I know you're getting grief from lots of permaculture enthusiasts for mentioning the weed reputation of dandelions BUT I really appreciated the dual perspectives you mention in this video. In my front yard I plan to wood chip the whole thing (already 1/2 done) but it is my front yard and we do have an HOA (though less-psycho-than-most) and curb appeal does matter both to my neighbors (two of whom will be selling within the next few years) and to me in this case. Unlike you we only have 1/4 acre properties, so much more of that front-yard-as-showpiece vibe. The woodchips I have down already mostly I didn't do cardboard underneath but I plan to do cardboard underneath for the rest since I'd like to have the grass die underneath. The idea of seeding the woodchips with clover seed all over or just on the rows for walking sounds interesting to me but only if it's a naturally low enough variety so no mowing needed ever. Aside from obvious soil building benefits, that was part of the selling point of getting rid of a lawn was no more mowing, plus a lot of it is sloped so mowing would not be easy anyway. I can investigate myself but are you aware of a lower growing clover maybe 8" max so it's that compromise between my tree-hugger side and the social necessities?
I think Dutch white is the best due to how cheap it is, but also look into microclover. The seed can be more expensive, but it will definitely sit lower. Thanks for all the rest. Its funny because I express my love for dandelions in probably 10 to 15 videos, but if you say one bad thing about them, all the pitchforks come out! Wonderful plant, I LOVE dandelions guys, put down your pitchforks! Lol
@@CanadianPermacultureLegacy OK thanks soooo much! I will look into both Dutch white clover AND microclover. Probably the expense will be worth it for my little front yard. I think my mainstream neighbors might go for their pitchforks if the clover is too high in my front yard. :-).....Hmmm reading that the microclover flowers much less.
@@JWHealing I have microclover and it flowers quite a lot in my lawn. Have to wear sandals because even with précautions I have stepped on some rightly vengeful bees.
Did you ever find any short ground cover that satisfies the city/HOA/neighbors? The citation guy goes around with his little ruler and takes his job seriously! I spread mulch over most the front yard but not all was cardboarded first and as he mentioned weeds have found a way
A lot of those plants look like fall blooming goldenrods that will bloom later. I love your philosophy and your garden is a beautiful nature's chaos! I live in the US desert Southwest and love all the wild grasses that grow here, some of the exotics like Johnsongrass, I pull but let most of the natives grow. I am impressed with your clover and strawberries and stream. Here, our average rainfall is 8 inches which means some years we get less and some years more but maby most in one huge summer monsoon which runs off quickly. Please keep the videos coming.
Greetings from Nova Scotia! Early last summer I totally abandoned mowing the grass in my country garden and it seemed almost instantly I had bees and ladybugs everywhere and right up until it snowed I had bees working what I once thought were useless weeds. The immediate result was far more berries and far less troublesome insects doing damage. I read somewhere that we must choose between mowed lawns and bees because grass has nothing to offer bees but starvation!
Good lessons here, as always. I told my husband that grass is for livestock, and since we don't have any, we don't need. it. I don't think he's buying it yet. LOL Our yard naturally went to cover without us having to seed it. I love it! Like you said, the bees love, it and it takes tons of abuse from walking, kids and dog playing, wheelbarrows, etc.
Haha good stuff. Hopefully he comes around. Its quite freeing when the enemy you thought you had is your friend, and you can just get along living together. I love clover, maybe one of my favorite plants. It just makes everything so green. I even grow my tomatoes inside a clover groundcover.
And I should have seen the connection sooner. Sports fields are sown with clover because it withstands foot traffic so well. Why didn't I realize this makes better pathways? Living pathways with living soil under them.
@@CanadianPermacultureLegacy I was already going to get some to plant around my fruit trees for the nitrogen but after seeing your video, I bought a much bigger bag. 👍
Best of luck! Thanks for the comment and best of luck with you and your Hubby! BC is just such a beautiful place. If anywhere could get me to move off my property, it would be convincing my wife to let us move to Courtenay or Chilliwack or Prince Rupert, etc. I honestly feel like I belong in BC! Zone 8 in Canada! With massive mountains for the view and skiing/biking/camping/hiking? I'd love it out there.
You got another subscriber from nothern part of 🇵🇹 Portugal....I just signed a contract to buy 5.8km2 of field used to grow only corn and wine grapes. I have a natural source of water to include small rivers and lakes to do aquaculture and also as a healing ponds for sick fishes I find in poluted rivers and hopefully recover almost extinct species of fresh water fishes , arthopods and clams. Can't wait to start it
Another very helpful video! I always pick up some ideas, even though I live in a very different environment, in the high desert of southern California. I like this version of that saying: “The best fertilizer is the gardener’s own shadow.” 😊
Chop and drop is natures favorite way to fertilize the surface area. (Dropped leaves, failed seedlings, trampled herbs...) When we chop and drop around the plants we want to thrive, we become nature.
"Stuff like this" at 7:12 looks like narrow plantain. It's usually considered a weed but I love it! It's edible (bitter) and a nutrient accumulator. You can use it to chop and drop. I feed it to my rabbits when I harvest hay - they love it. I use young leaves chopped up in salads for myself. The seeds from plantain are a super food like chia seeds and I snack on them when working in the garden. I made a salve out of the leaves for the first time this year using an oil immersion and it's worked well against insect bites including mosquitos. Maybe everyone knows this already but it was a revelation for me when I realized two years ago that so many of the weeds in my garden were beautiful gifts. I hope this is useful to someone.
This video is great for OCD gardeners, learning to work with the Lord's perfect design and stop working against it with our own idea of perfection. Thank you.
Thanks for watching Shea! Yeah it's crazy, most of this stuff works everywhere, because it all addresses root causes of problems, and nature works pretty much the same everywhere. So much of this actually has more to do with a physics style energy maximization perspective. It's just biological processes that drive the conversion processes, but in the end of the day, the more energy you collect, the more work a system can perform. Maybe that's just my background seeing things from a physics perspective, but I think it's really the secret that we need to focus on.
FYI, you will probably really enjoy my video called "this will change how you garden forever", and "how I dealt with pests in my garden". Those are very similar in feel to this one, but expand a bit deeper on those topics.
Look up tapestry lawn for your walk paths. Is usually made up of low growing flowering drought tolerant herbaceous grass and plants. Mine as a ground cover has clover and thyme that are low to no maintenance. Then next year when iRobot comes out with Terra robot lawn mover, my food forest will be wild in the beds and tidy in the pathways. Yes. Here in South Florida rainy summer and hurricane season is beginning so everything is growing wild and I’m way too busy to mow. Luckily my front yard the screen off from the street by permaculture food forest hedges.
Totally agree with your goals. Key understanding that helps achieve this is that there is always limiting factors. Identifying the limiting factors that are easiest or cheapest to address at any moment of intervention will make you a master gardener. Could be water, boron, genetics or a million other things.
This is good systematic level thinking, and is heavily relied upon in engineering. What is the barrier? What is the root cause of that barrier? How to remove the barrier? Are there any detrimental effects if you do remove the barrier? Then try it and observe what happens and adjust plan according to observations.
By watching your channel it is coming to a point that I don’t hate weeds anymore but I am putting either veggies or flowers on every space in my garden. I jammed veggies until there’s no spot for weeds to grow and i am loving the outcome of it. Thanks
Oh for sure. I definitely don't want to imply that we should strive to have "weeds" everywhere, but rather that ANY plant is better than no plant. The only thing I would caution is to place too many "hungry" plants in a dense polyculture. We really do want as many plants that are very hardy in an area, and mix those with some of our hungrier plants (who tend to be water-heavy veggies like tomatoes). It just so happens that many weeds enjoy the nutrient depleted cracks in sidewalks, so they are perfectly happy drilling deep taproots and not competing with others. So just be careful cramming a spot full of tomatoes growing around tulips and hydrangeas and dhalias. They may not all get along, cuz they may all be greedy mofos.
Permaculture is what I've been working towards before I knew what it was. Now that I know I work towards it daily. Thank you for your informative videos :)
Indeed it's all just a name. Anyone working moving to sustainable gardening and then taking the first steps from sustainability towards regeneration are doing permaculture whether they know it or not. Some of the most regenerative farmers on the planet refuse to be called permaculturists (see Sepp Holzer), but everything they do is rooted in permaculture principles. I'm okay with people just being radicalized planet savers and not putting a label on it.
Something to consider: poison ivy loves calcium deficient soil. Dandelions love compacted soils. A system called Read Your (the?) Weeds may benefit your gardens.
