The interesting thing is we are only 75 miles from Paul Gautschi (Founder of the Back to Eden Garden) however, in just that short distance is a very big difference in climate. Where he lives only gets 17" annual rainfall where we get 120-160". With that being said, we have to deal with slugs far more than those in Sequim do and hiding in wood is their favorite place. So wood chips are not the best thing in our area. The other crazy thing is we live in a logging community yet finding wood chips is not as easy as one would think here. SO yes, we all have to find what works best for us! :D
Leaves and cardboard, collect all the leaves you can (no black walnut) if you can mulch them do, and cardboard before fall comes. Pull your ending garden growth, leave in garden, lay down cardboard, put as many leaves as you want on top. The Works will take care of the rest all winter. On our 3rd year we didn't have to till and added only organic manure and humus on top at first snow melt. We are going to plant soon, this is our 4th year and we are direct planting again this year. Becoming wheelchair bound we began building our beds up to 2' high which we are cont. With garden rails added every year. So we know our soil levels increase 3-4"s each yr. We also only water from our rain water off house in barrels, and a spring available to us from a free gravity piping our town set up many, many moons ago.
Yep, I find leaves and grass clippings to be my favorite mulch, plus adding whatever chop and drop herbs I grow like borage, amaranth, dandelion, and more. :)
Did you ever try shredded leaves? I live in the city of Memphis. I called tree services also. They all want $250+ for truckload. And then, you would get who knows what, trash included, mixed with it. We have plenty of leaves to mulch. So I bought a leaf/wood chipper/shredder. In the fall and winter, I collect fallen limbs and bags of leaves to shred. Love. Love. Love.
$250 a truck load!!! HOLY COW!! I have had about 9 or 10 truck loads dumped off within the last two months! The only "trash" I found was a shovel and a Stihl blower! I knew what tree service delivered it so I called them to tell them my find. They were happy.
Tim Carroll, thank you!!!! When you can't get free wood chips, buy a wood chipper and make your own! Amazing idea! What is wrong with all of these people? They can't get FREE wood chips so they bad mouth BTE. It takes at least one year for BTE to be effective. Two years would be better. And weeds? You can not just put down wood chips and stop pulling weeds. I see so many videos of homesteader's gardens and the weeds are out of control because no one works their gardens. Yet they complain the BTE doesn't work for them.
Ya gotta do what ya gotta do. It sounds like you’ve got a good plan. One suggestion I would make is Lavender... lavender body wash, lavender moisturizer, etc. The ticks don’t like it. My job requires me to walk through the weeds a lot, plus I’m trying to create actual soil on a reclaimed strip mine... the place is just one big tick nest. Before I started using lavender, my showers had become little more than just tick finding missions, 2 or 3 a day was becoming the norm. Now, I may get 2 or 3 year. The lovely scent is just a bonus! :) Good luck!
Susie Keeton that is Awesome! I had no idea ticks dislike lavender. I do agree every place and soil is different. Being aware of what you are using is the most important part. Learned something about the black walnut tree also Informational day!
I miss the Ozarks. Yall need to get guineas for those ticks. Now how about those snakes💥sure dont miss those. As for everyone we hafta see what works best. I need a bumper sticker
I don't agree with following a certain type of gardening. I study the ideas and watch many you tube channels. When I plan to plant a particular thing or in a particular spot, I take stock of my resources and decide what is the best solution for the current project.
That's the best thing to do really. Every region in the country/the world is going to have different climates, soil, water, temperature, etc. so following a gardening method that works for someone in, let's say, Northeast Texas most likely isn't going to work for me in Central Oregon
I suggest leaving the straw on the ground, add the manure, then till. It really helps to aerate and amend the Ozarks clay. Best of Luck, 8 generations of Ozark gardening and we always learn new things and have disappointments. I have a friend who always says “I’ve never met a pessimistic gardener.”
@@reedackerman9041 Or you could just do what she said and then a put down cover crop and in two months it has more nitrogen than you know what to do with...
