Thank you your videos on your experiments in west Texas. I am outside of Abilene and it is so good to see land like mine! I started permaculture around an existing plum tree...when it had plums, they were not big or sweet. This spring was amazing! Large, juicy, sweet plums! My husband, a disbeliever in what I wanted to do, is now a believer in permaculture and wood chips! Please keep on with your experiments in permaculture.
Thank you, this is really informative. I learned about agroforestry in college in Kentucky, and since have come home to central new mexico. I always wanted land and so finally bought a small patch of dusty desert scrub on a sandy mesa an hour from town. I'm planning to do some experimenting of my own. Maybe it's a central new mexico agroforestry experiment. I want to collect rainwater and play with drip irrigation. Plant drought tolerant plants. I want to learn how to build cisterns... you deal with a lot of the same problems i face in my climate, so i'm grateful to have your channel
Glad that you have found some relevant content in my channel. Sounds like you have your work cut out for you. I’d suggest documenting your journey so that others may learn from your experiences. Good luck!
Burying wood under soil beneath the wood chips holds moisture so the soil acts like a clay pot trapping water. Then, to break down the cellulose of the wood you need ammonia such as urea which can be animal manure or urine. Those two things (buried wood and urine on the upper soil wood) in combination are the fastest way because fungus etc. always makes its way in eventually. The only downside is the salts from ammonia but that is no problem on the caliche because it acts like a water-hardener-vs-water-softener reaction so you always have excess reagent in the caliche calcium. Therefore no salts remain. The Sunshine, if anything _(as long as you have the buried wood, although that takes effort to bury it),_ helps breaking it all down for the UV bombardment. Other than that, motion such as treading on it.
Thanks. That would take quite a bit of urine to break down all my chips! Can you imagine the smell? These 3 or 4 snows we received this winter seemed to do a great job of saturating the wood chips. They seem to be breaking down fairly well once you dig down past the top layer. There are so many rollie pollies! My wood chips fever has died down a bit since I've started experimenting with cover crops. I've also been trying to layer other things in with the wood chips to have kind of a lasagna effect.
@@WestTexasGardenExperiment Well I mean the manure or urine would be no greater a ratio than if you used manure. It takes a lot less urea than manure because it has no humic material. Really though the manure has urine in it. Bit icky to think about but that is the reality. As for the caliche, I cannot quite work out how big your garden is from the footage and am unsure were fences start and end because it looks like maybe some sort of desert or arable field behind it (and I'm guessing you have a house on or near it). But if, for example, it was just some large patch of land, almost like desert, if I had such a plot (with no house on it), I'd scrape away all the soil with a mini-digger (or even just use a rake trailer on a 4x4 landrover power-takeoff) so it is caliche exposed, and then drill holes(2foot deep if possible) like swiss cheese all over it in a grid (with an electric auger bit or pneumatic drill) and pour pure ammonia or or urea/irine directly into it all. It actually would not smell after the reaction took place (because calcium carbonate is the excess reagent), and it would give off a lot of heat for a few days as an exothermic reaction so then the caliche would become very weal and would form a fertiliser. The ammonia would no longer exist as the caliche is by far and excess reagent (and anyway, the rain or snow melt would wash it out on one go). Then I'd smash it up with the 4x4 landrover rake (or minidigger). Maybe take a pee (or get the cat do do it, lol) in half an old empty cola bottle and drop a large smashed (almost powder for high surface area) chunk of chalk rock in it and you'll see what I mean. After the reaction is over, it does not smell. it is the same principle as sawdust used to cover up bodily fluids like spew or number-twos. Fizzy CO2 and water is the exothermic obvious bit. Then (back in my minidigger timeline) you have calcium nitride as the basis of fertiliser once you mix the woodchips in with the smashed up calcium nitride rock. and then I'd cover the whole lot up with the old topsoil over the woodchips and aforementioned depleted-reagent mix. Extremely fertile soil. Unbalanced equation: NH3 + CaCO3 = CO2 + H2O + Ca3N2 Balanced equation: 2NH3 + 3CaCO3 = 3CO2 + 3H2O + Ca3N2 You have so much calcium (the entire of Texas, deep ground, in fact - lol), you would never have ammonia as the excess reagent. Now of course I do not expect you to go through all that. The principle is true though. What I would be doing is leaving a grid of such holes each the size of a car inbetween untampred ground also at least the same size, so the caliche holds it all in as it is a fantastic thermal insulator and stops the rain washing it all away. You are after all going to have a lot of rain and snow from now on in comparison to previous decades.
