Trench Composting: A Great Way to Do Your Fall Clean-up
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- Опубликовано: 16 июл 2024
- In this video I prepare one of my garden beds for next year quickly and easily by composting all the garden waste right where it grew. Thanks for watching, and if you enjoyed this content, please subscribe to my channel. You can also check out my podcast (maritimegardening.com) where I discuss how to grow healthy food in your backyard cheaply and easily. Please share if you found this information helpful, and thanks for watching! Special thanks to Audionautix.com for the music ("pioneer" and "travel light").
I'm a certified Permaculturist and I'm learning from you, thanks so much.
Thanks, that's nice of you to say.
I wish I had found your podcasts before this growing season started.
Im burying fish in my garden rows as i harvest my crops. I wish i had thought of this sooner. I already buried 40 catfish where i harvested potatoes. Im gonna keep burying fish everywhere i get an empty space in my garden. Its beginning of july so by end of march to beginning of april when i plant crops this spring there should be some fertile ground above those fish. Gonna cover with compost later and then shredded leaves to sit over winter. Fingers crossed this coming growing season will be plentiful. My sons go catfishing a lot so i can get fish scraps by the buckets..... At least i know the worms are gonna be happy and well fed.
Great job, a wealth of practical information. Thanks.
Thanks Dorian!
Im gonna plant some sunflowers with cucumbers next spring. Gonna plant them with my peas also. Hoping everything will climb those big sunflowers.
Just beware - the sunflowers also cast shade
Sunflowers are not a good idea as a trellis for other plants. Sunflowers are allelopathic which means that like walnut trees they put out biochemicals that inhibit the growth of other plants around them. The residue of sunflower biochemicals can last in soils for up to 2 years after the sunflowers are gone. Some garden plants like tomatoes and potatoes are very sensitive to sunflower and will not thrive near them. It's best to plant sunflowers in beds by themselves to avoid conflicts with other crops. After sunflowers are removed at the end of the growing season don't add the old plants to your compost to avoid contaminating that as well. Burn sunflower trash at the end of the season and use the ash in your garden. After beds have been used for sunflowers it's best to compost heavily with organic matter and cover with mulch to allow mother nature to break down the biochemicals and fertilize the soil as sunflowers are very heavy feeders and take a lot out of the soil. Not saying not to grow sunflowers as they have their place in the garden and are excellent for breaking up hard packed soils and attracting bees but be aware they are best grown by themselves.
It DOES make sense. So much easier than hauling things to the compost pile (which is getting really large and unruly!) and then hauling it back. I’m on it!
Enjoy!
another thing many gardners overlook is letting their veggies bolt and go to seed unchecked and ignored...never let weeds or any other plant go to seed in proximity to ur garden unless you want it...
Agreed. Man I wish I had chickens to feed those weeds to. It would be great to be able to turn my weeds into eggs and manure!
Your ground looks so good.
Thanks - all horse manure - that's the big secret :)
great video
I really appreciate your work. Thx
Thanks man :)
@@maritimegardening4887 do you have an instagram? where's the best place to message you? Thx.
I like your videos. You are the true sustainable garden. So many other homesteads claimed of sustainability and they use luxury equipment and fertilizers. Doing things nature's way will solve it by nature eventually. You don't find pesticides best and fertilizers Vectra in a natural forest. There are a reason for good bugs and bad but. Good ones to pollinate. Bad one to do the dirty work helping the breakdown. So I'm thinking what is the reason for mildew and aphids. Is there some imbalance? Some shortage that we do not notice. ?? They must be there for a reason
Thanks Heila. Yes, there's none of that in a forest, but your garden isn't a forest. As natural as I try to make it, my garden has all kinds of things growing it it that grow nowhere in Canada, and in a concentration that never exists in a forest, and with a caloric value that is pretty rare in a forest. Everything out there is looking for food, and there's more food in my backyard than in all the back yards on my street combined, and for hectares of forest. I copy nature in my garden, but it's not "natural" in the same way as the forest. Aphids are there because they like eating your plants. Mildew is there because the conditions favour it's growth. Everything just does what it does, and sometimes a balance gets worked out, and sometimes it doesn't and you lose a whole crop to pest damage or disease.