And the ground up pallets? Many of them are treated with chemicals and you don't want that either. Missouri "soil" really isn't "soil" at all. It's rocks with red clay holding it all together. I have yet been successful digging a hole here that didn't require a pick to do it. I straw bale garden because I don't have "dirt" here. However, I also garden on a very small scale as it's just the 2 of us.....15 bales and I'm good. You do what you need to do. It's YOUR family you are growing for! Best of luck with those weeds....they are a chore here.... :)
OZARKMEL really? I've never heard of pallets being treated! I just researched it. That's pretty scary stuff that they fumigate pallets with. I had no idea!
Thank you for being honest about your problems.. I bought a big wood chipper because wood chipping is not a known technique where my permaculture project takes place and I am going to woodchip all the prunings,dry branches, remainings from sunflower,corn crops etc.. bit by bit until I cover at least under the trees... (Central Turkey)If you have enough trees to prune , buying a woodchipper and building up your source might be a solution..Or in the future, when you establish your trees, this might work.. Good luck guys..
Good video. Back to Eden is not for everyone. I am with you since I also have a large garden and live in a rural area. I mulch after I plant with grass clippings. Just till it all in the fall. Works great.
You used wheat straw, which is compost in a few months, pine straw is what you need. Pine straw dose not grow in high country like it does in the low sandy country.I use pine needles/straw around tomatoes & it is still holding weeds down in the early Spring of the next year. Burlap bags last one season, if you are near a coffee processing plant & coffee chaff is better then coffee ground. I use coffee chaff & coffee chaff compost. Peanut hull work well, chipped leaves in the fall, can be good in the spring. There are over 200 plants that will not grow around black walnut family, tomatoes & roses. The woven ground cover is a good bet. Nothing better than Rabbit compost!
You should have put the manure under the cardboard. When you put the straw under the manure, you are temporarily sucking all of the nitrogen out of the manure and the straw decomposes very fast due to all of the nutrients and bacteria in the manure. As the bottom layer of straw decomposes, the nitrogen becomes available again and it helps decompose the remaining straw on top quicker. You want to have as thick a single layer of straw as possible. Another reason for putting the manure down first is that it creates air cavities between the manure and the cardboard, which helps to keep the cardboard from decomposing as fast so it maintains its weed barrier ability. You need at least 2 layers of cardboard everywhere for it to work properly. You want to put the manure, cardboard, and straw down in the fall if possible to give the manure time to decompose, if you are using fresh manure. With the decomposed manure that you are using may be used early spring if it is decomposed enough.
I am dealing with the same issue. No company will deliver chips out to me. We have a lot of ticks too, so that is good to know about the straw. I will let them stay back in the woods haha. Thanks for sharing.
For ticks plant mint. Leave your straw. Add leaves. You can also add gravel as a mulch. Worms love it. You can try straw nail gardening or hugiculture.
Great vid...one suggestion is to try a small plot using town mulch for back to eden, just to see if it will work...also you can rent a large chipper for a day and clean out your woods to make a big pile of chips to supplement...just a couple of ideas to help you keep from putting all your eggs in one basket...keep up the good work!
Plus, when I used wood chips for mulch, they were a haven for cock roaches and ants! Totally grossed me out. I've always preferred dry grass clippings but they are hard to get now and probably have chemicals in them
I tried BTE over and over and it has not worked for me either. I thought maybe it was me but it drew in more bugs and like you, I had tons of weeds. There is no miracle garden except the one that you find that works for you. What I'm finding is praying over my land first, then good ole fashion tilling works best here for me. BTE works for a lot of people so I'm not knocking it. It just doesn't work for some. I will say though, I've laid just plain cardboard and put rabbitamire on top of that and it has worked for me. I just don't use straw or chips. I have hard clay soil and the ground I have worked on is now black and soft. Really great soil now. I do make my own compost and use that too. You just have to find what works. Thanks for the video.
I do wonder if it (the Back to Eden method) does not work is because of the amount or depth of wood chips. Years ago my neighbor told me it takes 6" of mulch to knock out weeds. I will give it a shot and document my findings.
I bag my grass and leaves and put around plants individually. Free resource and works well. You guys will do well what ever yall decide to do . You guys are hard workers and dedicated.
David Crowson we did the same with leaves and grass around our fruit trees, plus rabbit or chicken poop... and we had unbelievable amounts of cherries, apples, pears, figs, grapes, raspberries and more... never used bought fertilizer and watered maybe twice a year when extremely dry, more as a precaution than apparent necessity ... in beautiful British Columbia.