Hi Jay, thanks for that info! Did you put down 2 feet initially, or did you work your way up to that much? I think the guy at the Off Grid Athlete channel had 3 feet of chips in his back yard, which seems like a lot. Also, about how much rain does your area receive annually? I receive around 23 inches here. Last question: How long have you had your wood chips? Thank you
@@WestTexasGardenExperiment Well, it started as 1 foot because I was just using the mulch as decoration. Then I got serious about permaculture and increased it to two feet starting 2 years ago roughly. We receive about 31 inches a year in rain. I try and get my wood chips delivered by drop fresh every time I lay mulch. Sometimes I have to pick them up myself though. I always lay my chips immediately because the wife will nag me if there is a huge pile lol. There area where I have had wood chips the longest has weevils, fungus, worms and a decent level of fertile soil. That was 3 years in the making. I am trying to do swales now.
Thanks! I'll strive to get my level up to 1ft this year, and aim for 2 ft next year. I didn't know chips could get weevils! Good to know that someone else in Texas has had some success with the chips.
@@WestTexasGardenExperiment Yeah, I am completely sold on wood chips now. The only thing to keep in mind really is that woody species prefer chips whereas the soft stem vegetable stuff likes biomatter more. So in my gardens I mulch with straw and in my beginning food forest I am using chips mostly. I am also going to plant native wildflowers in my swale basins once built.
I used cardboard to deter weeds and grass. It worked. I want my chips to breakdown so I keep the bottom layer damp. The chip layer is thick enough I don’t water much. I’m going to order king Stropharia mushrooms. Not only will they help breakdown the wood chips....you can eat them too. Win win.
Hello, I'm finding the same to be true about using cardboard to suppress weeds. If I put down chips alone, the weeds pop up. In areas where I've hid my cardboard under the chips, there are no weeds. I don't know much about growing mushrooms, but that sounds very interesting.
an idea I got while watching you drone on (jk) was what effect would a cover crop have on chip decomposition. I am seeing winter rye, dripping with morning dew even in hot august days (cool humid mornings). if you get a microclimate over the wood chips, thats gotta be good, granted, that is another step or two from putting down fresh wood chips. also, just fyi, i chipped a bunch of eastern red cedar back in august, and spread it as a "drive way", but already have some grass sprouting up thru it, granted i spread it really thin, like an inch give or take, but it is fresh cedar just dripping with sap, so I thought it would be like putting diesel on the dirt, but no, after just a couple or three months, the plants are coming on up.
Trying to reply to this for the third time (the first two attempts didn’t go through for some reason). I’m sure you are right about getting better decomp results with cover crops inter-planted among them. I’ve only recently started using cover crops, so I don’t have much experience yet. Regarding your cedar chips, I’m thinking you would’ve needed a weed barrier underneath to suppress the weeds. I don’t really mind the weeds popping up through the chips that much; I figure they are providing some food for the wildlife, as well as providing some benefit to the soil.
if you want to take your wood chip fever to 11, turn a few of the wood chips into char, and mix them in compost piles, fungus love them some char, dont go over 10% to 15% by volume though, unless you want it as a mulch, or the microbes will ignore the plants cuz they get all the carbon they want from the char. (it makes a horrible mulch because it is so light, any sheeting water will float it away.) but if you were doing inside potted plants, I could see using it as a mulch for water retention. www.biochar-international.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/1G_Toucan_TLUD_for_Biochar.pdf
@@WestTexasGardenExperiment I am only at the compost stage (bokashi buckets) but the fungal hyphae are crazy in the buckets i used char in. once i get it charged up I will use it for growing. So it will be this spring or late winter before I actually grow in it, but just judging from my coffee grounds compost buckets and the last one with the prickly pear and char, the prickly pear and char are a lot more active. fungally. I am also going to do an experiment with pretty much sand and char(or compost with char) in an ebb and flow style container, just to learn, and because I am so starved for water here, so irrigating large areas before I get some rain harvesting stuff set up is going to suck.
@@WestTexasGardenExperiment from my research, charing certain plants can make the minerals those plants accumulate, plant available. aside from that, I dont think char would provide a ton more benefits than good wood chips, it can be a great medium to innoculate with though, if you are trying to add microbial diversity. but you could do the same with other materials as well. The more I read on biochar, the more complex it gets. But that terra preta holy grail thing is fascinating, plus I like the idea of being able to make charcoal to filter water with, should things get mad maxian at some point.