Great video thank you !! I spent the whole day yesterday pulling out grass roots by hand lol. You've just convinced me to carry on mulching it and stop pulling it ! Much love from South Africa :)
Just one caution... this method works when new plants germinate and pop up. However, if the source of the new plant is a rhizome runner from an established plant, then it will be a nonstop battle. For example, my Bermuda grass creeps in from the lawn. If I would just chop and drop the runnered new grass shoot, then the host plant (my lawn) will just send infinite new plants in. I actually won't starve the plant out via chop and drop, because I'm only ever cutting a fraction of a percent of the overall plant. So specifically for grasses, it can sometimes me with rooting up the rhizomes underground, then trying to block off the host plant from the rest of the garden using a rhizome barrier underground. This can be a plastic barrier, or a natural one such as my comfrey border/wall.
For the last couple of years, I have been planting huckleberries (mostly _Vaccinium ovatum,_ but a couple of _V. membranaceum,_ as well) in the bare ground under a small grove of _Thuja plicata._ I had added a layer of wood chips beneath the trees that seemed to perk up the red cedar. The huckleberries seem to be thriving, so I keep adding more and more. This spring, I planted three Aquilegia on the eastern edge of the bare patch. They seem to be very happy. I'm on the northernmost edge of the Olympic Peninsula in western Washington State, USA - right across the Strait from Victoria, BC.
Yeah, it's a sweet location. I was looking out to BC when I first wanted to buy, somewhere around Abbotsford. There is this warm zone that cuts in from the ocean, and it is zone 8 in some places. Man, that would be nice!
Apparently the deworming medications given to horses can cause problems in garden soil; they can kill the nematodes, which messes up the soil ecology and not much will grow, as you mention at about 15:00. I'm told the manure should compost until all your local weeds start growing on the pile before it's "safe" to put into the garden. Haven't tested this out personally, though.
Definitely. I like to let it sit at least a year. Learned my lesson from that one patch for sure. I didn't mention the nematode thing, but antibiotics can also sometimes remain active. That's obviously very bad for soils.
Be also aware of Grazon, an aminopyralid-based toxin from Dow AgroSciences. A recently released herbicide designed for hay growers and cattle farmers. The toxin could continue killing plants for years, even after being eaten by animals, then excreted, then composted for months. That means you could buy a load of compost, manure or hay and KILL YOUR WHOLE GARDEN if it's contaminated with it. (it's been banned in the UK since 2008 but is still legal in USA)
I think it depends. I don't put my dog poop on there anyways. I just put it out back in the wilder area. It still turns to soil, but I don't have to worry about any of this stuff. I get tons of free nutrient from other sources, I don't worry about the dog poop. It ends up making some wild trees stronger.
Definitely. I love dandelions! I think this video was the one where I said they were ugly? In my head when I was saying that, I was pretending to be a new gardener "but they are uuugly". But it didn't come across clearly enough in the video. I definitely love dandelions. ❤
Stefan sobkowiak told a very beautiful thing that every weed is an indicator of soil health for example if a deep taproot or a strong hold root having weed is planted in a area that means that soil needs air inside it .
Exactly this. I've done a few videos on ecological transition, and that's basically what the weed is telling you... what part of the ecological transition phase you are in. A good example of that is in this video ua-cam.com/video/B5NbybtxG7Q/v-deo.html
So glad you talked about your "walking paths!" I was just thinking of planting clover (currently just wood chips) in all of my paths. Now I will ;) Opps stepped on a bee! ha ha ha well memories of a bi gone era :) How did you plant the clover? Did you just broadcast it?
It even better, learn to see the value in it, then use that value in a way that benefits you, and turn a problem into a solution. Stuff wants to regrow in all my paths? Cool. Let it be clover then. Sow it thick. Now when I mow it, it disassociates nitrogen clusters and fertilizes all the other plants around it. Just gotta think outside the box.
Good video :) it is nice to see a transition from the city person to a nature lover. This kind of stuff 7.12 is a medicinal plant - Plantago lanceolata and the next you pull 9.00 is some kind of violets (in Poland bloom much earlier than any flowers) not sure the exact variety, but the ones I have are all edible - flowers and leaves. Both plants very beneficial for the insects, let your paths be more than one species, clover is great, but monoculture of it is worse than letting it be mixed with other plants. I would say know your weeds - most of them are beneficial. Great job!
Totally agree with everything. I'm looking for more nice groundcovers to mix in with the clover. I have native stuff like creeping Charlie that people hate for some reason. Bees love it and thats good enough for me. There is mint in there, vetch, purslane, dandelion etc. Lots of goodies in those pathways. The clover is just the nitrogen fixer keeping them all pumpin.
Herbicides was never a problem for us. My dad said as far back as we can remember we use horse manure from mennonite farms or local farms we know have a well, that way we know for sure the manure will be aged, dry and pesticide free.
I keep trying to get white clover going in my woodchipped paths but it's a struggle with dogs plus kids. Nothing grows in them bc of foot traffic. I love that you've gotten yours to establish so well :) appreciate your perspective and experience. Cool to see the progress.
My wife and I were fortunate enough to have started a permaculture on our property in Mississippi and we have moved five years later to Massachusetts and get to start all over. Sadly we left a lot of hard work and productive plants and trees behind, all of them actually. But we learned a lot and we get to put it into action without making many of the mistakes we made in the previous five years
I'm wondering about the wood chip paths as a method for soil building. I saw a video where someone dug deep trenches for their paths and then backfilled with wood chips and greens in layers, and over time that created incredibly nutrient rich soil in the area that holds more water than any soil around it and acts as a reservoir in a somewhat dry climate. Do you still think that green paths have an advantage on this approach? The video in question is called Hugel Swale Paths with Matthew Trumm--Regenerative Soil. I'd really love your input on this as I've been considering doing this in my Mediterranean climate where we need all the water we can get during dry months
I think the wood chip path, even a composting in the path method, those work best for annual gardens where you are constantly amending beds. The green paths (my method in this video) work best if you don't need to be doing yearly scoop outs in your path for soil building. A food forest doesn't need that much constant fertility work. It accomplishes it more with just adding woodchips on top of the actual food forest, leaf drop from the trees, chop and drop from the sacrificial plants and nitrogen fixers. A forest just doesn't need that much constant fertility added all the time that would be from making a composting walking path. It doesn't need or want it. Trees would be pushing roots into that space, and you would be doing too much damage, for work that isn't needed.
Indeed, 98% of what is on my cold hardy climate channel is going to be applicable anywhere on the world, because that's just how nature works. The only stuff that won't be directly applicable are the specific species of plants I am using. I am always a fan of using local species, as they have adapted and evolved to thrive in your specific climate, your specific soil chemistry, your specific insect load, wind, sun, rain, pH, trace elements in the soil, etc.
Thank you for these helpful videos! I'm saving to buy some land to do this. Already started planning I can't wait. Just hope I can find something affordable with these insane prices
That flower gap you mention is why i don't stay on top of chopping all my comfrey. Its flowers are hugely popular with bumblebees and such this time of year. So, maybe leave some of your comfrey to flower? Forgot to add that I appreciate you sharing your experience with the wood chip paths as I was contemplating going that route in certain areas of our garden.
I actually have quite a few comfrey in the backyard that is flowering. I think from now on I ever harvest every other one instead, to uniformly keep some flowers up everywhere. That's a great suggestion, I will definitely do it thanks!
I am convinced I can do this and hope to buy a piece of land in Portugal . There is a hell of a lot of work to be done on the site but I think it will work out good Where could I sign up for courses , I am living in Germany as the moment
The front yard of our urban home has started to look a lot like your grown in walking paths and it's not because of permaculture. For a number of reasons, we've had to bring heavy equipment into our back yard and the only access we have is by driving over our frontage. We're also blessed with heavy clay soil so couple that with our recent extremely dry summers and you can imagine what's growing out there. The best I can say is it's mowed and mostly green, at least in the spring. I'm beginning to suspect, that in order to replace our lawn with any kind of ground covers, I'm going to have to dig in a whole lot of soil amendments, which in turn means removing a lot of the "soil" we have in order to make room for it. (we can't afford to add any height to our soil level because our 1920's house is already low in comparison) Any suggestions on what kind of ground cover could be used in clay soils? I refuse to waste water on something as unnecessary as a grass lawn.
I don't have heavy clay, so take this with a grain of salt, but my understanding is that daikon radishes are amazing for changing clay into a loam. You will always have clay, it will just act more like a balanced soil in terms of drainage.
@@CanadianPermacultureLegacy Thank you for the information. I know I'm going to have to do this in manageable sections so I'll try tilling in some compost into an area and planting Daikon. At least that gives me a place to start.