Here in TN with the heavy clay soil, rainfall, humidity seemed to bring insects, slugs, fungus and WEEDS I abandoned Back to Eden/permaculture. As much as I wanted a no till situation, I ended up building 12" raised beds and invested in mushroom compost (bulk) soil amendments like rock dust, worm castings. I use red and black plastic mulch to keep the weeds under control. And this year I'm planning a 12'x12' greenhouse with dutch bucket hydroponics for tomatoes and green peppers, NFT for strawberries and Kratky hydroponic tub/rafts for lettuce and greens. I'll be using the inground raised beds for root crops, beans, peas, corn. Living on a Mtn we get a thick mist that usually burns off around 8-9:a.m. but it's a real challenge with tomatoes and keeping fungus down. So I believe the greenhouse will allow me to control for that and be able to grow 9 months out of the year. Hobby gardening is much easier but when you're objective is self sufficiency, it sure gets tough quick.
Great video and very informative. Ticks are a problem here in SC. I had no idea they like straw. For our daughter's bridal shower, we got straw bails for folks to site since it was an outside event. Then we set up straw bails with horse tack for photo booth which was fun. However, folks were complaining about ticks. We had sprayed the garden just for that event to avoid bugs trying to steal food. But the ticks were a surprise. Now I know it was a bonus that came with the straw. Never, ever again. Thanks for that info.
Hi we found our selves in the same situation when we moved. I looked around for organic material for our very hard clay soil and our serious weed area we wanted the garden. I saw the Lord provided leaves as a ground cover so I used a tarp raked up large amounts from our woods and covered the ground in the garden space. We did yank what we could and dumped them on about a foot deep. not to hard.It worked excellent and as the leaves break down they make beautiful soil. And its free! We used the riding mower to , but those spots didn't last and some weeds can poke thru. Where we put the plants or seeds we dug up those spots and implemented and the leaves up against our plants. Did notice after a very very strong windstorm some of our leaves blown. so we started lightly sprinkled the little woodchips we made which held them down. We have a huge heirloom garden also. We raise guineas for our tick issue, they really do work. And a dog on a zip line at night for the deer and rabbits. :)
It looks like to me that back to eden works really well out west and in the dry areas and areas with poor soil. But here in the eastern part, where we have good soil and plenty of rain, not so much. I have more trouble trying to keep stuff from growing, than growing what I want to grow. We sometimes mow out yard twice a week to keep it tamed and from seeding out. I have mulch in our landscaping. At times it is so wet and humid here, that mushrooms and other funguses grows in it and on it. Bugs like to too. As well as reptiles.
me and my buddy use just a cardboard layer over the whole garden for a weed barrier. It works well and composts into the soil by the next year. I throw straw ontop to make it pretty.It works great.
Hey guys I would till , tarp, and then flame weed. It just seems to work better here . Like they do at never sink farms. As far as compost I run a lawn maintenence co. And have access to grass clippings from yards that are not treated with anything. You might find a local lawn care company that would supply you with clippings from yards that are not treated at no cost. Makes great compost.
I am sorry to hear about your problems but I think I know what your problem might be. You talked about straw and compost but not a top mulch. Top mulch is the most important part of sheet mulching. Straw doesn't make a great mulch because, like you said, it breaks down quickly and tends to sprout (though the weeds it sprouts are pretty easy to pull usally). It does make a good filler though for those reasons (breaking down quickly). You might check with Wright Tree service. They are in my area right now and tend to be in your area too (you are only about 60 miles away from me). They are pretty good about bringing free wood chips (do utility company work). Sounds like you have a decent plan for your new garden. I personally don't like weed fabric and find it doesn't work well for me but hope you have a different experience.
I think you made the right choice for this season. We have 3 acres of land that had been farmed conventionally for years which means the nutrients and organic matter in the soil is pretty much zero. We can't get enough wood chips to cover 3 acres so instead we are growing our own mulch through cover crops and mowing. Perhaps you could use the cover crop method if you had another area that you want a future garden. It takes a few years to build up a good layer of mulch and suppress all the weeds. The Living Web Farms RU-vid channel has some great presentations on using cover crops.