@@WestTexasGardenExperiment yea, I will try to start a channel. and get some vids. got a little overwhelmed the late summer early fall, new raw land with no well, and no electricity, and was like, what the hell have i got my self into, but have my water situation sorted, and a generator, so feeling like I at least have some kind of handle on it now.
So the curious part of your woodchip path experiment would be how has/will the soil beneath the chips changed over say 3-5years. Woodchips 6-9-12" deep is not a nature-generated activity for your area so I wonder what soil life is now able to thrive in this environment or have a longer life. I live in Michigan so forests were the native environment before suburbs (1920s) and farms (1800s). What was your area like 150 years ago? Do you consider your soil degraded? Sounds like you are well informed on soil health.
Hi Kevin, I believe our area here was more prairie-like 150 years ago, so there was probably a lot of grasses back then. I think cattle brought the mesquite trees to the area as they dispersed their seeds. The soil is very dry, and doesn't seem to have much life. I would say that is due to the summer sun baking it to a crisp. It's hard to grow stuff in dry lifeless dirt. I'm hoping that the thicker layer of chips will let the moisture remain longer after a rain, and thus encourage more soil life. More moisture and soil life should also improve my ability to grow things. As the wood chips decay and do what they were meant to do, I'll add more and more perennials to increase the # of living roots that I have in the ground. That should also help to bring in more soil life. I'll also incorporate compost under the chips, which would be another reason for those soil organisms to hang around. All of that will take time, but I think the effort should pay off at some point. Thank you
Are there chemicals in stump removers? I was thinking those are toxic, but really I don't know much about them. I used one once to help me get rid of a big mesquite in my back yard.
@@WestTexasGardenExperiment There may be additives in the stump remover you buy, but the active ingredient, and all you need, is Potassium Nitrate. It is a source of nitrogen for the bacteria and fungi that break down the wood. It's just potassium nitrogen and oxygen. You can use pure potassium nitrate if you can find it.
Thank you your videos on your experiments in west Texas. I am outside of Abilene and it is so good to see land like mine! I started permaculture around an existing plum tree...when it had plums, they were not big or sweet. This spring was amazing! Large, juicy, sweet plums! My husband, a disbeliever in what I wanted to do, is now a believer in permaculture and wood chips! Please keep on with your experiments in permaculture.
Good to hear you have success out here! I hope to have some successful fruiting plants in the next few years. Thank you
This is a great observational process!
Thank you! 🙏
Thank you, this is really informative. I learned about agroforestry in college in Kentucky, and since have come home to central new mexico. I always wanted land and so finally bought a small patch of dusty desert scrub on a sandy mesa an hour from town. I'm planning to do some experimenting of my own. Maybe it's a central new mexico agroforestry experiment. I want to collect rainwater and play with drip irrigation. Plant drought tolerant plants. I want to learn how to build cisterns... you deal with a lot of the same problems i face in my climate, so i'm grateful to have your channel
Glad that you have found some relevant content in my channel. Sounds like you have your work cut out for you. I’d suggest documenting your journey so that others may learn from your experiences. Good luck!
Burying wood under soil beneath the wood chips holds moisture so the soil acts like a clay pot trapping water. Then, to break down the cellulose of the wood you need ammonia such as urea which can be animal manure or urine. Those two things (buried wood and urine on the upper soil wood) in combination are the fastest way because fungus etc. always makes its way in eventually. The only downside is the salts from ammonia but that is no problem on the caliche because it acts like a water-hardener-vs-water-softener reaction so you always have excess reagent in the caliche calcium. Therefore no salts remain. The Sunshine, if anything _(as long as you have the buried wood, although that takes effort to bury it),_ helps breaking it all down for the UV bombardment. Other than that, motion such as treading on it.
Thanks. That would take quite a bit of urine to break down all my chips! Can you imagine the smell? These 3 or 4 snows we received this winter seemed to do a great job of saturating the wood chips. They seem to be breaking down fairly well once you dig down past the top layer. There are so many rollie pollies! My wood chips fever has died down a bit since I've started experimenting with cover crops. I've also been trying to layer other things in with the wood chips to have kind of a lasagna effect.
@@WestTexasGardenExperiment Well I mean the manure or urine would be no greater a ratio than if you used manure. It takes a lot less urea than manure because it has no humic material. Really though the manure has urine in it. Bit icky to think about but that is the reality.