Did you just throw the clover seeds directly over the mulch? I purchased some clover seeds in some areas that I put down mulch, I was planning on shoveling out the mulch. If I could seed the clover without so much labor, that would be great!
Yeppers. Its definitely better to pull back mulch and plant the clover, but throwing some on the mulch then just giving it a good shake and a good soak, will carry most of the seed down to the soil. Clover is very hardy and will germinate like this still. It will be sliiiightly more expensive on the seed side, but will save tens of hours of work, depending on the size of your setup. Welllllll worth it IMO.
I've had grass fields and grass paths for decades now. I won't cut it till I've harvested my Dandelions in mid spring, then I only cut it 2 or 3 times a year, but in sections so I can save and transplant plants that are welcome as they pop up, I put them on the edge of paths and they never get cut again. You mentioned strangling vines, I'm plagued with them, they grow so fast and like you said there's nothing worse than walking in tall growth and running into poison ivy or even a thick nettle patch on my journeys to rid the trees of this vine. Anyways nice place you got there. It's good to see young folk engaged in this, I was young as you when I started and going on 45 years of this type of living in a small town and my kids show no interest in any of it and I'm getting too old to maintain it much longer. It will just be left to run wild when the time comes to hang up my rake and shovel. Cheers.
Oh wow, I hope you stick around and watch more of my videos. I could learn a thing or two from you, I am sure of that! I love your philosophy of getting use out of volunteers and turning them into border plants. It's always fun to see what nature gifts to you, finding value in something, and then finding it a proper home. I love it. Thanks for watching. I hope you decide to join my community here and teach me a thing or two now and again. Thanks Roy 🤗
Great news that I'm popping up on new peoples feeds. That means the channel is starting to take its hold. I hope I can teach you something new, and also maybe inspire you to start a permaculture garden of your own!
Everything can be a resource. Dandylions for animals like meat rabbits, ducks or chickens. Trimmings from mulberry, apples, pears could be a chop and drop mulch, feed for rabbits or can be dried to use as a tree hay in winter. So many options!
I’d like to have year round flowers one day. Right now I have bees loving the California lilac, walker’s low catmint, English thyme, lavender, sage, roses, thornless blackberries. Sadly, my attempt at early spring flowers, flowering red currant, seems to have died. Zone 8b.
Ooh bermuda grass! In NZ, it is called either couch or twitch but either way its hideous. My section of land was a paddock for stock, so its filled with clover (great) and bermuda grass (not so great). I'm using sheet mulches and also using clover and reseeding annuals (eg nasturtium, phalacia) as a ground cover. I doubt that will be enough to stop the grass coming back though. I see you are weeding it. What are your recommendations for dealing with it? Thanks, from NZ.
Honestly, nothing will REALLY work. The best thing I've found is to plant a polyculture where it grows, native grasses and low groundcovers... then along the edge of all my beds I now put a wall of comfrey.
I looked after my lawn for 20 years, beautiful tough grass. Now I am digging it up for a rather mixed up veggie garden. No dig will not work with this grass. I cover the dug up area with cardboard and put grow tubes 1 cm above the cardboard and plant my veggies inside the tubes. I only water inside the grow tubes as Cape Town South Africa almost ran dry 2 years ago. This will be a new way to grow veggies in dry places.
For the no-dig thing... I talk about that in a video here on "4 bad things you can do once", where I talk about starting with a double deep till. It could be something to consider, depending on how far along you are and how big your project will be. At least trial it in spots if compaction is really bad. Systematic tilling is bad, but sometimes a one-time till can be the correct thing to do. ua-cam.com/video/YOllAJgqs_Q/v-deo.html
I pair columbine with bee balm... Both make good tea and both spread without help... Columbine blooms june through july, and and bee balm july through August.
I actually followed up with my sister after this video and she has Columbine. It will definitely be one of the flowers I add. Thanks for the suggestion, I will definitely do it.
There is a seed company near me who does this kind of thing. I have been meaning to get seed from them for a year now. So many priorities, so many projects to complete.
I’m trying to turn my permaculture veggie garden into a food forest. I don’t know how to combine cardboard and straw mulch (like Ruth Stout method) with no-till living paths and ground covers?
Its honestly not as complicated as it may seem. The living mulches can be sown right into the straw and will eventually kind of take it over. What you will have is something like clover living in top of a straw mulch. The clover roots will find the soil under it. Then in the dormant season you can add thin layers of new straw right on top of the clover. The clover will find sunlight here and there and eventually get back up through it and on top of it. This is what plants are meant to do. Any clover that gets smothered will die, shed roots (and N nodules) and basically be "tilled under" but without tilling. More clover seed can always be thrown right over the straw if you were to go too thick and smother it completely in areas. But given time, even if you didn't re seed, clover (a spreading groundcover) will do what all groundcovers do.... spread.
Thanks! I really enjoy your content as im from shuswap bc... its nice to see canadian forest gardens. Im planning my food forest, wondering if you seed for clover on existing walking paths, does it grow through constant traffic??
Yeah that stuff is crazy resilient. If you can, keep off it until it establishes, but I have so many places that I've sowed it and walked all over it from day 1, and it pushes through it no problem. Thanks for watching! I'm super jealous, BC is probably the most beautiful part of Canada, and warm zones too, depending on where you are. Kolona area is a bit cooler. I was looking to buy out in chilliwack or Abbotsford (going exclusively based on Agricultural zone), and I thought that was far enough from Vancouver to get some land and a decent place for a decent price. Nope. Insane prices.
@@CanadianPermacultureLegacy yeah the fraser Valley prices are crazy... we looked there too! We are close to salmon arm... its beautiful, the most biodiverse area in all of BC. Love it here! Ill try planting clover... do you have any western canadian seed companies you prefer??
@@teeshastutzman2717 no, because I really prioritize buying local, so I support Ontario seed Company a lot. For trees though, I have bought from treetime.ca and they are in Alberta. Kinda close to you. Sorta not really. About as close as some of the super cold hardy Quebec nurseries are to me I suppose. Those Quebecquers really have great cold hardy trees.
This was quite helpful as I’m just starting my food forest and thought of mulching my walking paths with wood chips. After what I just learned from you I won’t do that anymore and instead will spend my money on more plants. 😊 Thank you!
Still useful to mulch paths with woodchips, and some people will then use the woodchips in the path to put onto the gardens as half broken down chips. However, I would recommend also sowing some clover or something into the pathways. The woodchips can still be there, because they will also help reduce compaction. Just also sow clover. You can throw some down then a few inches of chips on top and they will push up through them. Then end of season you can sow a little more down right on top and the rains will bring it down to the soil level.
Cannot believe you said the area full of dandelions looks "disgusting". What is so disgusting about it? That they are beautiful, bright, cheerful, yellow flowers that feed you and thousands of bees???
Hey, I love dandelions. Like love love, LOVE them. I didn't mean it how you took it (my fault). I meant more like I was talking through someone else's perspective, you know? Like "ew gross". Maybe it didn't come across well. I have ranted many times before about how we hate a plant that is fully edible, food for bees, early spring food no less, when it is most needed. I kick dandelions like I'm in kindergarten, trying to spread the seed everywhere. Love love love them.
Are you sure that "lovage" near the beginning (at ~2:50) isn't Valerian? With it just starting to flower, the scent would have been a big tip-off. Leaf shape is different too.
Definitely valerian. I have gotten much better over the years. I was still learning a few of my plants, ajd valerian and lovage were brand new to me at this point.
We generally do value that. Many people also understand that pretty much everything was non native at one point. Just because it has been native for 500 years doesn't mean it's native. That's why there is the saying "native to when?". There are nasty invssives like Dog Strangling Vine, Kudzu, black wattle, soapbush. These things strangle out ecosystems and kill life. Then there are plants on invasive lists like seabuckthorn, which builds soil, and its entire goal in its life is to turn devastated land into a healthy forest and cede back and die once that is done. Humans have destroyed out forests, clear-cut and destroyed our soils. Just because something does a very good job at fixing that and restoring our soils, doesn't mean it should be invasive just because it grows well on dead soil. It's only temporarily invasive, and if it's healing the planet quickly, then we literally need that right now as a matter of existential crisis. Nothing is black and white. For deer, I have tons of deer, but not really a problem. I talk about this in a few videos but maybe I will make a video exclusively about it.
What kind of plants do you use on the edges of your newly mulched and planted area to keep the root growing grasses from creeping in at the sides. Iam thinking Jerusalem artichoke, comfrey? More ideas?
A weed by one definition I've heard is any plant growing someplace you don't want it to. Once I found out that dandelions were not the enemy my life has become easier.
