Have you considered doing the Back to Eden or wood chips method? If you have, what's your experience been like?

Hi Melissa - a few tips from someone who’s been chipping for several years... 1) try getting a load or two with coarser chip material to use in your paths or higher traffic areas, orchards, perennial beds, etc - the coarse material holds up for at least a few years and will reduce the area you need to remulch each year. Also consider making the depth of your path mulch deeper - added years between mulching, plus you build up some really scrumptious compost in the paths over time with zero work. 2) mix soil amendments (other than compost or worm cast) into the chips as you spread them (i.e. bone meal, blood meal, rock dust, bio char, etc). The rain and your more vigorous worm population will move them into the underlying soil over time, almost like compost tea. 3) for compost, worm cast, or other similar heavier amendments, I layer that very thinly on top of my chips in the fall, and let it have all winter to work its way down through the chips and into the underlying ground. Be sure you can still see the chips through the “dusting” of compost in order to avoid caking.

Just a warning for anyone living in an area with deer ticks - I used this method in my garden about 15 years ago. I discovered that wood chips are an ideal environment for ticks and every time I worked in the garden I was finding them on myself. Unfortunately, I didn't find them all and contracted Lyme disease. I am still suffering the effects of that decision with ongoing Lyme complications (yes, 15 years later).

I used to work for an arborist. We were always looking for places to dump our mulch for free. If you want free mulch, just contact your local tree care service. If they are like we were, they will be happy to drop mulch off for free. All you would have to do is move it to where you need. We were a small 2-man team and we still had 1-2 truckloads per week that we needed to get rid of.

You don't know how LONG it took to convince my mother to mulch, lol. Her poor garden looked like a cracked desert. Then she tried it...on one teeny little patch...and was shocked that the soil beneath stayed dark and moist. She's a mulcher now!

Once the garden is done for the season, I pen the chickens in and leave them all Winter. They eat the leftover vegetables and any weeds that come in the Spring. They keep it scratched up and turned over while they also leave lots of fertilizer! About 30 days before the last frost, I move them back to their yard, then till everything in and cover with the wood chips and grass clippings. This gives the chicken poop time to break down and the soil stays loose and rich!

5+ years of back to eden and hugekultur, I'm sold for life. It takes a bit of learning but it totally is worth the effort.

Thanks for keeping the video under a half-hour, unlike others who ramble on forever. Lots of useful information, and a nice spread of land you have.

well, I''m glad you and your husband are teaming up to do this. Awesome!

One of the reasons for covering bare soil is to block UV light from hitting the exposed soil. This will normally kill the micro organisms that are a key element in the food chain of healthy soil.

This year I started putting grass clippings on my garden. I haven’t pulled any weeds. I simply cover the weed with grass and it’s gone. My garden is rockin too! It’s producing way more than ever.

I’m so glad you talked about the weeding getting away from you. VERY encouraging, thanks!

We mulch our leaves in the fall and put them on the garden. We put mushroom soil on in the spring and rototill it in before planting. My parents have had big crops of string beans in the past.

Paul would be glad to hear this😊🌱

Good for you for going just a section to see f it worked! Glad your experiment worked.

You did a heck of a lot of work! Thanks for sharing the results with us.

We're in Upstate South Carolina so when I first saw the Back to Eden system I was impressed but wary. Paul gets a lot less rain and humidity where he is than we do here. So, we tried it in small areas and had very nice potatoes and tomatoes for the roly polies to consume. They used the wood chips as their headquarters, but that growing area did not receive hot sun all day long. The other area did, and I as a lifelong gardener was amazed! Peppers, tomatoes, husk cherries, flowers just thrived in that environment. I'm for the system where I am, but in the right spot. It also helped us, I believe, that I found a source of wood chips that were already half rotted.

Hey, you. I've used your technique for drying (moringa leaves) in a paper bag. I love my new dried superfood.

This is amazing. I just got a brand new 20 × 10 × 17 high tunnel and was trying to figure out how i was going to make the beds ... thanks for the tips 😀

I live in a drier climate. I put wood chips down last November to break down over the winter. One of the things that I noticed come spring time was the insane amount of earthworms in the soil. Each shovel of dirt when planting the tomatoes revealed about a dozen assorted-sized worms.