As for the caliche, I cannot quite work out how big your garden is from the footage and am unsure were fences start and end because it looks like maybe some sort of desert or arable field behind it (and I'm guessing you have a house on or near it). But if, for example, it was just some large patch of land, almost like desert, if I had such a plot (with no house on it), I'd scrape away all the soil with a mini-digger (or even just use a rake trailer on a 4x4 landrover power-takeoff) so it is caliche exposed, and then drill holes(2foot deep if possible) like swiss cheese all over it in a grid (with an electric auger bit or pneumatic drill) and pour pure ammonia or or urea/irine directly into it all.
It actually would not smell after the reaction took place (because calcium carbonate is the excess reagent), and it would give off a lot of heat for a few days as an exothermic reaction so then the caliche would become very weal and would form a fertiliser. The ammonia would no longer exist as the caliche is by far and excess reagent (and anyway, the rain or snow melt would wash it out on one go).
Then I'd smash it up with the 4x4 landrover rake (or minidigger).
Maybe take a pee (or get the cat do do it, lol) in half an old empty cola bottle and drop a large smashed (almost powder for high surface area) chunk of chalk rock in it and you'll see what I mean. After the reaction is over, it does not smell. it is the same principle as sawdust used to cover up bodily fluids like spew or number-twos. Fizzy CO2 and water is the exothermic obvious bit. Then (back in my minidigger timeline) you have calcium nitride as the basis of fertiliser once you mix the woodchips in with the smashed up calcium nitride rock. and then I'd cover the whole lot up with the old topsoil over the woodchips and aforementioned depleted-reagent mix. Extremely fertile soil.
Unbalanced equation:
NH3 + CaCO3 = CO2 + H2O + Ca3N2
Balanced equation:
2NH3 + 3CaCO3 = 3CO2 + 3H2O + Ca3N2
You have so much calcium (the entire of Texas, deep ground, in fact - lol), you would never have ammonia as the excess reagent.
Now of course I do not expect you to go through all that. The principle is true though. What I would be doing is leaving a grid of such holes each the size of a car inbetween untampred ground also at least the same size, so the caliche holds it all in as it is a fantastic thermal insulator and stops the rain washing it all away. You are after all going to have a lot of rain and snow from now on in comparison to previous decades.
Wow, you are smart! I’ll pee on some caliche (off camera) and see what it does.
I am in Central Texas, I found that 2 feet of wood chips helps enormously for water retention and breakdown.
Hi Jay, thanks for that info! Did you put down 2 feet initially, or did you work your way up to that much? I think the guy at the Off Grid Athlete channel had 3 feet of chips in his back yard, which seems like a lot. Also, about how much rain does your area receive annually? I receive around 23 inches here. Last question: How long have you had your wood chips? Thank you
@@WestTexasGardenExperiment Well, it started as 1 foot because I was just using the mulch as decoration. Then I got serious about permaculture and increased it to two feet starting 2 years ago roughly. We receive about 31 inches a year in rain. I try and get my wood chips delivered by drop fresh every time I lay mulch. Sometimes I have to pick them up myself though. I always lay my chips immediately because the wife will nag me if there is a huge pile lol. There area where I have had wood chips the longest has weevils, fungus, worms and a decent level of fertile soil. That was 3 years in the making. I am trying to do swales now.
Thanks! I'll strive to get my level up to 1ft this year, and aim for 2 ft next year. I didn't know chips could get weevils! Good to know that someone else in Texas has had some success with the chips.
@@WestTexasGardenExperiment Yeah, I am completely sold on wood chips now. The only thing to keep in mind really is that woody species prefer chips whereas the soft stem vegetable stuff likes biomatter more. So in my gardens I mulch with straw and in my beginning food forest I am using chips mostly. I am also going to plant native wildflowers in my swale basins once built.
I used cardboard to deter weeds and grass. It worked. I want my chips to breakdown so I keep the bottom layer damp. The chip layer is thick enough I don’t water much. I’m going to order king Stropharia mushrooms. Not only will they help breakdown the wood chips....you can eat them too. Win win.
Hello, I'm finding the same to be true about using cardboard to suppress weeds. If I put down chips alone, the weeds pop up. In areas where I've hid my cardboard under the chips, there are no weeds. I don't know much about growing mushrooms, but that sounds very interesting.
@@WestTexasGardenExperiment , I don’t know anything about growing them or if they will grow in our west Texas environment, but I’ll find out.
an idea I got while watching you drone on (jk) was what effect would a cover crop have on chip decomposition. I am seeing winter rye, dripping with morning dew even in hot august days (cool humid mornings). if you get a microclimate over the wood chips, thats gotta be good, granted, that is another step or two from putting down fresh wood chips.
also, just fyi, i chipped a bunch of eastern red cedar back in august, and spread it as a "drive way", but already have some grass sprouting up thru it, granted i spread it really thin, like an inch give or take, but it is fresh cedar just dripping with sap, so I thought it would be like putting diesel on the dirt, but no, after just a couple or three months, the plants are coming on up.