I have my off-grid property in the south of Portugal (Alentejo) , were the temperature reaches 47c on the summer (the well dryed on the spring) and in the winter around 1 or 2C with occasionally some frost. Now the question is, if I stop to use mulch paths and leave it to grow wild is it not gonna deplet more the water table?
No, because the leaves will transpire. Well, more accurately, yes it will in the very short term. However it will be beneficial in the long term. Sometimes it's easier to see something if you consider the opposite scenario. For example... The worst scenario for dryness is bare soil no plants. (i.e. desert). So yes, having plants, anywhere, is better for the water cycle.
Excellent videos! I've watched 2 from the last 6 months and am now subscribed. I noticed that you haven't mentioned irrigation. Do you irrigate? If so, how? Thanks!
Not really. I do my swales, which catch a ton of water in the snow melts, and spring rains. Then summer gets really dry, but the woodchip mulch helps. Then fall rains come and I'm good. The last 2 years I watered only 1 time each, ajd did it with my house hose. I know we get good rainfall here, but swales are honestly amazing water storage systems. I made a few swale videos if you are interested. They work best in dry climates actually, which may seem counter intuitive. But they recharge underground aquifers.
Greetings, I'm new to permaculture, and started a food forest this year. I have been sheet-mulching with woodchips, and have designated walking paths as you describe. Your point "nature will put a plant there" makes a lot of sense. I like the idea of the clover paths that you have. Can I just throw clover seeds on top of the woodchips, and they eventually sprout? Or am I going to need to remove the woodchips? I know planting into woodchips is wrong, that we need to plant into the soil, but from what you shown it looks as though the woodchips are still there under the clover. It's been a lot of work to put them down, I'm sure you're aware, so I am hesitant to remove them. I will if I have to, of course. Thanks. Wisconsin, zone 5a.
Clover of all things can do okay sowed directly into wood chips because they are Nitrigen fixers and can get what they need from the air. So they do okay. I have myself sowed clover directly into woodchips and they grew. That being said, optimal way could be to pull back *some* chips, sow clover and let it get strong this season. Then after they go dormant in the fall, increase the chips a bit. With a strong root system they will have no problem at all pushing up through the chips. And just do this each season. Add a little more chips, and build that mulch layer, but a bit by bit only, so you dont smother them. Maybe 2 inches per year is no problem.
Wood chips do a really good job of building soil structure, and combined with the nitrogen from the clovers, the carbon and nitrogen ratio is perfect to "compost" with over the top soil. I plan on having a meadow like system where I live once I pull out all the invasive ice plant
It's not really a problem. The pathways have living roots in them and even when they are flooded, we don't really get any mud. I don't trample around out there though. If you have a heavily traffic area that you need to walk in when it's soaking wet, then I would recommend mulching with woodchips and then sowing clover into the woodchips, and add a few more woodchips in the winter when the clover is sleeping. Not a ton, enough that it can push back up through it. Walking on roots and woodchips will prevent mud problems. The other option if for whatever reason that doens't work, would be to hardscape it, and maybe line the edge with a french drain to allow the water to drain off the path.
A lot of new people seem to be finding me through this video. Glad you enjoyed. Make sure you check out my video called "This will change how you garden forever". It has my main rules to follow, and explanations why this all works. You should enjoy it a lot :)
Thanks for your knowledge.....you’ve been an inspiration for our piece of land, I intend on doing something similar as what you’ve done to your pond and falls to mine ... as soon as I can find the massive rocks you have that makes yours look like you found a natural oasis .....any suggestions to where I might be able to start looking.... keep pushing !!! You’re doing it!
I always like going local, especially for something as big as rocks. I would just start calling around landscaping businesses and see what kind of rock they can get a hold of.
I sheet mulched with newspaper and woodchips 3 years ago and bindweed has taken over. Could I cut it back and throw down clover seed in order to take up the space? Will it out compete the bindweed as well as fix nitrogen?
Not much will outcompete the bindweed, but if you get a nice short clover and sow that in, and mow repeatedly at a height just above the clover, then the bindweed can be used as a organic matter booster for fertility, and the clover can coexist with it. You likely won't be able to eradicate the bindweed, but you can learn to live with it and not hate it. I haven't dealt with it directly myself, so take that all with a grain of salt. I just know its reputation. Whatever you do, don't till or dig in the area, or you will just multiply it. Another thing that can work is a full season reset. A thick dark tarp for a full season will kill everything underneath it. Then resow the aea to clover next spring. It's not nice having a giant tarp there (and they can be expensive!), but that will kill anything.
Trust me, if there's someone who values weeds it's me. If you ever hear me call something a weed, you'll know I'm "air quoting" the word "weed" super hard. You'll see that as you get into more of my videos. Some of my favorite plants: Purslane, Lambs Quarter, Plantain, Comfrey, Dandelion, Amaranth, Clover, Creeping Charlie, Garlic Mustard, so many plants that people call weeds which are amazing plants.
To be honest my flower game need work. If anyone has any suggestions I would love to hear them. Ideally they are edibles or medicinals also. It's also likely that these problems are already solved with wildflower hill that I planted out. It's just starting to come up now.
@@CanadianPermacultureLegacy I'm in zone 6a in Washington and we have chives, poppies, and iris in bloom. I've been working on propagating them since the deer leave them alone and the pollinators love them.
@@CanadianPermacultureLegacy I'd reccomend some false indigo. Mine blooms May to early June in zone 5b in shaded areas. Nitrogen fixer, good at attracting pollinators, and numerous supposed medicial applications per Native Americans -sore throat, vomiting, cleansing wounds, et. al.
I'm not sure to be honest, because clover is just so perfect for it. Anything with a large broad leaf that grows short is going to work well. The large broad leaf helps it resist foot traffic (similar to a snow show by distributing weight and impact). Short growth is handy for pathways, but more importantly it means that the stem won't snap.
If I were looking for bee forage at the end of the daffodil season I'd look at the trees. Maple flowers aren't showy, but are good nectar producers. Looking at the landscape from the bees perspective really changes what you value. Pussy willow is the earliest pollen source, so swampy ground is good. Sumac produces nectar at about the #100 honey/acre rate. Red maple has long nectar season and is generous. Sugar maple is the least value maple. The timber value of a tree is usually a small fraction of its bee forage value (or grazing value), so if you like trees but have to justify the carrying costs...
After many very short-staffed & tough yrs on our family farm, by the time I met my now-husband, we had small ( up to at least 3 feet tall !) trees & weeds growing on the top of some of our chopper boxes ( metal box on wheels, open to the front, for transporting & unloading chopped hay ( haylage ) ) ... growing in a few inches of old chaff & what-not, on top of the roof. I don't know that anyone ever did do anything about them...
Hahaha awesome. Nature is nuts. There was a 6 foot tall tree growing out of a streetlamp post 1 inch crack where it meets the pavement. Found that at work.
I agree and I actually said that in the video :) I said the whole part is edible, flower, leaves, roots, stem. Also early bee food when they have almost nothing to eat. Amazing plant.
Thanks, great video. That's a beautiful place. Good lesson on cramming plants everywhere. One suggestion: the shakiness of the camera while you were moving around I found rather unpleasant. I would recommend a gimbal or tripod. But besides that it was great thanks
Thanks, I have one. Sometimes when I'm out harvesting or planting I only have my phone with me, and I think of something just start filming. I will be better about going inside to grab the gimbal.
Q: I read that slugs like clover, and there is a major slug issue here. They ate anything I tried to plant when we first moved to our new place in July 2020. We killed the sod with cardboard and mulch and wondering - would the clover bring more slugs or fill them up so they don’t eat our other plants? Also, do your other plants require multiple loads of mulch by chance? Was watching a permaculture video and they kept 6” of mulch on pathways and once a year old, scooped it onto the beds, replaced the mulch. Sounds like a ton of work!!!
For the mulch question that entirely depends on how fast it breaks down. How fast it breaks down depends on many things - type of trees in the mulch, parts of the trees in it (is it just heartwood or is there a lot of leaves and twigs and bark), amount of sun it gets, amount of moisture it gets (maybe the most important thing). If you have a really dry place that is either super cool or super hot and your woodchips are all heartwood chunks (like you'd buy at home depot), then it may take 2 years to break down. If it's all cedar or locust, it may take 10 years to break down. However if the mulch is a nice mix of species, and a mix of types of wood with lots of leaves and branches, and you get a lot of rain and warm (but not scorching) temps, then your mulch may break down in 3 months. Using woodchips in pathways and scooping them out on the beds is a great idea. And honestly it's a little work - not as much as you think - but what's more work, an hour in the fall or weeding your paths all year long? Then those weeds creep into the garden beds, etc. My opinion only: no matter how much work doing mulch is, it's WAY less work than the alternative of weeding all year long. For slugs, I'm not sure. We get some slugs, and they eat some stuff, but so do other things. And I'm sure birds are eating the slugs. I think they are part of a healthy ecosystem. If you get a ton of slugs though, you can lay down planks of wood at night and the slugs love the environment under the board. Early in the morning go lift up the board and they are all there. Go scoop them up and do whatever you want with them.
