10X Your Growing Skills
Farm Chads
I want to pop in and tell you about some tricks to 10X your growing skills in the garden and level up your fruit tree game.
Everyone who has space should be thinking about how to grow food. In order to grow food you need good soil. Start working towards building your soil or at least sourcing some of the materials you’ll need to get better soil for growing food now.
When you need it (not if), you’ll be glad you did.
Mulch Magic
Today I’m talking about what everyone calls mulch, and it’s an absolute game changer for gardens and fruit trees. But there is another name that describes this material better, and will help you in your quest for an edible landscape.
I’m sure you have heard that it’s a good idea to add mulch around trees and shrubs but it isn’t until recently that it clicked for me.
There are many reasons why adding mulch to your garden is a game changer. The number one reason is it just makes everything look better.
Adding mulch around your fruit trees will give it a healthy deep brown color that contrasts well with your green plants. By simply adding mulch to your trees, you’ll look like a Chad Gardener in less than a day. But that’s not all mulch does for your crops.
What is Mulch?
Mulch is material (such as decaying leaves, bark, or compost) spread around or over a plant to enrich or insulate the soil. I’m sure when you think of mulch you think about colored wood chip stuff in the garden centers that comes in bags. That is not what we’re talking about here, I’ll elaborate, keep reading.
Here are some of the many mulch benefits:
helps to keep weeds from growing while locking in moisture
keeps the soil cool in hot summer months and warm in cold months
feeds the plants nutrients during irrigation
creates a healthy environment for earthworms and fungi/beneficial bacteria to grow which improves your soil greatly
breaks down over time feeding back into your soil, increasing the organic matter content which makes it easier to grow plants. The result is rich loamy dirt. Money.
tends to stick together well because it has a mixture of wood, bark, and leaves. This helps the material to stay where you put it and not blow away or slide down a hill.
Mulch has so many different uses that it’s always good to have some laying around if you’re a small farmer or homesteader. We use it in our chicken coop for a layer of organic material to help the chicken manure break down.
We also use it around our flower beds for a quick spruce up instead of straw or fancy store bought mulch.
A good homestead business idea would be to bring in mulch and break it down (compost) to sell to other gardeners as a growing material for their garden or nursery. This is actually something I’m working on now.
You’ll need to put a thick layer down around your trees covering the entire canopy of the tree. The thicker the better because the mulch will shrink and break down over time.
New layers will be added at least once a year resulting in a thick layer of rich brown soil just above the native soil and underneath the mulch.
In the garden, you can till this material into your native soil once a year to mix everything up and improve your soil texture. Or you can simply plant right in the loamy mulch dirt layer. I would recommend at least broadforking the bed first.
How to Get Free Mulch Delivered
I’ve been asking myself lately, why haven’t we been using mulch more often?
Well to be honest, I didn’t really know where to get it in bulk for cheap.
I’ll show you how I finally began getting truckloads of mulch brought to me for free. And if you’re serious about growing plants, once you get a truckload, you will quickly realize you can never have too much… mulch.
Mulch covers such a wide array of material, I want to clarify what you should be sourcing to add to your gardens and fruit trees.
The material that works best for growing food is material that comes from the process of running a tree limb through a chipping machine. The result is a combination of all natural material that’s filled with nutrients. It ends up as a mixture of wood, bark, and leaves. This stuff is pure gold.
I knew I needed mulch for my plants, but didn’t want to buy it at a store. I was looking for fresh mulch in bulk. Even better, I didn’t want to have to drive to get it, because then I would have to unload it by hand.
I looked into dump trailers to help transport and unload mulch once I found some, but they’re expensive and it didn’t really make much sense investing that much money for a mulch trailer.
So I began searching for a local mulch source and here’s what I found.
Mulch is not called mulch in the commercial tree service business. Mulching usually refers to hydraulic machines attached to skid steer loaders. These machines will mulch an entire Forrest in a few hours leaving the tree scraps scattered along the property.
What I was actually looking for is called “wood chips” in the tree service industry.
This is the term used by tree service professionals who go around cutting down trees from power lines and houses. They run the branches and logs through a chipper machine that shoots the chips into the back of a truck.
As stated earlier, this is a mixture of bark, wood, leaves, and small twigs.
This is what we want!
There are a few large national tree service businesses operate chippers. Depending on where you live, it might be easy to just google search for wood chipping in your area and call them up.
First you would ask if they own a wood chipper. Then you would ask them to drop some chips on your yard next time they are working in the area. However, it’s probably not going to be this easy, at least it wasn’t for me… t’was warned.
In my area, there is only a small handful of companies that have chippers, because these machines are expensive and high maintenance.
Believe it or not, most tree service providers in my area just load up the whole tree and take it to a dump.
I called every provider in my area as well as all of the bigger regional chippers. Everyone says yes we’ll call you next time we’re in the area, but I got nothing.
I even signed up on a website called chipdrop . Com. Nothing.
So what did I do?
Anytime I saw a chipper truck working I would pull over and talk to the workers.
Note: First, ask if they speak English 😂
I found the worker who speaks English and let him know that I have a place not far away where they can dump chips.
They are usually interested because their only option is a dump located far away that they have to drive to. They also have to pay a fee to dump.
So I’m saving them time and money.
Note: Make sure you tell them you only want chips. Some of them may think its ok to dump a log or large branches on your property along with the chips, that wouldn’t be good.
Over the past few weeks I’ve finally gotten 3 full loads of fresh wood chips with more on the way (hopefully). I’m adding it to my garden around the edges and around some of my fruit trees and it already looks 10x better.
If you have space somewhere in your yard or property, I highly recommend following these steps and trying to get some wood chips. Even if you don’t use them right away, they’ll be fine sitting out in the weather. The chips and leaves start to break down over time resulting in even better material for your garden… wood chip compost.
Wood Chip Compost
Another valuable angle on piling up wood chips somewhere on your property is they break down over time. Eventually it will turn into black gold, some damn fine soil amendment for anything you’re trying to grow.
To Be Continued
If I get a few comments, likes, or shares on this article I’ll come back with a deep dive on soil building.
If you’re interested in something else, feel free to comment what you want to talk about and I’ll see what I can come up with or at least give you my thoughts on the matter.
Your friend…
Farmer