I know you're getting grief from lots of permaculture enthusiasts for mentioning the weed reputation of dandelions BUT I really appreciated the dual perspectives you mention in this video. In my front yard I plan to wood chip the whole thing (already 1/2 done) but it is my front yard and we do have an HOA (though less-psycho-than-most) and curb appeal does matter both to my neighbors (two of whom will be selling within the next few years) and to me in this case. Unlike you we only have 1/4 acre properties, so much more of that front-yard-as-showpiece vibe. The woodchips I have down already mostly I didn't do cardboard underneath but I plan to do cardboard underneath for the rest since I'd like to have the grass die underneath. The idea of seeding the woodchips with clover seed all over or just on the rows for walking sounds interesting to me but only if it's a naturally low enough variety so no mowing needed ever. Aside from obvious soil building benefits, that was part of the selling point of getting rid of a lawn was no more mowing, plus a lot of it is sloped so mowing would not be easy anyway. I can investigate myself but are you aware of a lower growing clover maybe 8" max so it's that compromise between my tree-hugger side and the social necessities?

Finally a Canadian permaculture !

Greetings from Nova Scotia! Early last summer I totally abandoned mowing the grass in my country garden and it seemed almost instantly I had bees and ladybugs everywhere and right up until it snowed I had bees working what I once thought were useless weeds. The immediate result was far more berries and far less troublesome insects doing damage. I read somewhere that we must choose between mowed lawns and bees because grass has nothing to offer bees but starvation!

06:00 “You see nothing but green” Blue barrel: Am I a joke to you?

Hello from Abbotsford, B.C. as Joel Salatin say's, "The land doesn't like to be naked".

A lot of those plants look like fall blooming goldenrods that will bloom later. I love your philosophy and your garden is a beautiful nature's chaos! I live in the US desert Southwest and love all the wild grasses that grow here, some of the exotics like Johnsongrass, I pull but let most of the natives grow. I am impressed with your clover and strawberries and stream. Here, our average rainfall is 8 inches which means some years we get less and some years more but maby most in one huge summer monsoon which runs off quickly. Please keep the videos coming.

This video is great for OCD gardeners, learning to work with the Lord's perfect design and stop working against it with our own idea of perfection. Thank you.

"Stuff like this" at 7:12 looks like narrow plantain. It's usually considered a weed but I love it! It's edible (bitter) and a nutrient accumulator. You can use it to chop and drop. I feed it to my rabbits when I harvest hay - they love it. I use young leaves chopped up in salads for myself. The seeds from plantain are a super food like chia seeds and I snack on them when working in the garden. I made a salve out of the leaves for the first time this year using an oil immersion and it's worked well against insect bites including mosquitos. Maybe everyone knows this already but it was a revelation for me when I realized two years ago that so many of the weeds in my garden were beautiful gifts. I hope this is useful to someone.

1:36 “Untidiness is good natural order, tidiness is maintained disorder” Bill Mollison

I looked after my lawn for 20 years, beautiful tough grass. Now I am digging it up for a rather mixed up veggie garden. No dig will not work with this grass. I cover the dug up area with cardboard and put grow tubes 1 cm above the cardboard and plant my veggies inside the tubes. I only water inside the grow tubes as Cape Town South Africa almost ran dry 2 years ago. This will be a new way to grow veggies in dry places.

By watching your channel it is coming to a point that I don’t hate weeds anymore but I am putting either veggies or flowers on every space in my garden. I jammed veggies until there’s no spot for weeds to grow and i am loving the outcome of it. Thanks

Chop and drop is natures favorite way to fertilize the surface area. (Dropped leaves, failed seedlings, trampled herbs...) When we chop and drop around the plants we want to thrive, we become nature.

I really enjoyed this. My husband and I are starting to regenerate a property in BC. I am studying permaculture design. Your place looks great!

My wife and I were fortunate enough to have started a permaculture on our property in Mississippi and we have moved five years later to Massachusetts and get to start all over. Sadly we left a lot of hard work and productive plants and trees behind, all of them actually. But we learned a lot and we get to put it into action without making many of the mistakes we made in the previous five years

Good lessons here, as always. I told my husband that grass is for livestock, and since we don't have any, we don't need. it. I don't think he's buying it yet. LOL Our yard naturally went to cover without us having to seed it. I love it! Like you said, the bees love, it and it takes tons of abuse from walking, kids and dog playing, wheelbarrows, etc.

So many universal lessons in this, even for a bloke from semi-arid/subtropical Australia. Thank you! Subscribed!

This video is Pure wisdom. Nature abhors a vacuum!