@@CanadianPermacultureLegacy thank you! Maybe I’m all mulched out from our recent truckload of mulch (hours and hours of wheelbarrowing). Definitely happy to have it as an option but wondering if it is possible to eventually have a system that doesn’t require 37 truckloads of mulch? (That’s the number they used!) do you still need to bring in mulch or are you now at a point where you can just use chop and drop?
I mostly chop and drop older areas. I may add some chips to some spots of the 4 year old garden. I mainly get woodchips now because I'm expanding so much constantly.
Namaskaram, I am contemplating a lot about paths. As I mentioned we are mostly on a rather steep slope, +20°, so especially during the wet part of the year, lets say from october to february march, the grassland we inherited, which is a polyculture with lots of mosses inside, becomes just a slippery slide. We need to use these paths quite a bit, especially with loaded wheel barrows, so we were thinking to woodchip them as this should provide a firmer path. I really love your solution of having green paths, but would clover survive a full on pushing wheel barrow road or would it just slide away as well?
Do both! I use clover in my footpaths and my garden, and in my garden they are planted right into several inches of woodchips. I literally just scatter them right on top, and they will grow into it. That's the nice thing about clover - it can get it's nitrogen from the air. So get a few inches of woodchips down on your path and scatter clover seeds right on top. The clover and woodchip combo will withstand food traffic really well, and yes even wheelbarrow traffic. Where it gets worn down a bit, it will just creep and re-fill - that's the nice thing about using a ground cover - it just re-fills in open holes.
I try to fill in before the sheep's sorel take over the place but man this plant is hard to control and I think it strangle to death everything in it's path, even raspberry. I have put a thick wood chip mat on top and it is beginning to coming out of it. I don't care for a lot of "weeds". But this one, it is insane.
Just remember, no plant can survive constant harvest of leaves and being starved of photosynthesis. Some will really hold on and fight for their lives but nothing, nothing at all can survive that if you keep on top of it. Often it just comes down to how much you have and how much time you can devote to managing it. If that's the case then focus on a manageable area and chop and drop that area constantly to kill it. It will give up... eventually. It's just pure energy in vs energy out.
Great info !! I’m in California and star thistle is horrible!! Maybe buy good pasture seed and try to crowd it out? I’m digging it up by hand what I can I’m on 2 acres with animals it’s awful stuff
Remember also, all plants are nature screaming at you, telling you what state the soil is in. Any kind of thistle growth is telling you that the soil is depleted and pioneer plants are growing. Build the fertility of your fields up and the pand will transition past the soil condition that the pioneers germinate in. Lots of woodchips, tons of composting, sow lots of nitrogen fixing plants like clovers and vetch and cow pea. Your field soil will build in fertility and your land will transition into Savannah and scrub land.
Canadian Permaculture Legacy ok I’ll do that I have a lot of walnut trees I heard they kill plants around them I just found your channel thank you! I’m learning!!
Yeah, walnuts have juglone. The highest concentration is in the husks of the nuts, in the nuts, and in the leaves, in that order. And each one is about 10x more than the next. So as long as you are able to get the nuts and husks off the ground, and as many leaves as you can, then you should be okay. Also for what it's worth, black cap raspberries, currants, paw paws and elderberries are all very tolerant to juglone. Only problem is, you miiiight be a bit too warm for most of those.
What is the tree at 19:10? It looks like it is being smothered by all the tall greenery but I only saw the trunk and not the branches. Did you plant the tall stuff? What is it? I have quite a few areas of my property that stay wet because of the clay layer under the muck lands. So I am interested in what you are growing in your wetlands. Are your wetlands man made or natural? I’m going to try and see if you have a video on what can be grown in wetlands but if you can post a link then I will be sure to find the video. 😊👍
That's a peach. It gets all the sun it could ever want, it's way up above the groundcover layer. I'm not sure if you have seen this one yet, but make sure you check it out. Here's a timestamp where I'm at the same location (that peach you mention): ua-cam.com/video/cFLyGVhu0bY/v-deo.html But the whole video is really important. Those groundcover plants don't starve nutrients to the peach. Much the opposite, they are feeding root exudates (sugars) to feed the soil life, and the peach tree can now use that soil life to go get nutrients and make them bioavailable for it. The peach has no concerns about plants underneath it, only plants above it which may shade it. If you want to see a better view of that peach, check out this video here: ua-cam.com/video/QTg520N44JE/v-deo.html. That's a time stamp about 20 sec before I sit down on the swing there. The peach in question is at 31:20, towards the top right of the screen. No shade at all is being cast on it from the understory layer. It's happy to be "smothered". :)
Nature uses fire 🔥too, so a flame thrower used on poisonous plants would probably be within permaculture bounds 🤷🏻♀️ The “weed” flowers fill in those gaps for your pollinators it seems. Thanks for sharing your learning curve. I enjoy David The Goods approach and his is more like natures too, and in a subtropical climate it requires a lot of work or a monoculture to keep things “perfect” to human eyes. TY again.
Indeed, excellent point. I had about a 2 minute segment discussing that, but it hit the editing room floor... video was a bit long. Indeed, lightning does this naturally in nature (and much less efficiently), and the making of biochar is essentially the "controlled burns" of the forestry service, but done in VERY controlled way. A blowtorch is a method many permies do to control weeds, and will actually release less carbon than chopping and dropping. It just gets a bit hard to do without damaging nearby plants.
You aren't kidding! My chives are flowering like crazy. I keep meaning to expand them, but I always eat them all! I should give them a season break and work on expanding to make more of them, so that I always have a silly amount of surplus!
Thanks! I have some younger ones that are still developing. That's good news. My sage is also now flowering and looking all awesome. It looks like it was really only about a 1 week dead window. I added a bunch of stuff and am interested to seeing if I covered that window next year.
I know you're getting grief from lots of permaculture enthusiasts for mentioning the weed reputation of dandelions BUT I really appreciated the dual perspectives you mention in this video. In my front yard I plan to wood chip the whole thing (already 1/2 done) but it is my front yard and we do have an HOA (though less-psycho-than-most) and curb appeal does matter both to my neighbors (two of whom will be selling within the next few years) and to me in this case. Unlike you we only have 1/4 acre properties, so much more of that front-yard-as-showpiece vibe. The woodchips I have down already mostly I didn't do cardboard underneath but I plan to do cardboard underneath for the rest since I'd like to have the grass die underneath. The idea of seeding the woodchips with clover seed all over or just on the rows for walking sounds interesting to me but only if it's a naturally low enough variety so no mowing needed ever. Aside from obvious soil building benefits, that was part of the selling point of getting rid of a lawn was no more mowing, plus a lot of it is sloped so mowing would not be easy anyway. I can investigate myself but are you aware of a lower growing clover maybe 8" max so it's that compromise between my tree-hugger side and the social necessities?
I think Dutch white is the best due to how cheap it is, but also look into microclover. The seed can be more expensive, but it will definitely sit lower.
Thanks for all the rest. Its funny because I express my love for dandelions in probably 10 to 15 videos, but if you say one bad thing about them, all the pitchforks come out!
Wonderful plant, I LOVE dandelions guys, put down your pitchforks! Lol
@@CanadianPermacultureLegacy OK thanks soooo much! I will look into both Dutch white clover AND microclover. Probably the expense will be worth it for my little front yard. I think my mainstream neighbors might go for their pitchforks if the clover is too high in my front yard. :-).....Hmmm reading that the microclover flowers much less.
@@JWHealing I have microclover and it flowers quite a lot in my lawn. Have to wear sandals because even with précautions I have stepped on some rightly vengeful bees.
Did you ever find any short ground cover that satisfies the city/HOA/neighbors? The citation guy goes around with his little ruler and takes his job seriously! I spread mulch over most the front yard but not all was cardboarded first and as he mentioned weeds have found a way
A lot of those plants look like fall blooming goldenrods that will bloom later. I love your philosophy and your garden is a beautiful nature's chaos! I live in the US desert Southwest and love all the wild grasses that grow here, some of the exotics like Johnsongrass, I pull but let most of the natives grow. I am impressed with your clover and strawberries and stream. Here, our average rainfall is 8 inches which means some years we get less and some years more but maby most in one huge summer monsoon which runs off quickly. Please keep the videos coming.