Trying to reply to this for the third time (the first two attempts didn’t go through for some reason). I’m sure you are right about getting better decomp results with cover crops inter-planted among them. I’ve only recently started using cover crops, so I don’t have much experience yet. Regarding your cedar chips, I’m thinking you would’ve needed a weed barrier underneath to suppress the weeds. I don’t really mind the weeds popping up through the chips that much; I figure they are providing some food for the wildlife, as well as providing some benefit to the soil.
That ending 🤣 (ps. Yes, I live comment as I watch)
I had fun making the little animations
Y’all spreading the wood chip fever🌡🌡🌡🌡
This is the kind of fever I don’t mind having!
if you want to take your wood chip fever to 11, turn a few of the wood chips into char, and mix them in compost piles, fungus love them some char, dont go over 10% to 15% by volume though, unless you want it as a mulch, or the microbes will ignore the plants cuz they get all the carbon they want from the char. (it makes a horrible mulch because it is so light, any sheeting water will float it away.) but if you were doing inside potted plants, I could see using it as a mulch for water retention.
www.biochar-international.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/1G_Toucan_TLUD_for_Biochar.pdf
Thanks. Have you seen a significant difference using the biochar?
@@WestTexasGardenExperiment I am only at the compost stage (bokashi buckets) but the fungal hyphae are crazy in the buckets i used char in. once i get it charged up I will use it for growing. So it will be this spring or late winter before I actually grow in it, but just judging from my coffee grounds compost buckets and the last one with the prickly pear and char, the prickly pear and char are a lot more active. fungally.
I am also going to do an experiment with pretty much sand and char(or compost with char) in an ebb and flow style container, just to learn, and because I am so starved for water here, so irrigating large areas before I get some rain harvesting stuff set up is going to suck.
Sounds very interesting. Have you considered posting your progress on your channel?
@@WestTexasGardenExperiment from my research, charing certain plants can make the minerals those plants accumulate, plant available. aside from that, I dont think char would provide a ton more benefits than good wood chips, it can be a great medium to innoculate with though, if you are trying to add microbial diversity. but you could do the same with other materials as well. The more I read on biochar, the more complex it gets. But that terra preta holy grail thing is fascinating, plus I like the idea of being able to make charcoal to filter water with, should things get mad maxian at some point.
@@WestTexasGardenExperiment yea, I will try to start a channel. and get some vids. got a little overwhelmed the late summer early fall, new raw land with no well, and no electricity, and was like, what the hell have i got my self into, but have my water situation sorted, and a generator, so feeling like I at least have some kind of handle on it now.
So the curious part of your woodchip path experiment would be how has/will the soil beneath the chips changed over say 3-5years. Woodchips 6-9-12" deep is not a nature-generated activity for your area so I wonder what soil life is now able to thrive in this environment or have a longer life. I live in Michigan so forests were the native environment before suburbs (1920s) and farms (1800s). What was your area like 150 years ago? Do you consider your soil degraded? Sounds like you are well informed on soil health.
Hi Kevin, I believe our area here was more prairie-like 150 years ago, so there was probably a lot of grasses back then. I think cattle brought the mesquite trees to the area as they dispersed their seeds. The soil is very dry, and doesn't seem to have much life. I would say that is due to the summer sun baking it to a crisp. It's hard to grow stuff in dry lifeless dirt. I'm hoping that the thicker layer of chips will let the moisture remain longer after a rain, and thus encourage more soil life. More moisture and soil life should also improve my ability to grow things. As the wood chips decay and do what they were meant to do, I'll add more and more perennials to increase the # of living roots that I have in the ground. That should also help to bring in more soil life. I'll also incorporate compost under the chips, which would be another reason for those soil organisms to hang around. All of that will take time, but I think the effort should pay off at some point. Thank you
Have you considered using stump remover to decompose the chips?
Are there chemicals in stump removers? I was thinking those are toxic, but really I don't know much about them. I used one once to help me get rid of a big mesquite in my back yard.
@@WestTexasGardenExperiment There may be additives in the stump remover you buy, but the active ingredient, and all you need, is Potassium Nitrate. It is a source of nitrogen for the bacteria and fungi that break down the wood. It's just potassium nitrogen and oxygen. You can use pure potassium nitrate if you can find it.
@@dontaskme9047 You taught me something new, thank you! I'll look into this further.