How I put my garden to bed
Each fall and winter I try to put my garden “to bed” before the weeds get too bad. I was late getting to it this year, but it doesn’t matter that much as we don’t have to rush to beat snow. Here’s how I do it.
Here’s how the east part of our garden looked after harvesting the corn and leaving the ground bare for a couple months. The weeds grow super well in December and January around here, and the wood chip paths are pretty worn out. (You can see the drip line rolled up at the far end of the bed.)
If the weeds aren’t too tall, which they weren’t, I don’t even pull them up. I cut apart one of our chicken feed bags (if you don’t have these, you can use paper grocery store bags, newspaper, or cardboard–but cardboard takes longer to break down, so you might have to fight with it a bit when you plant). The feed bags are big and three layered, so they work great!
After all the bags are laid down (overlapping, so no weeds can sneak out) I dump on the compost and spread it out.
Then we laid another thick layer of bark chips on the paths between the beds. Side note: if you order bark chips from chipdrop they are free! If you order a drop after a wind storm, delivery is almost immediate. We got our huge pile 2 days after we ordered because we had just had a huge wind storm and trees were down everywhere! And if you order it in the winter, there are no shredded leaves mixed in.
And we just keep going like this until the whole garden is covered and ready for a new year!
I love starting new beds with cardboard overlaid with compost, dirt and wood chips. It works pretty well, except over Bermuda and green briar! yep, those two will push through or go around, and be a nuisance until I pull them. And I love cover crops! Maybe its just because we can grow things year round, my ideal is to have something growing all the time in my beds. Joys of central Texas.
I got one drop from chipdrop, and have been registered with a request for 2 years now. The one drop came soon after we moved in and I set up my account, but nothing since. However, we did make sure to stop and talk to the guys doing tree work in the neighborhood a few times, and got one guy who dropped 6 loads when I had to ask him to stop. We are still working with that pile! I’ll keep up the chipdrop request, but talking to the tree guys seems to work better for around here. And if you’ve got space, letting the piles compost down makes for really nice dirt. And the wood chips are super nice for “extreme composting”. I can put all sorts in my compost pile, even smelly things and high nitrogen, and then layer on wood chips, and it burns down hot and fast and makes for gorgeous compost in just a few months. Yep, meat, dairy, bones, all sorts of food leftovers. But you gotta have the wood chips for the carbon to keep the nitrogen stuff from stinking up a storm.