Permaculture is what I've been working towards before I knew what it was. Now that I know I work towards it daily. Thank you for your informative videos :)

Totally agree with your goals. Key understanding that helps achieve this is that there is always limiting factors. Identifying the limiting factors that are easiest or cheapest to address at any moment of intervention will make you a master gardener. Could be water, boron, genetics or a million other things.

I've noticed the same thing about the lack of flowers in spring but realized that I'm not seeing the small flowers like clover and dandilions.

Something to consider: poison ivy loves calcium deficient soil. Dandelions love compacted soils. A system called Read Your (the?) Weeds may benefit your gardens.

Herbicides was never a problem for us. My dad said as far back as we can remember we use horse manure from mennonite farms or local farms we know have a well, that way we know for sure the manure will be aged, dry and pesticide free.

I'm in Florida, and your info seems to be universal. Thank you for sharing your knowledge

You got another subscriber from nothern part of 🇵🇹 Portugal....I just signed a contract to buy 5.8km2 of field used to grow only corn and wine grapes. I have a natural source of water to include small rivers and lakes to do aquaculture and also as a healing ponds for sick fishes I find in poluted rivers and hopefully recover almost extinct species of fresh water fishes , arthopods and clams. Can't wait to start it

Another very helpful video! I always pick up some ideas, even though I live in a very different environment, in the high desert of southern California. I like this version of that saying: “The best fertilizer is the gardener’s own shadow.” 😊

Everything can be a resource. Dandylions for animals like meat rabbits, ducks or chickens. Trimmings from mulberry, apples, pears could be a chop and drop mulch, feed for rabbits or can be dried to use as a tree hay in winter. So many options!

Man! The time, money, and effort you just saved me!

Look up tapestry lawn for your walk paths. Is usually made up of low growing flowering drought tolerant herbaceous grass and plants. Mine as a ground cover has clover and thyme that are low to no maintenance. Then next year when iRobot comes out with Terra robot lawn mover, my food forest will be wild in the beds and tidy in the pathways. Yes. Here in South Florida rainy summer and hurricane season is beginning so everything is growing wild and I’m way too busy to mow. Luckily my front yard the screen off from the street by permaculture food forest hedges.

This was quite helpful as I’m just starting my food forest and thought of mulching my walking paths with wood chips. After what I just learned from you I won’t do that anymore and instead will spend my money on more plants. 😊 Thank you!

That flower gap you mention is why i don't stay on top of chopping all my comfrey. Its flowers are hugely popular with bumblebees and such this time of year. So, maybe leave some of your comfrey to flower? Forgot to add that I appreciate you sharing your experience with the wood chip paths as I was contemplating going that route in certain areas of our garden.

I've had grass fields and grass paths for decades now. I won't cut it till I've harvested my Dandelions in mid spring, then I only cut it 2 or 3 times a year, but in sections so I can save and transplant plants that are welcome as they pop up, I put them on the edge of paths and they never get cut again. You mentioned strangling vines, I'm plagued with them, they grow so fast and like you said there's nothing worse than walking in tall growth and running into poison ivy or even a thick nettle patch on my journeys to rid the trees of this vine. Anyways nice place you got there. It's good to see young folk engaged in this, I was young as you when I started and going on 45 years of this type of living in a small town and my kids show no interest in any of it and I'm getting too old to maintain it much longer. It will just be left to run wild when the time comes to hang up my rake and shovel. Cheers.

Apparently the deworming medications given to horses can cause problems in garden soil; they can kill the nematodes, which messes up the soil ecology and not much will grow, as you mention at about 15:00. I'm told the manure should compost until all your local weeds start growing on the pile before it's "safe" to put into the garden. Haven't tested this out personally, though.

For the last couple of years, I have been planting huckleberries (mostly _Vaccinium ovatum,_ but a couple of _V. membranaceum,_ as well) in the bare ground under a small grove of _Thuja plicata._ I had added a layer of wood chips beneath the trees that seemed to perk up the red cedar. The huckleberries seem to be thriving, so I keep adding more and more. This spring, I planted three Aquilegia on the eastern edge of the bare patch. They seem to be very happy. I'm on the northernmost edge of the Olympic Peninsula in western Washington State, USA - right across the Strait from Victoria, BC.

I keep trying to get white clover going in my woodchipped paths but it's a struggle with dogs plus kids. Nothing grows in them bc of foot traffic. I love that you've gotten yours to establish so well :) appreciate your perspective and experience. Cool to see the progress.

Thank you! I'm starting a permaculture garden, lesson learned!

A weed by one definition I've heard is any plant growing someplace you don't want it to. Once I found out that dandelions were not the enemy my life has become easier.

