying around and they moved on but that's not really going to work long term as they weren't even my leaves so can't keep adding more.

I'm thinking I've got two choices, stop throwing food scraps in it and stick to garden waste, or build another one up in the chook run. Anyone compost in the chook run?

 

[politicalcenter]

Well think I solved the mystery of why the fruit fly are so bad in my Veges this year. Was sitting surveying my hard work when I noticed a swarm of something on the nearby compost heap. Went and had a look and it seems I had created fruit fly heaven 10 feet from my tomatoes duh. No wonder they have been so bad, I've been calling every fruit fly in the area with the delicious smell of rotting fruit and Veges. I covered the whole thing with a bag of leaves I had lying around and they moved on but that's not really going to work long term as they weren't even my leaves so can't keep adding more.

I'm thinking I've got two choices, stop throwing food scraps in it and stick to garden waste, or build another one up in the chook run. Anyone compost in the chook run?

Not so much the chook run but I am going to clean out my pig pens and build some more raised beds from that. I tried it last year and I had the best greens in the pig dirt. I have some flowers I want to plant in it just for show. I have some Angel Trumpets ( brugmansia) started and they should do well since they are heavy feeders.