Finally a Canadian permaculture !
Stefen sobkowiak has one as well
Greetings from Nova Scotia! Early last summer I totally abandoned mowing the grass in my country garden and it seemed almost instantly I had bees and ladybugs everywhere and right up until it snowed I had bees working what I once thought were useless weeds. The immediate result was far more berries and far less troublesome insects doing damage. I read somewhere that we must choose between mowed lawns and bees because grass has nothing to offer bees but starvation!
Peach on! Glad to hear the results are exactly what I would expect them to be. :)
The bees (and many other valuable insects) thank you!
carriad11, good advice. Happy 2021.
1:36 “Untidiness is good natural order, tidiness is maintained disorder” Bill Mollison
Good lessons here, as always. I told my husband that grass is for livestock, and since we don't have any, we don't need. it. I don't think he's buying it yet. LOL Our yard naturally went to cover without us having to seed it. I love it! Like you said, the bees love, it and it takes tons of abuse from walking, kids and dog playing, wheelbarrows, etc.
Haha good stuff. Hopefully he comes around. Its quite freeing when the enemy you thought you had is your friend, and you can just get along living together. I love clover, maybe one of my favorite plants. It just makes everything so green.
I even grow my tomatoes inside a clover groundcover.
Man! The time, money, and effort you just saved me!
And I should have seen the connection sooner. Sports fields are sown with clover because it withstands foot traffic so well. Why didn't I realize this makes better pathways? Living pathways with living soil under them.
@@CanadianPermacultureLegacy I was already going to get some to plant around my fruit trees for the nitrogen but after seeing your video, I bought a much bigger bag. 👍
I really enjoyed this. My husband and I are starting to regenerate a property in BC. I am studying permaculture design. Your place looks great!
Best of luck! Thanks for the comment and best of luck with you and your Hubby! BC is just such a beautiful place. If anywhere could get me to move off my property, it would be convincing my wife to let us move to Courtenay or Chilliwack or Prince Rupert, etc. I honestly feel like I belong in BC! Zone 8 in Canada! With massive mountains for the view and skiing/biking/camping/hiking? I'd love it out there.
You got another subscriber from nothern part of 🇵🇹 Portugal....I just signed a contract to buy 5.8km2 of field used to grow only corn and wine grapes. I have a natural source of water to include small rivers and lakes to do aquaculture and also as a healing ponds for sick fishes I find in poluted rivers and hopefully recover almost extinct species of fresh water fishes , arthopods and clams. Can't wait to start it
Good luck! What a fun journey ahead of you!!!!
06:00 “You see nothing but green”
Blue barrel: Am I a joke to you?
LOL.
Another very helpful video! I always pick up some ideas, even though I live in a very different environment, in the high desert of southern California.
I like this version of that saying: “The best fertilizer is the gardener’s own shadow.” 😊
Chop and drop is natures favorite way to fertilize the surface area. (Dropped leaves, failed seedlings, trampled herbs...) When we chop and drop around the plants we want to thrive, we become nature.
It does feel like giving a little love to your baby you are nurturing.
"Stuff like this" at 7:12 looks like narrow plantain. It's usually considered a weed but I love it! It's edible (bitter) and a nutrient accumulator. You can use it to chop and drop. I feed it to my rabbits when I harvest hay - they love it. I use young leaves chopped up in salads for myself. The seeds from plantain are a super food like chia seeds and I snack on them when working in the garden. I made a salve out of the leaves for the first time this year using an oil immersion and it's worked well against insect bites including mosquitos. Maybe everyone knows this already but it was a revelation for me when I realized two years ago that so many of the weeds in my garden were beautiful gifts. I hope this is useful to someone.
Absolutely!
I tried to eat one raw, nope..did not enjoy.
Hello from Abbotsford, B.C. as Joel Salatin say's, "The land doesn't like to be naked".
Lol
This video is great for OCD gardeners, learning to work with the Lord's perfect design and stop working against it with our own idea of perfection. Thank you.
Yeah exactly. Nature is more beautiful than a hard edge and organized garden. That's just my opinion though.
I've noticed the same thing about the lack of flowers in spring but realized that I'm not seeing the small flowers like clover and dandilions.
So many universal lessons in this, even for a bloke from semi-arid/subtropical Australia. Thank you! Subscribed!
Thanks for watching Shea!
Yeah it's crazy, most of this stuff works everywhere, because it all addresses root causes of problems, and nature works pretty much the same everywhere. So much of this actually has more to do with a physics style energy maximization perspective. It's just biological processes that drive the conversion processes, but in the end of the day, the more energy you collect, the more work a system can perform.
Maybe that's just my background seeing things from a physics perspective, but I think it's really the secret that we need to focus on.
FYI, you will probably really enjoy my video called "this will change how you garden forever", and "how I dealt with pests in my garden". Those are very similar in feel to this one, but expand a bit deeper on those topics.
Look up tapestry lawn for your walk paths. Is usually made up of low growing flowering drought tolerant herbaceous grass and plants. Mine as a ground cover has clover and thyme that are low to no maintenance. Then next year when iRobot comes out with Terra robot lawn mover, my food forest will be wild in the beds and tidy in the pathways. Yes. Here in South Florida rainy summer and hurricane season is beginning so everything is growing wild and I’m way too busy to mow. Luckily my front yard the screen off from the street by permaculture food forest hedges.
Totally agree with your goals. Key understanding that helps achieve this is that there is always limiting factors. Identifying the limiting factors that are easiest or cheapest to address at any moment of intervention will make you a master gardener. Could be water, boron, genetics or a million other things.
This is good systematic level thinking, and is heavily relied upon in engineering. What is the barrier? What is the root cause of that barrier? How to remove the barrier? Are there any detrimental effects if you do remove the barrier? Then try it and observe what happens and adjust plan according to observations.
By watching your channel it is coming to a point that I don’t hate weeds anymore but I am putting either veggies or flowers on every space in my garden. I jammed veggies until there’s no spot for weeds to grow and i am loving the outcome of it. Thanks
Oh for sure. I definitely don't want to imply that we should strive to have "weeds" everywhere, but rather that ANY plant is better than no plant.
The only thing I would caution is to place too many "hungry" plants in a dense polyculture. We really do want as many plants that are very hardy in an area, and mix those with some of our hungrier plants (who tend to be water-heavy veggies like tomatoes). It just so happens that many weeds enjoy the nutrient depleted cracks in sidewalks, so they are perfectly happy drilling deep taproots and not competing with others.
So just be careful cramming a spot full of tomatoes growing around tulips and hydrangeas and dhalias. They may not all get along, cuz they may all be greedy mofos.
Canadian Permaculture Legacy ah, ok thanks once again.
Permaculture is what I've been working towards before I knew what it was. Now that I know I work towards it daily. Thank you for your informative videos :)
Indeed it's all just a name. Anyone working moving to sustainable gardening and then taking the first steps from sustainability towards regeneration are doing permaculture whether they know it or not.
Some of the most regenerative farmers on the planet refuse to be called permaculturists (see Sepp Holzer), but everything they do is rooted in permaculture principles.
I'm okay with people just being radicalized planet savers and not putting a label on it.
Thank you Man..!!!
You are soo deep into nature. There is alot to learn from you...
Thanks again.
I appreciate that!
Some Scott's Turf Builder salesmen don't like this video.
Lol, they won't like any of my stuff!
Something to consider: poison ivy loves calcium deficient soil. Dandelions love compacted soils. A system called Read Your (the?) Weeds may benefit your gardens.
Thank you for sharing extremely useful & comprehensive info. Cheers from Australia & subscribed
Thanks for watching :)
Great video thank you !! I spent the whole day yesterday pulling out grass roots by hand lol. You've just convinced me to carry on mulching it and stop pulling it ! Much love from South Africa :)
Just one caution... this method works when new plants germinate and pop up. However, if the source of the new plant is a rhizome runner from an established plant, then it will be a nonstop battle.
For example, my Bermuda grass creeps in from the lawn. If I would just chop and drop the runnered new grass shoot, then the host plant (my lawn) will just send infinite new plants in. I actually won't starve the plant out via chop and drop, because I'm only ever cutting a fraction of a percent of the overall plant.
So specifically for grasses, it can sometimes me with rooting up the rhizomes underground, then trying to block off the host plant from the rest of the garden using a rhizome barrier underground.
This can be a plastic barrier, or a natural one such as my comfrey border/wall.
