Post date: May 14, 2020 9:35:52 PM
One of the easiest and hugely beneficial way to build soil is to use wood chips.
Wood chips can be ordered with any of the arborists that take down trees in your neighborhood. They are happy to drop anything from 10-20 cubic yards of freshly chopped chips at your driveway. Register at any of the free wood chip delivery services online. Popular one is getchipdrop.com.
Wood chips come from freshly chopped trees. It holds carbon (brown and sturdy branches) and nitrogen (leaves and softer branches) and an immense amount of nutrition gathered over time from the sun and earth.
When you spread woodchips on the soil, you spread out a buffet for organisms that work on soil. Earthworms, nematodes, bacteria and fungi immediately colonize the woodchips. This benefit won’t happen with treated store bought mulch.
Then the magic happens when it rains. The woodchips simply soak up the rain, and direct it to the soil below. There is no erosion of top soil.
The moisture in the soil below does not evaporate away, as woodchips also are great mulches. They shield the soil from the drying effects of sun and wind.
This ideal combination of great food, adequate moisture, and protection from elements means the soil below simply turns to gold. In about 2 years, you have black rich beautiful soil. You can simply scrape it and add it to your vegetable beds. That delight of black and crumbly soil must be experienced to be believed. Come by to see it at my yard if you wish.
In that time while you wait, the woodchips will lie around feeding your garden with rain water, nourishing and building soil, and killing off the grass and weeds that you don’t need.
No top soil erosion, complete utilization of rain water, weed compression, microbes and beneficial earthworm support are all benefits of wood chips.
There is a movement of gardeners that swear by the ability of wood chips to convert soil into gold. Google ‘back to eden’ gardening.
Two notes of caution: 1. Do not mix woodchips into your planting bed. They will interfere with your plant growth and mostly stunt it.
This is because they draw nitrogen while decomposing.
2. Spread woodchips about 3 feet from the house to prevent any possible damage from termites. We haven’t heard any reports so far, but better safe rather than sorry.
Woodchips are free! That makes it even more awesome. Take a lot of work to haul them - consider it a good upper body workout!