I’m so glad you mentioned about the black walnut wood chips being a natural herbicide. It’s also extremely dangerous to have it around horses, I don’t know about goats. Thanks for saying honestly that just because certain things work for one person, it might not work for all.
Thank you for the video and your explanations for the change in your gardening. I know raised bed gardening helps with a lot of your issues and gives you better control, but if you need a great volume of produce to sell for your income on the farm that is not going to work. I know of many a gardener/farmer that has great success with tilled beds....so, fire-up that 'Troybilt' I saw in the background and 'git'er dun'! Good Harvest, Health and God Bless
Excellent information, y'all are very smart and thoughtful in your decision making! I agree with all you're saying! TY You are quickly becoming my favorite gardening/homesteading channel!
My dad would burn the garden in the fall and then put cardboard down before the first snow. In the spring he would put another layer of cardboard down and plant in holes he had made through the cardboard. He had about 1/3 of an acre in central missiouri (we grow big rocks) and hated to fuss with weeds.
I hear you. I live in Mo. right outside of St. Louis and there is so much heat in the summer. the only thing that I have had success with are peppers. I love your channel because I love the idea of learning through trial and error. Thank-God for my local farmers market.
I think you can still do back to eden principles in a sense. It's ground cover plus no till. Your fabric ground cover checks that box. No till coming after initial till I guess is fine. I don't know why you can't newspaper/cardboard out the weeds/grass to kill that and then ground cover tarp over that so you then check both boxes. Then mulch just feeds it nutrients and provides ground cover. You will have to feed it nutrients with anything organic that can break down regardless presumably. So I still see this as pseudo back to eden capable in a sense.
In Kansas I see the same thing. I mow as low as i can, cover and wait.... then repeat every so often. the chickens have been pretty helpful off season.
Thank you for this. We live in the Vegas valley (have our little urban homestead here) but bought 13 acres of raw land there in MO that we will be moving to in a few weeks. This information is good to know before we get there. 😁
Charity's Urban Farm Hill Just use well rotted manure! Nothing else. It will save you time. While you are at it, Start a worm farm for your kitchen waste processing. That will give you a source of compost as well! Try composting bocashi method as well!
Sam Nikole Sam Nikole Here on our urban farm, we do just that with the rabbit and chicken manure. So I have practice at that. And 2 years ago, I purchased some desert acclimated earth worms and put them in my garden. Once a week I dig a small trench (different locations every week), put my chopped up kitchen scraps in, and bury them for the worms to eat. Now, we have soooo many earth worms in the garden area, you can’t dig without finding several. I will look into that composting method. Thank you for the advice. 😁
Charity's Urban Farm Hill I just fill a carton box with scraps rabbit poo and weeds! Dont need to dig any holes at all. Besides, the poo, weeds and scraps are free.
Quick question- do you guys process wood for heat? Sorry idk bit of a newbie here but if u do youll be PLEASANTLY suprised what's underneath BLACK GOLD in the form of decomposed mulch and bark both have excellent soil benefits just DONT BREATHE the mold or mildew.
OK... do you know the names of the worst weeds you have? That would be helpful. And the 'good' twig/leaf/small branch chips are called 'ramial chips' (as opposed to heartwood/lumber wood chipos, as in pallets ;). Also, was that straw free of the ubiquitous clopyramid (and other '...amid') grass/cereal herbicide residue (it persists for years in the soil)? And I also love that WOVEN weed barrier (aka silt fencing on construction sites) ...(not 'spun' weed barrier, or solid black visqueen).. it is typically UV resistant (doesn't deteriorate in the sun), and leaves soil moist and weed-free when removed.... Amazon has 3.5' x 100' for $15... wish I could find it cheaper :) Many organic gardeners use black plastic for weed control... see Jean-Martin Fortier, Curtis Stone, the Permaculture Orchard, etc.... they couldn't produce without it!! Good Luck : )
This is what i tell the young guys at work. The big buck guys are not getting paid for knowing what to do when things are going smoorh. There getting paid to know what to do when things aren,t working. Ive put 2 foot of wood chips in my area 3 months ago. 25 loads each on my other 2 properties. Ill have a good outcome or big problems. Well LET THE CHIPS FALL WHERE THEY MAY. L.O.L.
you have it good. My wife and I have to raise everything in containers, because we live in fire ant and gopher country. It is challenging when gophers eat your fig trees and tomatoes before they can even root good. what the gophers don't get the fire ants do, not to mention the bugs. THANK GOD we have something to do every day. just maybe you should try hugelkultur . JUST SAYING MAYBE, OR CONTAINER GARDENING
I mulch with as much leaves and cut grass as I can get or make from my own property. Seems to keep the weeds at bay here in zone 3. Cover crops are also a good idea. We do use a little hay also. We have no animals so unfortunately no manure but our gardens seem to do well enough.