I have used wood chips (green rough chopped from tree trimming service) on my garden. The key to using them is applying compost on top of the wood chips and not to mix the wood chips with the soil itself. The transformation of the soil is amazing after three years from application. It has become a no till layered application of leaves, mowed grass and Fall application from compost pile. I am definitely adding more nutrients to the soil every year than the vegetables use. I have also gained 2 inches in height on the raised beds within the garden.

Wood chips, lawn clippings work great. After we till and plant seedlings we cover the entire garden with last falls leaves up to 6 inches. Really holds moisture and adds organic matter

My wife and I have found that plenty of wood chips with the addition of dried, fall leaves draws earth worms in abundance. We've salvaged clay soil with this method, and our garden grows prolific produce; all organic and without pesticides of any kind.

love the delivery, no ums or erms just information in a clear and precise way

Thank you, Melissa!

Only my 5th random video created by you and I'm already in love! I'm so excited my husband splurged on wood chipper last year for his buisness! We have 10 acres of trees 😝😉

I live in the Gio Grande Valley north of Albuquerque and we have Caliche clay that a pick axe will bounce off of... covered 2 quarter acres with 2 feet of wood chips and waited 3 years, it's broken down to 6"s and with rich black soil with earth worms glore! 1 lot is now fruit trees and the other is our veggie garden! Back to Eden is God's blessing for us!

Wow... I don't feel this way very often, but kinda jealous of how GOOD and HEALTHY your garden looks!

Thank you melissa thats wonderful

I've always wood chipped my gardens. I also do a lot of pot gardening. There are more weeds in the pots than in the chipped areas of my gardens. As for compost, I use chicken wire silos throughout, about 3 feet tall. All vegetable and weed compost goes into those and over time, falls out the bottom as rich soil. That way I don't have to work with the compost, it does the work by itself.

I have used rice haybales in my garden to grow directly in and I use it for my walkways. Adding the hay on the walkways is great, as it holds the weeds a bay and keeps it from getting muddy when watering. Then at the end of the season it just breaks down into the soil. Win. Thank you for your videos. I have learned a lot from you.

I have used wood chips for years. All though I would till them in. Every other year I would put ships and manure. This method really builds the soil. It keeps the soil loose. (I'm from Minnesota)

Great video and information, thanks! I discovered and have been using the fallen leaves from my trees from each fall / winter season for the same purpose in my garden space. I have realized many of the same results too, less watering, holds moisture, repels weeds from growing, and then also I mulch it all back into the soil in each spring tilling before re-planting.

We live in south Texas and our 2 acres has a lot of oak trees, therefore we have a lot of oak leaves every fall. My husband runs over them once with the mower and then puts on the leaf bagger and picks them up. We use these for mulch for the garden and flower beds but I have to say there is a lot of weed seeds that find there way into the garden if I don’t keep the leaves coming.

I enjoyed watching your experiment Melissa. Been gardening in NE France for 45 years - no woodchips easily available here, but plenty of leaves in fall. I keep the soil covered at all times and have very little weeding to do plus it cuts down on the watering in these hot, dry times (>90° for a month, very little rain). I'm very vigilant about not letting weeds go to seed - that helps cut down on the weeding too. Good gardening!

Glad to hear you liked the cardboard/wood chip method. We get wood chips for free through a local tree service, which we love... and our soil is really in need of help... Thanks for all of the tips on amending soil before this video as well!

Oh how I hate weeding!!! I keep hearing about using woodchips to help with weeds. We will definitely try it this year! Thanks for sharing 😁

I've used the back to Eden method for a number of years and it works perfectly. Be sure to add compost each fall to winter and then add fresh woodchips in the spring. Be sure to include leaves in your wood chips which will also add nitrogen.

Regarding some comments below about tilling. No reason to till things. The idea is that to amend the soil, you add the material to the top of the wood chips. Rain and snow will cause it to filter down through the chips. Lot's of interviews with Paul that have more info than the video. One of those was where he talked about this. He actually recommends scattering compost, green stuff and other amendments on top of the chips and letting nature filter the nutrients through. It's what he did when he started. If you want to add some fertilizer, do it when you plant. If you use the right chips you only need to add 1 or 2 inches each year to maintain the thickness. If you don't have to add any, then the chips are not breaking down- wrong type of wood. If the chips are too small, you have to replace more than that. If the chips have no green in them when you put them down, you can add grass clippings, leaves or some other green material to them. Paul recommended bloodmeal if you don't have any green to add to the the chips that don't have any. Last year I did the chop & drop method on the plant stalks and leaves left. They have all winter to decompose, & then they'll get about an inch of wood chips on top of them this year. If you till, you will turn chips into the dirt, unless you rake them back first. BTE is supposed to be a form of permaculture / no till gardening. You will also do 2 things you don't want to do if you till. 1. Till weed seeds into the soil. 2. Negatively affect the activity of the earthworms in your garden drastically. The activity can be reduced as much as 90% by tilling. The worms should be your tillers. There are many wonderful small nuggets of information in the sit down interviews with Paul Gautschi. They are worth watching.