For the last couple of years, I have been planting huckleberries (mostly _Vaccinium ovatum,_ but a couple of _V. membranaceum,_ as well) in the bare ground under a small grove of _Thuja plicata._ I had added a layer of wood chips beneath the trees that seemed to perk up the red cedar. The huckleberries seem to be thriving, so I keep adding more and more. This spring, I planted three Aquilegia on the eastern edge of the bare patch. They seem to be very happy.
I'm on the northernmost edge of the Olympic Peninsula in western Washington State, USA - right across the Strait from Victoria, BC.
Super cool. Is that zone 7 or so?
@@CanadianPermacultureLegacy Zone 8 - they say 8B, but it's borderline 8A. It's on the coast, but at 500-ft elevation.
Yeah, it's a sweet location. I was looking out to BC when I first wanted to buy, somewhere around Abbotsford. There is this warm zone that cuts in from the ocean, and it is zone 8 in some places. Man, that would be nice!
Apparently the deworming medications given to horses can cause problems in garden soil; they can kill the nematodes, which messes up the soil ecology and not much will grow, as you mention at about 15:00. I'm told the manure should compost until all your local weeds start growing on the pile before it's "safe" to put into the garden. Haven't tested this out personally, though.
Definitely. I like to let it sit at least a year. Learned my lesson from that one patch for sure. I didn't mention the nematode thing, but antibiotics can also sometimes remain active. That's obviously very bad for soils.
Be also aware of Grazon, an aminopyralid-based toxin from Dow AgroSciences. A recently released herbicide designed for hay growers and cattle farmers. The toxin could continue killing plants for years, even after being eaten by animals, then excreted, then composted for months. That means you could buy a load of compost, manure or hay and KILL YOUR WHOLE GARDEN if it's contaminated with it. (it's been banned in the UK since 2008 but is still legal in USA)
Very interesting - I’ve never thought about that before, now what about having dogs with deworming meds?
I think it depends. I don't put my dog poop on there anyways. I just put it out back in the wilder area. It still turns to soil, but I don't have to worry about any of this stuff. I get tons of free nutrient from other sources, I don't worry about the dog poop. It ends up making some wild trees stronger.
But.. wild dandelion fields look absolutely amazing! (also, dandelion wine!)
Definitely. I love dandelions! I think this video was the one where I said they were ugly? In my head when I was saying that, I was pretending to be a new gardener "but they are uuugly". But it didn't come across clearly enough in the video. I definitely love dandelions. ❤
Stefan sobkowiak told a very beautiful thing that every weed is an indicator of soil health for example if a deep taproot or a strong hold root having weed is planted in a area that means that soil needs air inside it .
Exactly this. I've done a few videos on ecological transition, and that's basically what the weed is telling you... what part of the ecological transition phase you are in. A good example of that is in this video ua-cam.com/video/B5NbybtxG7Q/v-deo.html
So glad you talked about your "walking paths!" I was just thinking of planting clover (currently just wood chips) in all of my paths. Now I will ;) Opps stepped on a bee! ha ha ha well memories of a bi gone era :) How did you plant the clover? Did you just broadcast it?
The best upside (bees) does have a small downside!
Flowering in June here in central europe-> green manure plants : Lupinus polyphyllus, Phacelia ssp. , "Mustard " Sinapis alba
Thanks Max
My takeaway: don't fight it since you are doomed in the end.
It even better, learn to see the value in it, then use that value in a way that benefits you, and turn a problem into a solution.
Stuff wants to regrow in all my paths? Cool. Let it be clover then. Sow it thick. Now when I mow it, it disassociates nitrogen clusters and fertilizes all the other plants around it.
Just gotta think outside the box.
Good video :) it is nice to see a transition from the city person to a nature lover. This kind of stuff 7.12 is a medicinal plant - Plantago lanceolata and the next you pull 9.00 is some kind of violets (in Poland bloom much earlier than any flowers) not sure the exact variety, but the ones I have are all edible - flowers and leaves. Both plants very beneficial for the insects, let your paths be more than one species, clover is great, but monoculture of it is worse than letting it be mixed with other plants. I would say know your weeds - most of them are beneficial. Great job!
Totally agree with everything. I'm looking for more nice groundcovers to mix in with the clover. I have native stuff like creeping Charlie that people hate for some reason. Bees love it and thats good enough for me. There is mint in there, vetch, purslane, dandelion etc. Lots of goodies in those pathways. The clover is just the nitrogen fixer keeping them all pumpin.
Herbicides was never a problem for us. My dad said as far back as we can remember we use horse manure from mennonite farms or local farms we know have a well, that way we know for sure the manure will be aged, dry and pesticide free.
I keep trying to get white clover going in my woodchipped paths but it's a struggle with dogs plus kids. Nothing grows in them bc of foot traffic. I love that you've gotten yours to establish so well :) appreciate your perspective and experience. Cool to see the progress.
Thanks! Your place is incredible also. I have very much been enjoying watching your videos. I am jealous of your paw paws!
My wife and I were fortunate enough to have started a permaculture on our property in Mississippi and we have moved five years later to Massachusetts and get to start all over. Sadly we left a lot of hard work and productive plants and trees behind, all of them actually. But we learned a lot and we get to put it into action without making many of the mistakes we made in the previous five years
A silver lining :)
Lovely green!
Thank you! Cheers!
I'm wondering about the wood chip paths as a method for soil building. I saw a video where someone dug deep trenches for their paths and then backfilled with wood chips and greens in layers, and over time that created incredibly nutrient rich soil in the area that holds more water than any soil around it and acts as a reservoir in a somewhat dry climate. Do you still think that green paths have an advantage on this approach? The video in question is called Hugel Swale Paths with Matthew Trumm--Regenerative Soil. I'd really love your input on this as I've been considering doing this in my Mediterranean climate where we need all the water we can get during dry months
I think the wood chip path, even a composting in the path method, those work best for annual gardens where you are constantly amending beds. The green paths (my method in this video) work best if you don't need to be doing yearly scoop outs in your path for soil building. A food forest doesn't need that much constant fertility work. It accomplishes it more with just adding woodchips on top of the actual food forest, leaf drop from the trees, chop and drop from the sacrificial plants and nitrogen fixers. A forest just doesn't need that much constant fertility added all the time that would be from making a composting walking path. It doesn't need or want it. Trees would be pushing roots into that space, and you would be doing too much damage, for work that isn't needed.
I'm in Florida, and your info seems to be universal. Thank you for sharing your knowledge
Indeed, 98% of what is on my cold hardy climate channel is going to be applicable anywhere on the world, because that's just how nature works. The only stuff that won't be directly applicable are the specific species of plants I am using. I am always a fan of using local species, as they have adapted and evolved to thrive in your specific climate, your specific soil chemistry, your specific insect load, wind, sun, rain, pH, trace elements in the soil, etc.
Trying to soak it all in... There's a lot. :) It's an adventure!
Thank you for these helpful videos! I'm saving to buy some land to do this. Already started planning I can't wait. Just hope I can find something affordable with these insane prices
That flower gap you mention is why i don't stay on top of chopping all my comfrey. Its flowers are hugely popular with bumblebees and such this time of year. So, maybe leave some of your comfrey to flower?
Forgot to add that I appreciate you sharing your experience with the wood chip paths as I was contemplating going that route in certain areas of our garden.
I actually have quite a few comfrey in the backyard that is flowering. I think from now on I ever harvest every other one instead, to uniformly keep some flowers up everywhere. That's a great suggestion, I will definitely do it thanks!
Thank you! I'm starting a permaculture garden, lesson learned!
Awesome!
About 3:00 - I don't think that's lovage - leaves should definitely look parsley-like (just bigger).
I am convinced I can do this and hope to buy a piece of land in Portugal .
There is a hell of a lot of work to be done on the site but I think it will work out good
Where could I sign up for courses , I am living in Germany as the moment
The front yard of our urban home has started to look a lot like your grown in walking paths and it's not because of permaculture. For a number of reasons, we've had to bring heavy equipment into our back yard and the only access we have is by driving over our frontage. We're also blessed with heavy clay soil so couple that with our recent extremely dry summers and you can imagine what's growing out there. The best I can say is it's mowed and mostly green, at least in the spring.
I'm beginning to suspect, that in order to replace our lawn with any kind of ground covers, I'm going to have to dig in a whole lot of soil amendments, which in turn means removing a lot of the "soil" we have in order to make room for it. (we can't afford to add any height to our soil level because our 1920's house is already low in comparison) Any suggestions on what kind of ground cover could be used in clay soils? I refuse to waste water on something as unnecessary as a grass lawn.
I don't have heavy clay, so take this with a grain of salt, but my understanding is that daikon radishes are amazing for changing clay into a loam. You will always have clay, it will just act more like a balanced soil in terms of drainage.