You need to spray you garden for ticks! Please everyone hear the gospel message! Jesus is our only hope for freedom and Salvation! Ray Comfort has FREE movies and interviews on RU-vid with the gospel!
Sometimes you also get pests. There is no shortage of wood chips here. The tree companies will even deliver it to your property for free. The last load I accepted was full of fire ants. My neighbors still have several piles to spread. In early May, I watched termites swarm from the piles next door.
I'm soooo disappointed!! I got 6 dump truck loads of the wood chips from the fairgrounds delivered to me for free in Douglas county and I am in Squires. I also live across from the livestock auction yard and got all the manure I wanted. But I had to get that myself. They will load in in your truck. I could have given you the contact info of who would have went to fairgrounds and delivered all you wanted FREE!!!!! I have watched 100's of BTE gardening and thought the purpose of the wood chips is the weed barrier. not the STRAW. Am I confused??? Am I returning to a tick farm?? that's scary! see you in may
I guess the main reason it didn't work for you is you didn't have the materials to make it work. Before being introduced to back to Eden methods, I used sugar cane mulch, (small home garden), there is nowhere that I can go without being bitten by sandflies, and yes grass ticks and paralysis ticks. fortunately, we have a wood chipper and plenty of material to work with. 30 years? no, I watched a grass-covered area turn into a garden of Eden-style garden, and they used it from day one, each year it got better. No fertilizer. and very little water. One thing I have learned on my brother-in-law's farm is, you must use fertilizers that have all the trace elements and as much mulch as you can get. Love your channel, I have subscribed and enjoyed it. Love the canning videos, especially as you follow the proper standards. (started making chutney and water bath can it). May the Lord richly bless your family. From the land down under.
As I see it, one of the main points in KNF is the fact that mulch made from the plants you are growing in a plot (row) are used because they have already absorbed the needed nutrients needed for good growth and by composting this residew (sp?) and covering the same row with it, growing same crop in it your plants do not have to struggle so much to get what they need (hope this makes sense).....I see that a lot of the big stores here in California like to buy produce from framers who practice KNF because the quality of the produce is so much better then chemically raised crops........I like the fact that so much of your food stuff is canned, freeze dryed, stored for future use..thanks for sharing your knowledge on how you do it
the KNF method has many of the methods you used such as covered rows but there are methods added to this that help surpress weeds...MY suggestion...read up on this, inplement in a portion of your garden and grow from there.......just a thought......
Ruth Stout, Ruth Stout, Ruth Stout!!!!!!!!! Straw bales, straw bale gardening !! I live handy to you and have used the afore mentioned methods for a long time. I don't have the problems you talk about . I have started my garden small and then gradually expanded it as the years went by. My straw was NOT 4 inches thick, it was about 2 feet thick applied in the fall and left over winter, then re-applied in the spring right before planting !! BTW, I use everything, except wood chips, that's organic as mulch, throwing it on when ever I can. Being new to the area, i suspect you should have started smaller and then expanded as you saw what was going to work!
Some people just don't get it. The ashes work just as well as the chips, you just have to manage em different. Same with cardboard and straw! Time to think out of the box. Straw is free, if you look!!! Tics? Come on! Weeds are there for a REASON! It tells you your soil needs something! There's more to this than just hitting enter on a computer or going to a 3 day conference. Geoff Lawson seems to be doing it all over the world, with much less budget!
Our dirt has everything a garden could want except it’s missing vegetable material. Clay, sand, silt... But all the vegetation either floated down the Rip Grande or simply blew away. There’s no humus. Eden was NOT in central NM!