Sincerely appreciate that Melissa! Food for thought!!

Melissa is AWESOME ! Bless Melissa ! Good job Miss Melissa ! Go Girl !

Leaves work pretty good too. If you dont have enough just go into a wooded area and rake them up. Or ask neighbors if you can take theirs.

I prefer to add a lot of wood chips in our chook run, this turns into rich, nutrient & worm filled compost which goes onto our garden beds. We use wood chips also for the paths between the beds which stops dirt getting onto our veggies & comfortable to walk on

I was going to try half and half also this year! Thanks for this, I’ll just woodchip layer the entire garden! Thanks for saving me an entire season!!

I tryed this, I felt it work very well.

I’ve been doing this for 6-7 yrs & I have to tell you, you will NOT be sorry!! Next yr you will pull less weeds & then the third yr, none! That’s right, none! Most Americans want it now & don’t want to stick it out. They will give up if they do too big of a garden! You were very smart in doing half of your garden because it is alot in the beginning. I only put down woodchips in the fall & spring as it’s too hot down south to do in summer. Make sure you get woodchips with the leaves mixed in. You need the organic matter to break down. I put down 3-4 inches 2x’s a yr. Wait until all the mushrooms & mycelium fungi start to show up! Crazy good soil with wonderful minerals that will make your veggies sweeter, tasty & free from many pests. Sounds crazy but true if you stick it out for 3 years. You WILL NOT be disappointed. Don’t listen to the nay sayers (look straight ahead) & go to KZfaq & watch all the garden tours that L2Survive did of Paul’s garden. Now I will subscribe to watch you flourish. I’m getting older & my garden is getting better with less work! It will only get better & easier. If you dream of going out to your garden & planting only & not pulling weeds & your soil getting richer & richer every year, then stick with it! You will not be disappointed! Happy BTE gardening! God is Good! (I would not use sawdust, it has no organic matter (leaves) in it). Also do NOT till it in!

Hi! What i do is put an unusually deep layer of compost down every year, which feeds the plants and soil, retains the moisture and suppresses the weeds.

Beautiful to watch and beautiful results

We did the wood chips a few yrs ago we loved it and plan to do next yr again

I've been using wood chips in my raised beds for years. I do think it eats the nitrogen as some plants don't do quite as well as I'd like. There's rarely weeds and the soil never fully dries out. I've inoculated the chips with Wine Cap Mushrooms, as well. The mushrooms eat the wood chips, move nutrients around, and provide us with pound and pounds of mushrooms every year. Another bonus: smaller wood chips or wood shavings help deter snails in my beds! I think the smaller shavings impair their movement.

Been doing it for years. Works even better if you put a layer of grass clippings on top of the wood chips.

That is great news!

Love your presentation, thanks.

When we were dairy farming I used to use the wood shavings we used as bedding in the calf rearing sheds in the garden. It was a great mulch for the garden, it was easy to spread, looked great and really enriched the soil as it broke down. Plants really thrived.

The temperature of the soil in full sun is drastically reduced with the covering. That too helps to keep moisture. Without covering, my plants were basically cooking in the sun, no matter how much water I added, it dried always instantly. Now with covering, even the heavy rain can not remove the soil. We have to adapt to long periods of drought with devastating rains sometimes. Covering is a step to protect from both. I am not threatened by "the late freeze of death" (march april freeze killing fruits) but the coverings might also help with freezing as well. I'm only one year in, layer not thick enough to see benefit in the weeding, but I do a huge area, I have not yet a veg garden as clean as yours. I just want to avoid a gardened forest to drift into aridity and ending like a desert.

Thank you for sharing!