"burn it in the campfire and cook hotdogs over it" Love it thats right!...I agree with burying plant matter it makes perfect sence but I don't think I'd have buried the ripe cukes or any ripe fruits.. :-)
I love your approach, gives me a lot of inspiration.
Qestion about the hay: where I garden, in the Netherlands, slugs are everywhere in the gras / hay.
Don't yoy have a slug problem?
Excellent question, and I will address it at length in my next Q&A video. Short answer is yes... BUT, it's really not that big a problem, and only for certain plants, and only at certain times of the year. :)
Make icicle pickles out of the yellow cucumbers!
Ha e you ever left a carrot over winter so it will produce seeds the next year? I left a couple last year and man they're giant bushes now. They got almost 4 feet tall and bushed out about that far in a circle.
Yes = if you have open-pollinated carrots it totally works
Nice vid. Is it really no till if you've just dug a trench through the bed? Hows that different ti tilling as you're still digging it over?
Well for one, I didn't turn over the whole bed - just the centre, so the "ecosystem" was no completely turned upside down. Also, I only did this in a couple of my beds, for most I just chop everything up and leave on top, and add a good 6" in the fall.
Have you tried a living mulch for green manure in any beds? what did you plant it with next.
I don't do green manures for two reasons (1) because they have to be worked into the soil - which is work; and, (2) I would have to plant them at the beginning of august to get them to grow at all before the 1st frost in Sept - and in August I'm still growing things in my gardens for the most part. I just find it easier to throw yard waste on the beds and let the worms do the work. In this bed, I think I planted kale the following year.
Will this be completely broken down by Spring??
There's kale growing in there right now (check recent vids). It's been growing since April. I don't knwo if it was completely broken down, but I planted kale in the soil that was on top of it, and it grew just fine. I imagine it was partly broken down, then everything froze, so it stopped, and then it resumed breaking down in later March. If you check some of the vids that I did back in march, I had a plastic dome on there and there was worms working away in March under the hoop-house. Hope that helps. Will work even better if its warmer where you live :)
Can I use other plants instead of cucumber plant?
Like beans,peas,gourds,chili,okra,melons,etc etc..??
Yes of course - it all breaks down right :)
Didn't you think you could avoid moving your soil letting your greens cucumber leaves and stokcs on the soil, not disturbing your worms and micro-organisms ? Weather (rain) would do the work for you with the help of your fauna (worms and micro-organisms) without digging or not ?
Yes I imagine both approaches would work, but it breaks down faster in the ground. It's ok to do a little trench composting once and a while. Garden and soil were fine. Had a great kale garden in that bed this year.
could you not just chop and drop the cuc's and mulch over with hay?
do you take the hay mulch off in the spring?
No, you just move it aside to make rows and plant.
I am you just left it on top to dry out won't that be the same?
I think you get more out of it this way, but more importantly, my garden is next to a forest, I can't have food lying around rotting. There's black bears here, I don't want to draw them it.
Do you have a problem with mice or shrews.. under the hay?
Mice/ moles/voles are everywhere anyway. Yes i have them, but they really don't cause many problems because there are other things holding them in check.
@@maritimegardening4887 Oh, no. This is my third year gardening and my first year goofing around with hay bales for mulching clay soil and for growing potatoes. Did not know it would attract voles, those horrible things. You have spoiled my fun, but it is good to know before I go spreading another bale. I did see some strange digging in the garden today, but not in the hay area. Of course, I might not notice that.
Do you do that with your tomatoes?
With tomatoes I'm so worried about blight and other diseases I get rid of them.
With so many farmers using pesticides in their hay or straw, how do you address these issues?
Use hay and straw that isn't treated
Living in the NYC area, there are plenty of straw bales at big box stores and local garden centers in the fall. Finding out if pesticides were applied has been difficult. Is there any way to tell if the straw is safe to use?
I bet you go through a lot of tennis shoes.
I guess I should have been wearing boots :)
great video
Thanks :)