Isn't there a re-cycling centre or Tree Surgeon Business where even if they won't deliver you could go and get a truckful of woodchips? Why, Yes Sharon there is lol. But it won't work for you, 64 trips is a lot I didn't realise your truck's bed was so small. However, I'm really interested in your Weed Suppresion Matting Fabric though. Can you tell me what it's called? Thank you.
Problem with Back to Eden seems to be the fact that MOST people seemed to miss the point that was made about tree mulching....great for trees that have been growing, already rooted into the soil..but not good for yearly planted foods because the wood mulch would take the nitrogen needed from the soil...what was overlooked is the fact that the woodchips needed to be composed over a period of time...more then a year, best if 2/3/4 years old. after the wood chips break down then you get to absorb nutrients needed for great planr growth...then in the following season newly composted chips can be added with little to none nitrogen loss.......
Do what seems right for your situation. As successful as you've been with other things on the homestead, I'm sure you will be successful with the gardening too.
Brown and green pieces is just to check what combination is Best in your enviroment :-) and remember different leafs or wood chips can have different chemical thing in side naturally and can helps or stops growing other plants it is Best part of playing with The soil :-) my father in law when I meet him have literally river sand on his Tiny garden after 10 years of planting greens and mixed them with soil after seson of growing turn his sand into Rich Brown-black soil:-)
LOL.... BTE is not 100% woodchips... According to Paul G... Size is not the issue. Any woodchips will do as long as it is old. Chicken manure composted with other plant material should be included.
Why did it all disappear? Your soil was depleted and from the looks of it very hungry soils. Just keep chiseling away and adding. It will take time but since you made this video, I'm sure you understand.
I’m so glad to have found your channel. You guys do a fantastic job thank you. Gardening is so different everywhere you go and doing what works for you and your area is really all you can do. The Market Gardener May have some ideas that could work for you - check MJ out plus he’s a fellow Canadian so I’m proud to recommend his channel to you all.
I used straw once on my lettuce raised bed and got aphids all over my lettuce. Have never used straw mulch since. I've instead been using landscape fabric and covering it with wood chips and punching a a large enough hole when planting. It's been working like a charm because it keeps the soil temperature stable and it also keep the soil constantly moistened. Rarely need to water in-ground and raised beds in southern Maryland.
I suggest you look into cover crops to build soil health and control weeds if you haven't already. I can't seem to post a link to RU-vid lectures by farmer Gabe Brown. Do a RU-vid search for : gabe brown soil health.He seems very knowledgeable and has been farming a long time. Seeds are cheaper to transport in than things requiring large trucks and fuel.
New subscriber here, may I suggest if you have local farms ask them if they have old round bales of hay, the more rotted the better. I unroll them in my garden but I put it on VERY thick 12"-18" has worked the best for me. I get them for free in the summer to use the following year so I do plan ahead, this year I am going to try to get 4 and just let them rot to use next year. I like this better than wood chips, and hardly any weeds grow. Have fun gardening, I really enjoy it.
I think what you are doing is smart and could work. But in your situation there is something else you can do that can save you a lot of money, hard work, and back pain. There is a famous book called "A natural way of farming" by Masanobu Fukoka. He was trained in modern soil science and went back to an ancient mystical Japanese system. His vegetable garden was like a self seeding jungle. He never tilled, he never planted, he never weeded, he never fertilized. But the soil got more and more fertile year after year. He did not have to do anything except walk through it and pick what he wanted to harvest. Years ago I did a research project. I may be the only one who has figured out why his sytem worked. Here is what he did, and it is something you can do. He interplanted quite a bit white and black clover among his vegetables and trees. This fed and encouraged his earthworm population to grow, aeriate, turn over, and fertilize his soil. Worm castings keep soil balanced from a major mineral and trace mineral stand point -- this is not a controversial statement, it has been proven. It is pretty obvious to me, the enzymes in worms facilitate the transmutation of atomic elements. They really do. There are books on this. So what happened. The worms attacked and eat the protazoa in some of the root nodes of the legumes. This stimulates a hormonal repair process in the plant that includes a growth hormone. You get 3 times the biomass and three times the yield of, say, green beans, snow peas, lentils, sweet white lupin, cow pea, or whatever, legume you have, planted. It is worth doing just for the increase in yield. I am the one who figured this out. You have not heard about it because my research got shut down by the fertilizer industry. I have a different situation than you do, and a different solution. I am raising all my food on a small city lot using grow bags on vertical shelving. I sew my own grow bags using landscaping cloth -- they cost about 20 cents apiece when you make your own, not counting the labor. Grow bags "air prune" the roots. This is a big deal. Plants are bigger and healthier and they yield more and better and tastier food with grow bags. I raise worms and put about a dozen in each bag, and I put a piece of landscape cloth on top of the soil to protect them. Worms have very small mouths and no teeth. They tend to eat and use fine grit like chickens. I grow comfrey which is 26% protein and blend it in a vitamix. I pull back the tandscaping cloth, and pour the slurry on the soil and that feeds the worms. They can easily eat it because the particles are so small. So they thrive, and the soil in the grow bag gets fertilized. To give you an idea how well this works, you can grow ten corn stalks per bag and each yields 3 huge, tasty organic quality ears of corn -- that is 30 ears of organic quality corn per grow bag, and the bags are roughly the size of a canvas shopping bag. Hope this helps.