Awesome job

Wow. I haven't been able to watch one of your videos in quite some time. This is a great way to revisit the topics. Also, my wife said that she's enjoying all of your material so far. While we do have some limits on our time at the moment we are confident things will change so that we're able to spend more time on what matters...............growing our own food, again. :-)

The longer you do it the less weeds you have to deal with. Next year will be better! My wife and I are creating a food forest with wood chips and are excited about building our awful red clay with good organic matter and fungal communities. Enjoy your new way of gardening! We all look forward to seeing your progress.

I like that 80's pbs music too! You go girl!

Very informative. Thank you! 💕☺️ I'm not an experienced gardener nor will I ever grow as much as you but I appreciate your time and information. 👍

I tried cardboard & woodchips in part of my garden this summer. It was the easiest garden that I've had. It was amazing at reducing the weeds and preventing the soil from drying out. Fortunately, I live not too far from a tree removal company that literally has a mountain of free woodchips that I can pick up. My chips are much bigger than yours so they won't break down as quick but I'm okay with that since I amended the soil when I planted in the fall.

Did not like chips in my veggie garden. Started mulching with lawn mower clippings. Every week when I now everything I can take up goes on my garden no weeds, no watering! Great veggies.

Had an awesome watermelon patch last year with seeds planted in compost over wood chips over cardboard. So little watering required also, which for Texas is great.

Yes! Yes! Yes! 702 medium! Thank you!!!!

grass clippings are fantastic too if you are not using a lot of products on the lawn. Great around the annuals/seedlings after they come up.

Consider adding mushroom spores to the mix. You can add a crop and enrich your soil at the same time.

I've been using this method for about 3 years now and it is marvelous. Anything that I have shipped to me in plain cardboard boxes I break those cardboard boxes down peel all the tape off and store them for future use.

Hi, Melissa i have been gardening for 30 yrs. ago. And i hope then to know what i know now about mulching the garden plot. All those back breaking from weeding to watering, but now hell yes it’s a whole lot better. Last year i did decided to mulch with the help of my boys for i planted lots of tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and etc. for freezing. I did a lot better this year my veggies are healthier and i froze more than those past years with no back breaking chores. Thank you for sharing this good technic👍 and i hope to be a big help for our fellow gardener(specially women) and yes a special thanks for all those who have knowledge about permaculture, no dig gardening they are a part of my know how to’s. 🙏 Thanks, I am knew to your channel, but looking forward to you next video.

Just a heads up, most cardboard ink now a days are made with a vegetable base for easier composting. Not all but quite a lot of it!

I'm so glad to see this worked so well. This year I tried mulching with straw and hated it! It was messy, the birds dug through it for bugs and spread it everywhere, it had seeds so actually created more weeds, and made my seedlings really leggy trying to grow through it. It's back to wood chips for me!! Thanks for the reassurances!

More information than I needed to know

Thank you! I like your approach.

I put down two to three layers of cardboard since it lets me skip a year when replacing the cardboard. As a mechanical barrier, the two to three layers of cardboard prevents weeds better than a single one. I am still putting down wood chips every year but it is more like topping up than replacing.

Living Traditions Homestead here in KZfaq has some great videos about using woven weed fabric. If I was able to plant large spaces I would definitely go that route.

I really appreciate learning from your experience and effort ,thank you mam !

love your garden and the view beyond.

We have loved our back to eden experience the past 10 years. no way we would go back. i recommend a coarser, darker chip from the trucks that cut around the power lines to include the green leafy matter. we do about 6" on the garden at a time.

I just subscribed. I have really been enjoying your gardening videos.

Every year I try to get enough corse, fresh chips from tree trimmers in the neighborhood to cover my entire yard (except for the small patch of grass) 4 inches deep. I've been doing it for 10 years and love the results.

Awesome! This was a helpful video. Thank you!

I put 1 foot of wood chips in my backyard 4 years ago on soil that was rock hard.... now my soil is rich and soft... plants do well because it holds in moisture and keeps the temperature regulated.., I do put nitrogen on occasionally...all has decomposed except the top few inches. I’m glad I did it...but of course there was a waiting of a few years to use it but I wasn’t in a rush.... oh and basically no weeds 😃

Your should also try fungul dominated mulch its just shreded dry leaves, you wet it an let it sit for a year it should look like soil by then.

ThankYou!

what an interesting film, and the comments below make for good learning. Thank you

I found that putting grass clippings on top of the wood chips really cuts down on weeds and helps wood chips break down.