Good video :) it is nice to see a transition from the city person to a nature lover. This kind of stuff 7.12 is a medicinal plant - Plantago lanceolata and the next you pull 9.00 is some kind of violets (in Poland bloom much earlier than any flowers) not sure the exact variety, but the ones I have are all edible - flowers and leaves. Both plants very beneficial for the insects, let your paths be more than one species, clover is great, but monoculture of it is worse than letting it be mixed with other plants. I would say know your weeds - most of them are beneficial. Great job!

Cheers, CPL! 🍻 I love your approach, and appreciate the contribution you and your family are making to the Canadian permaculture movement / community. Keep up the excellent work! 😉👍

After many very short-staffed & tough yrs on our family farm, by the time I met my now-husband, we had small ( up to at least 3 feet tall !) trees & weeds growing on the top of some of our chopper boxes ( metal box on wheels, open to the front, for transporting & unloading chopped hay ( haylage ) ) ... growing in a few inches of old chaff & what-not, on top of the roof. I don't know that anyone ever did do anything about them...

I learnt a lot from this video! Thanks. ..C Heers from Australia!!🙂

A lot of this is based on the context of your growing location. For example, I've been growing a large permaculture garden for 8 years in Northern California. I used to do clover paths but now do sheet mulch with wood chips and the effect is much nicer. In the hot Mediterranean climate of Northern California the clover paths in the sun die unless they are irrigated but the wood chips provide a huge boost of moisture retention for the soil beneath. The wood chip path also stays nice and clear a lot longer than I'd assume would be in the case in a cooler wetter climate. I used to leave my garden very wild. Over time though It has become much tidier due to replacing certain weeds such as betmuda grasses with plants which are actually beneficial and beautiful in the landscape. I love the wildness of these permaculture gardens left to nature. But I've also come to understand that everything is contextual with creating an abundant ecosystem. What is good here may not be good there. It really comes down to understanding your unique location and the best way to make it as abundant and diverse as possible. Which really just comes with experience. Love your thoughtdulcontent and your videos! Thanks for sharing.

Glad I found your channel. Just starting my first year in the permaculture world! Zone 3 Saskatchewan!

Thank you for the words of wisdom!

Thank you for these helpful videos! I'm saving to buy some land to do this. Already started planning I can't wait. Just hope I can find something affordable with these insane prices

Thanks for sharing your truth and experience. I can relate.

Good job guys 👍

Thank you, I've learned so so much of which I will now change and implement.

I pair columbine with bee balm... Both make good tea and both spread without help... Columbine blooms june through july, and and bee balm july through August.

Thank you for sharing extremely useful & comprehensive info. Cheers from Australia & subscribed

Great video. Looking good. Very sound advice. Love what yr doing there. Cheers from Melbourne, Australia ; )

Great job. Very nice video.

But.. wild dandelion fields look absolutely amazing! (also, dandelion wine!)

Dandelions are NOT ugly!! They are such a good medicine in addition to all the foods you listed. Just saying !! Sara Alabama Herbal Permaculturist

I live on a city plot in Wash. State and haven't the space for much but have been adding more and more native plants to my yard the last few years cause I feed the birds. Mostly berry bushes, but for flowers I like to plant Echinacea for the seeds for the birds. And of course lots of other plants. I've watched Garden Answer from eastern Oregon for quite some time and they have a very beautiful place, BUT, I so prefer yours! Give me the natural any day! Love your videos, thanks for sharing!

Great video thank you !! I spent the whole day yesterday pulling out grass roots by hand lol. You've just convinced me to carry on mulching it and stop pulling it ! Much love from South Africa :)

Excellent

Alliums for late Spring early Summer! Thank you for this, I am a newbie. I have subscribed

Flowering in June here in central europe-> green manure plants : Lupinus polyphyllus, Phacelia ssp. , "Mustard " Sinapis alba

ah yes the flower gap. here its very dependent on the kind of spring we have, late or hot spring means everything rushes to bloom and then nothing, cooler or late spring and their isn't a gap. i don't shun annuals that continuously bloom for this reason. iris are currently blooming on the edge of the pond (just about done though), and as someone else has mentioned, comfrey is blooming as well right now.

Stefan sobkowiak told a very beautiful thing that every weed is an indicator of soil health for example if a deep taproot or a strong hold root having weed is planted in a area that means that soil needs air inside it .

Lovely green!

Put comfry plant underneath trees for chop and drop

My takeaway: don't fight it since you are doomed in the end.