See we have the same problems. We are into our third year of waiting for chips, getting chips/spreading chips, cardboarding...We used American guinea pigs to till. Geese are great for weeding. But it all takes time. Your point though about time and resources is well taken. One other thing...consider a hoop house with irrigation to cope with heat, and try Swiss chard. It is a biannual, so it Will grow and loosen soil. I am currently building chicken /rabbit tunnels to place at garden boundaries. This idea is to suppress weeds at edge from progressing into garden. A little work , so much fun watching chickens travel the tunnels.
Have you tried tarping? I got the idea from Curtis Stone’s book. We are only in our second year on our homestead, but so far this method is working for us. We are battling invasive Bermuda grass in our garden space. It’s not a perfect fix for us but when combined with drip irrigation & not stirring up the the roots of the grass with plowing, the weeds are manageable. We’re still learning as well. We ran into the same issue as y’all with trying to get wood chips to our rural GA location. I appreciate your honesty & adaptability since what works for one area, may not work in another. Keep up the good work!
Back to Eden gardening method is with wood chips not straw. That is probably why you had all the problems you mentioned. We have to not deviate. And yes, we have to get hardwood, non-treated. I can get dump truck of it delivered in our area for about $300. With straw, you will get weeds and grass both from within the straw and because the straw breaks down. They use straw to cover new seeded grass which means it isn't a material fit to kill off grass and weeds.
Thanks for this message! I am starting my own back-to-Eden orchard and garden. Just started receiving my first loads of chips and know that it depends on where the tree crews have work as to where they drop chips, but I go into this with a lot of hope and firm determination to remember NO system is perfect, some seasons will have more failures than successes, but whatever I can manage to glean is a blessing. Good luck, you two - sending you wishes for success.
It looks to me like a lot of folks build up soil and can't continue adding mulch(chips) because they don't have it available and of course now weeds take over..... Why not tarp it or cover with black plastic to kill weeds and still have good soil or time to get more chips?
In the city wood chip from tree contractors is a waste product that costs money to get rid of. In the county, wood chip from tree contractors is a resource one has to buy if one wants it. I have to pay $200 for a truck load of wood chip for my farm. It’s a business expense just like buying any other input for the farm. The wood chip is used to mulch trees in an orchard. The mulch is laid down thickly in a ring around a tree. The mulch suppresses weeds, retains moisture, insulates the soil and breaks down into the soil.
I like your videos I wish you had a date so I could watch your latest video but I guess not. I also do the back to Edan growing but or we have a company that has 100 percent organic mulch so we not only use that but chicken manure and coffee grounds. We don't have the largest garden but we have a very healthy and organic garden.
Your method is good. Missouri is an agricultural area so you should have lots of hay and straw available. As for the ticks, get some pea hens. They will eat every tick you can find and fertilize the garden to boot. Ducks will also do a good job.
What you will have to do is design your own compost program. I haven’t checked prices but hay has to be the way to go unless you can figure away to haul straw from Illinois. I see a lot of cardboard that doesn’t seem to move around stores. That may figure in.