A lot of this depends upon your region. I live in Georgia (7B) and when I first moved in 3.5 years ago, the yard was nothing but weeds (including english ivy and poison oak) and rock solid red clay. Some of the trees had to come down, so rather than have the tree guys haul the chips, I asked to retain them. I spread them around the perimeter of the yard. I have raised beds, so filling them with lasagna-style layers, including purchased compost -- didn't use the chips there. Year 2, the chips were seasoning nicely and I discovered that not only were they turning into lush dark soil, but the moisture retention (in what could be long periods between rain here) was the real eye-opening. Needless to say, buying mulch from the store is not the same (and more expensive). Store bought stuff is largely sterile, processed and only minorly effective for breaking up clay soils in the manner I've experienced with fresh wood chips. Most tree cutters are more than happy to bring their chips to you for free, just to get rid of them (especially if they are working in the neighborhood and their truck is filling up fast ... it saves them a trip to a landfill or recycle center). Fast forward to today, I get the chips and include them into my compost pile and let this all season for at least a year -- which means I don't have the fear of nitrogen depletion. And that compost mixture keeps the weeds at bay in my raised beds. I continue to mulch large areas of the property (outside the raised beds) with bark chips (the only issue is I'm now 67 and hauling loads of bark chips around my 1-acre lot with a wheelbarrow doesn't get easier). As with any mulch, it is suprising how fast it breaks down, but if you are a soil enthusiast, it breaks down in a very good way. Can't say enough about how good it is for Georgia (half my neighborhood now has a load of chips in the drive at least once or twice a year). All that said, I lived in the Pacific Northwest many years ago, and my goodness the soil was so much better there. I was able to keep the weeds at bay with straw. I will say that the only challenge I have with my winter garden beds (without wood chips) is increasing chances of slugs. Slugs don't appear to be as prevalent in areas with bark chips.

Thanks so much for posting all this. That was a lot of work. I just bought a wood chipper ot get rid of all the branches and broadaxe shavings I've made so this really helps.

Just got our wood chips down last week finally getting to give the back to Eden method a go and I know we may not get a good harvest this year but I’m sure in the years to come our soil and harvest will be amazing

Stopped having lawns thirty five years ago. Coarse barkchip looks great and feeds the soil beautifully. It improves or super sandy soil hugely and saves huge amount of needless time wasting and chemical damage

From my research, we are working on doing a no dig garden for spring next year. We started by marking out a section of the yard with fencing (we have dogs that like to dig!), then we put black plastic down for about 2 weeks. Then, once the grass and things have died back (we had no garden before), the plastic will come up and we'll put the cardboard down. We will lay out our beds and make them with about 12" of mushroom compost. We will use wood chips ONLY for the walkways around the beds. The cardboard, compost and wood chips are what Charles Dowling does for his no dig beds. I intend to plant some alfalfa and clover as cover crops to over winter and improve the compost/prevent erosion. In the spring, we'll lay out the plastic again until the cover crops die back, then we'll transplant our started plants into the beds. We've never tried to have a garden, so we'll see how things turn out!

Thank you for your video. I have covered my old veggie plot with cardboard, and my grass cuttings will go on top of it.

Great explanations! Thanks.

That's what we call sawdust out here. Like many here, I recommend the use of the large wood chips. I apply them only once every 3 years. I like them so much, I use them in my commercial orchard. They decompose faster and create less of a nitrogen issue. I also foliar feed and side dress, so this works exceptionally well. Thanks for sharing. Great video!

I bought an electric wood chipper and chip my own. I used to burn everything. The plants do really well in a cardboard wood chip garden. No complaints. There are tons of earthworms everywhere where there used to just be ants. Weeding is no big deal. The soil stays moist even in the hot Florida sun.

Yesss I just found this channel and I’m inspired

Thank you.

When you said dandelions grew my brain straight away went yum! Nice dandelions grown in that soil must be delicious! It's one of my favorite bitter greens.

I've been adding ground leaves, grass clippings n manure I o my soul for many years. It has made a huge difference in the soil. I don't have many weeds but I still weed often. I got that from our neighbor who was a horticulturist for the government.

My mother used to put down newspaper and then grass clippings on top and that worked very well. But back in the 50s, 60s, and 70,s everyone got a newspaper so there was plenty to use for gardens and the bottom of bird gages.