I recently discovered your channel and am thoroughly enjoying your informative videos, thank you. I was struck by the sounds of insects in this one - didn't need to see them to know they're there. We have so many stinkbugs which sting our tomatoes and wreak general havoc, but am trying to be patient and trust that the predators will eventually come. I applaud seeing any wasps these days!

If I were looking for bee forage at the end of the daffodil season I'd look at the trees. Maple flowers aren't showy, but are good nectar producers. Looking at the landscape from the bees perspective really changes what you value. Pussy willow is the earliest pollen source, so swampy ground is good. Sumac produces nectar at about the #100 honey/acre rate. Red maple has long nectar season and is generous. Sugar maple is the least value maple. The timber value of a tree is usually a small fraction of its bee forage value (or grazing value), so if you like trees but have to justify the carrying costs...

Just found your channel in my feed, love learning about Permaculture 😃👍🏼...subbed

Wise words

I’d like to have year round flowers one day. Right now I have bees loving the California lilac, walker’s low catmint, English thyme, lavender, sage, roses, thornless blackberries. Sadly, my attempt at early spring flowers, flowering red currant, seems to have died. Zone 8b.

Beautiful

Definitely like your view of combining both the landscape aesthetics and practices of Permaculture in your Yard! Whenever I encounter people who oppose permaculture, it’s usually based purely on aesthetics... I believe to increase adoption of Permaculture based yards, a more prevalent focus on aesthetics needs to be implemented to break people out of their archaic view of what a yard should be! Canadian Permaculture Legacy - please watch my permaculture interview video with Rob Avis when you have time, and maybe you’d like to have a discussion with me regarding the aesthetics of the permaculture garden?

Thanks for your knowledge.....you’ve been an inspiration for our piece of land, I intend on doing something similar as what you’ve done to your pond and falls to mine ... as soon as I can find the massive rocks you have that makes yours look like you found a natural oasis .....any suggestions to where I might be able to start looking.... keep pushing !!! You’re doing it!

So glad you talked about your "walking paths!" I was just thinking of planting clover (currently just wood chips) in all of my paths. Now I will ;) Opps stepped on a bee! ha ha ha well memories of a bi gone era :) How did you plant the clover? Did you just broadcast it?

Self heal/prunella vulgaris is a useful flowing pathway plant :)

good video

I like organization, but maybe I can move to organized chaos. Thanks for sharing.

Some rosa rugosa would flower in that late spring early Sumner window. Then they produce hips in the fall

Nice video. The lovage looks a lot more like wild valerian than lovage. It should smell like valerian, too!

The front yard of our urban home has started to look a lot like your grown in walking paths and it's not because of permaculture. For a number of reasons, we've had to bring heavy equipment into our back yard and the only access we have is by driving over our frontage. We're also blessed with heavy clay soil so couple that with our recent extremely dry summers and you can imagine what's growing out there. The best I can say is it's mowed and mostly green, at least in the spring. I'm beginning to suspect, that in order to replace our lawn with any kind of ground covers, I'm going to have to dig in a whole lot of soil amendments, which in turn means removing a lot of the "soil" we have in order to make room for it. (we can't afford to add any height to our soil level because our 1920's house is already low in comparison) Any suggestions on what kind of ground cover could be used in clay soils? I refuse to waste water on something as unnecessary as a grass lawn.

Nature know what she have to do... 😉🌱

Hope you share what early summer blooms you end up adding!

Are you sure that "lovage" near the beginning (at ~2:50) isn't Valerian? With it just starting to flower, the scent would have been a big tip-off. Leaf shape is different too.

Excellent videos! I've watched 2 from the last 6 months and am now subscribed. I noticed that you haven't mentioned irrigation. Do you irrigate? If so, how? Thanks!

Nice work! Hellow from Russia )

Thanks, great video. That's a beautiful place. Good lesson on cramming plants everywhere. One suggestion: the shakiness of the camera while you were moving around I found rather unpleasant. I would recommend a gimbal or tripod. But besides that it was great thanks

Some Scott's Turf Builder salesmen don't like this video.

I'm wondering about the wood chip paths as a method for soil building. I saw a video where someone dug deep trenches for their paths and then backfilled with wood chips and greens in layers, and over time that created incredibly nutrient rich soil in the area that holds more water than any soil around it and acts as a reservoir in a somewhat dry climate. Do you still think that green paths have an advantage on this approach? The video in question is called Hugel Swale Paths with Matthew Trumm--Regenerative Soil. I'd really love your input on this as I've been considering doing this in my Mediterranean climate where we need all the water we can get during dry months

Thanks! I really enjoy your content as im from shuswap bc... its nice to see canadian forest gardens. Im planning my food forest, wondering if you seed for clover on existing walking paths, does it grow through constant traffic??