Maine has the highest rate of Lyme disease due to being a great habitat for deer. Just keep up with a good supply of those little tick pullers I had about 20 ticks after mowing one day! But things have got better by keeping the grass cut. The little buggers will fall onto you from brushing waving grass and weeds.
After you put the fabric down add cardboard before your other layers to help with killing out weeds, from hard to kill weeds. We hated straw or grass. We only found later that you could use the straw and manure composted. Buy old round bails that the farmer can't use anymore. So that takes 1-2 years to make from cold compost. You can keep doing that to the side for a couple years till you can use then it's a deep dark composted soil. Keep it far away. Get chickens to keep ticks if you can.
The cost of straw and manure is why i grow alot of green manure. It doesn't cost much to buy a 50 pound bag of whole oats and a few bags of lentles. Or any other grain and legume combination.
All you revealed was that you do not have easy, free access to already chipped and shredded materials. For the one time investment into a chainsaw and a chipper/shredder, you can grow, harvest, and process all the material you could ever need. You will save time in the end, but the science needs to make sense to you, because that is the evidence of the thing not seen. I saw a ton of trees in the background. I assume there are many on your very one property. And, you can plant more to harvest for future needs. You see, you did not say that Garden of Eden farming is not for you. All you demonstrated was that your cardboard and straw method is not for you, and only because you did not ask God where you can get all the woodchips you would ever need for less of an investment than you will make tilling the weeds out every year.
I have an idea for you, collect all of your branches and limbs that you can off of your property and close to you along the sides of the roads if you can. As well as having your neighbor who works for the highway people, who you said they take and burn most of what they cut down and don't ship, ask him to bring them home to you dump them in your yard, and then one nice weekend rent a chipper and chip chip chip all of that material that you have collected over a. Of time.
I have the same problem here in Minnesota and we have lots of trees. I only once was able to get a truckload of chips when someone was cutting in the neighborhood and i literally had to stop them at a break and ask them for their chips. I have called people and businesses and the city...no luck. Around here they sell their chips to a company who then packages it and turns around and sells it. I did score like a dozen bags for like 2$ a bag from that company but not really enough to do the back to eden gardening. So we go forward like you all and put down leaves and straw.
That’s sad! What about your trees? You have a lot of trees in your property. You chop off trees to clear some areas anyway so why not use them as in hugeculture! don’t take any school of teaching strictly! Do what you can with what you have!
Another reason that you didn't mention for not using the free wood chips in town is that if they include pallet wood, I have heard truckers say that you never know what kind of toxic chemicals have been spilled on them and many of the pallets come from Asia and may contain invasive species of insects like Formosan termites.
Do you think only going with 4" of straw was the first issue and are you sure it was straw and not hay? Hay has lots of weeds seeds compared to straw usually. What you were doing is the Ruth Stout gardening method and I believe that the minimum is about 6" of cover with (straw or hay). For a large garden, that can get expensive quick so probably not what you want to do long term.
welcome to the Ozarks. what i found was to put down 3 mil black plastic to kill the weeds. then line the walkways after removing the plastic from your rows. also try raised beds filled with compost. i had good results with herbs in raised beds but still had to pull weeds. You may also find a local small sawmill where you can get sawdust from oaks.you will need to dig down in the pile but the sawdust will be well on the way to becoming good compost material
Great thoughts! We have to till our garden also. Hopefully in the future we can do more of the back to Eden type gardening. We have to do what works best for our individual circumstances.
The reason of it takes too much time and money to get them your selves isn't a good reason. But being a bad wood that is understandable. I got a truck 1985 ford gas is not cheap. I am getting 1 or two trips a week. But I agree you do have to do to get the job done. At the end of the day the most important thing is getting good food inside oneself.
Thanks for sharing your struggles and ideas. Living in rural Missouri does present some unique challenges. Even though I knew not to plant near black walnut trees, it never crossed my mind about how much would be in the mulch. I’m sure you’ve saved many of us a great deal of frustration.
OMGosh, I'm in Middle TN and I feel like I'm listening to my own story as I did back to eden in my garden last year. I also did the whole cardboard, hay, mulch...it broke down and I now too have a ton of weeds that I can't even keep up with! Next season, I will definitely be using the black weed barrier to help control this problem.