Ooh bermuda grass! In NZ, it is called either couch or twitch but either way its hideous. My section of land was a paddock for stock, so its filled with clover (great) and bermuda grass (not so great). I'm using sheet mulches and also using clover and reseeding annuals (eg nasturtium, phalacia) as a ground cover. I doubt that will be enough to stop the grass coming back though. I see you are weeding it. What are your recommendations for dealing with it? Thanks, from NZ.

I try to fill in before the sheep's sorel take over the place but man this plant is hard to control and I think it strangle to death everything in it's path, even raspberry. I have put a thick wood chip mat on top and it is beginning to coming out of it. I don't care for a lot of "weeds". But this one, it is insane.

Thank you for all your vids and info! I find them extremely helpful. I’ve started my own food forest last year and have used wood chips as my mulch. Much like yourself I have lots of weeds popping up and I was planning on layering cardboard then more chips. However, after seeing this vid, a cover crop is starting to look more ideal. How did you sow in the clover? did you just broad cast the seeds or did you have to pull back the chips? I have a lot of chips and new born twins so I don’t think that would be possible to do lol Cheers man and thanks again for these vids!

You build a path and Nature will compost in or under it. You can give up on the path, use foot traffic to keep the path open, or you can rebuild the path at intervals. (re-)Building a wood chip path should start with raking up the organic matter first. Treat your paths like a flat compost heap - remove the finished material before adding more. If you have the means, sift your new chips to remove some of the ramial wood, which wants to break down first.

woof "Super Dad!" got that right!

Nature uses fire 🔥too, so a flame thrower used on poisonous plants would probably be within permaculture bounds 🤷🏻‍♀️ The “weed” flowers fill in those gaps for your pollinators it seems. Thanks for sharing your learning curve. I enjoy David The Goods approach and his is more like natures too, and in a subtropical climate it requires a lot of work or a monoculture to keep things “perfect” to human eyes. TY again.

I have no idea about permaculture, but I think it is great that you started out differently and did f.e. build those gravel pathways. You said it yourself, it provides awesome habitat for the ruderal plants, I would not call this the mistake you present it to be. One has to remember that every area left alone will turn to forest and go through different stages to get there, but biodiversity naturally declines as some few plants get very successful. Personally I would consider my role in the garden as a regulative force that keeps biodiversity up by limiting some very successful plants and by creating/maintaining conditions for plants that would not be there anymore had I left the area alone. You did just that with your gravel pathway. I have a tiny ornamental garden and can only dream of a property you are showing. I think ornamental and ecologically sound and biodiverse can go very nicely hand in hand with food production- but I lack the opportunity to try. In my little ornamental garden I actually will remove topsoil (needed somewhere else) and put gravel on a patch in full sun next year- because I want the very pretty bloom of ruderals. I am jealous of every neglected gravelly stripe beside the road for its beauty and diversity, my top soil is too humus-y and nutrient-rich to pull it off, the species don`t like it here. If I had more space I would constantly remove biomass from some areas to not have it go to humus there to keep habitat maintained- compost that- and give that to veggies elsewhere. Like, while maintaining habitat for different stages of the process of going to forest, I would "harvest" biomass to compost to feed veggies that feed me. Right now, in the absence of more space for veggies, I have far too much compost than my garden ever needs. P.S. we live in different climates, but here Borago officinales, Verbascum and the ruderal Papaver rhoeas have been generating the most pollinator traffic the last couple of weeks, Lavender just opened , Echium is coming up and Allium sphaerocephalon is about to open, too. My oregano is working on the end stage of flowers, and when those open they will be densely covered with bees.

About 3:00 - I don't think that's lovage - leaves should definitely look parsley-like (just bigger).

great info thank you..clover any others

I am convinced I can do this and hope to buy a piece of land in Portugal . There is a hell of a lot of work to be done on the site but I think it will work out good Where could I sign up for courses , I am living in Germany as the moment

I have my off-grid property in the south of Portugal (Alentejo) , were the temperature reaches 47c on the summer (the well dryed on the spring) and in the winter around 1 or 2C with occasionally some frost. Now the question is, if I stop to use mulch paths and leave it to grow wild is it not gonna deplet more the water table?

What kind of plants do you use on the edges of your newly mulched and planted area to keep the root growing grasses from creeping in at the sides. Iam thinking Jerusalem artichoke, comfrey? More ideas?

Did you just throw the clover seeds directly over the mulch? I purchased some clover seeds in some areas that I put down mulch, I was planning on shoveling out the mulch. If I could seed the clover without so much labor, that would be great!