@@CanadianPermacultureLegacy Thank you for the information. I know I'm going to have to do this in manageable sections so I'll try tilling in some compost into an area and planting Daikon. At least that gives me a place to start.
I like organization, but maybe I can move to organized chaos. Thanks for sharing.
I learnt a lot from this video! Thanks. ..C Heers from Australia!!🙂
Did you just throw the clover seeds directly over the mulch? I purchased some clover seeds in some areas that I put down mulch, I was planning on shoveling out the mulch. If I could seed the clover without so much labor, that would be great!
Yeppers. Its definitely better to pull back mulch and plant the clover, but throwing some on the mulch then just giving it a good shake and a good soak, will carry most of the seed down to the soil. Clover is very hardy and will germinate like this still.
It will be sliiiightly more expensive on the seed side, but will save tens of hours of work, depending on the size of your setup. Welllllll worth it IMO.
I've had grass fields and grass paths for decades now. I won't cut it till I've harvested my Dandelions in mid spring, then I only cut it 2 or 3 times a year, but in sections so I can save and transplant plants that are welcome as they pop up, I put them on the edge of paths and they never get cut again. You mentioned strangling vines, I'm plagued with them, they grow so fast and like you said there's nothing worse than walking in tall growth and running into poison ivy or even a thick nettle patch on my journeys to rid the trees of this vine. Anyways nice place you got there. It's good to see young folk engaged in this, I was young as you when I started and going on 45 years of this type of living in a small town and my kids show no interest in any of it and I'm getting too old to maintain it much longer. It will just be left to run wild when the time comes to hang up my rake and shovel. Cheers.
Oh wow, I hope you stick around and watch more of my videos. I could learn a thing or two from you, I am sure of that! I love your philosophy of getting use out of volunteers and turning them into border plants. It's always fun to see what nature gifts to you, finding value in something, and then finding it a proper home. I love it.
Thanks for watching. I hope you decide to join my community here and teach me a thing or two now and again. Thanks Roy 🤗
god bless you for your good work Roy. Thank you
Just found your channel in my feed, love learning about Permaculture 😃👍🏼...subbed
Great news that I'm popping up on new peoples feeds. That means the channel is starting to take its hold. I hope I can teach you something new, and also maybe inspire you to start a permaculture garden of your own!
@@CanadianPermacultureLegacy Love it too and new sub today as found in feed today!
Glad I found your channel. Just starting my first year in the permaculture world! Zone 3 Saskatchewan!
See Trish, I told you people live there!
Canadian Permaculture Legacy best place on earth! 🥰🤣
Everything can be a resource. Dandylions for animals like meat rabbits, ducks or chickens. Trimmings from mulberry, apples, pears could be a chop and drop mulch, feed for rabbits or can be dried to use as a tree hay in winter. So many options!
Waste is a human concept! Nature doesn't do the whole "waste" thing! You are bang on.
i consider myself an anti-grasser
Relevant username! I love it.
I’d like to have year round flowers one day. Right now I have bees loving the California lilac, walker’s low catmint, English thyme, lavender, sage, roses, thornless blackberries. Sadly, my attempt at early spring flowers, flowering red currant, seems to have died.
Zone 8b.
Ooh bermuda grass! In NZ, it is called either couch or twitch but either way its hideous. My section of land was a paddock for stock, so its filled with clover (great) and bermuda grass (not so great). I'm using sheet mulches and also using clover and reseeding annuals (eg nasturtium, phalacia) as a ground cover. I doubt that will be enough to stop the grass coming back though. I see you are weeding it. What are your recommendations for dealing with it? Thanks, from NZ.
Honestly, nothing will REALLY work. The best thing I've found is to plant a polyculture where it grows, native grasses and low groundcovers... then along the edge of all my beds I now put a wall of comfrey.
I looked after my lawn for 20 years, beautiful tough grass. Now I am digging it up for a rather mixed up veggie garden. No dig will not work with this grass. I cover the dug up area with cardboard and put grow tubes 1 cm above the cardboard and plant my veggies inside the tubes. I only water inside the grow tubes as Cape Town South Africa almost ran dry 2 years ago. This will be a new way to grow veggies in dry places.
For the no-dig thing... I talk about that in a video here on "4 bad things you can do once", where I talk about starting with a double deep till. It could be something to consider, depending on how far along you are and how big your project will be. At least trial it in spots if compaction is really bad. Systematic tilling is bad, but sometimes a one-time till can be the correct thing to do. ua-cam.com/video/YOllAJgqs_Q/v-deo.html
I pair columbine with bee balm... Both make good tea and both spread without help... Columbine blooms june through july, and and bee balm july through August.
I actually followed up with my sister after this video and she has Columbine. It will definitely be one of the flowers I add. Thanks for the suggestion, I will definitely do it.
Have you thought about sowing native prairy grass seeds? They have some at Hawthorn farm seeds in Ontario :~)
There is a seed company near me who does this kind of thing. I have been meaning to get seed from them for a year now. So many priorities, so many projects to complete.
Permaculture Gandalf. I need to get up to speed.
I’m trying to turn my permaculture veggie garden into a food forest. I don’t know how to combine cardboard and straw mulch (like Ruth Stout method) with no-till living paths and ground covers?
Its honestly not as complicated as it may seem. The living mulches can be sown right into the straw and will eventually kind of take it over. What you will have is something like clover living in top of a straw mulch. The clover roots will find the soil under it.
Then in the dormant season you can add thin layers of new straw right on top of the clover. The clover will find sunlight here and there and eventually get back up through it and on top of it. This is what plants are meant to do.
Any clover that gets smothered will die, shed roots (and N nodules) and basically be "tilled under" but without tilling. More clover seed can always be thrown right over the straw if you were to go too thick and smother it completely in areas. But given time, even if you didn't re seed, clover (a spreading groundcover) will do what all groundcovers do.... spread.
Put comfry plant underneath trees for chop and drop
Thanks! I really enjoy your content as im from shuswap bc... its nice to see canadian forest gardens. Im planning my food forest, wondering if you seed for clover on existing walking paths, does it grow through constant traffic??
Yeah that stuff is crazy resilient. If you can, keep off it until it establishes, but I have so many places that I've sowed it and walked all over it from day 1, and it pushes through it no problem.
Thanks for watching! I'm super jealous, BC is probably the most beautiful part of Canada, and warm zones too, depending on where you are. Kolona area is a bit cooler. I was looking to buy out in chilliwack or Abbotsford (going exclusively based on Agricultural zone), and I thought that was far enough from Vancouver to get some land and a decent place for a decent price. Nope. Insane prices.
@@CanadianPermacultureLegacy yeah the fraser Valley prices are crazy... we looked there too! We are close to salmon arm... its beautiful, the most biodiverse area in all of BC. Love it here! Ill try planting clover... do you have any western canadian seed companies you prefer??
@@teeshastutzman2717 no, because I really prioritize buying local, so I support Ontario seed Company a lot.
For trees though, I have bought from treetime.ca and they are in Alberta. Kinda close to you. Sorta not really. About as close as some of the super cold hardy Quebec nurseries are to me I suppose. Those Quebecquers really have great cold hardy trees.
This was quite helpful as I’m just starting my food forest and thought of mulching my walking paths with wood chips. After what I just learned from you I won’t do that anymore and instead will spend my money on more plants. 😊 Thank you!
Still useful to mulch paths with woodchips, and some people will then use the woodchips in the path to put onto the gardens as half broken down chips. However, I would recommend also sowing some clover or something into the pathways.
The woodchips can still be there, because they will also help reduce compaction. Just also sow clover. You can throw some down then a few inches of chips on top and they will push up through them. Then end of season you can sow a little more down right on top and the rains will bring it down to the soil level.
Cannot believe you said the area full of dandelions looks "disgusting". What is so disgusting about it? That they are beautiful, bright, cheerful, yellow flowers that feed you and thousands of bees???
Hey, I love dandelions. Like love love, LOVE them. I didn't mean it how you took it (my fault). I meant more like I was talking through someone else's perspective, you know? Like "ew gross". Maybe it didn't come across well.
I have ranted many times before about how we hate a plant that is fully edible, food for bees, early spring food no less, when it is most needed.
I kick dandelions like I'm in kindergarten, trying to spread the seed everywhere. Love love love them.
Are you sure that "lovage" near the beginning (at ~2:50) isn't Valerian? With it just starting to flower, the scent would have been a big tip-off. Leaf shape is different too.
Definitely valerian. I have gotten much better over the years. I was still learning a few of my plants, ajd valerian and lovage were brand new to me at this point.
I am wondering why permaculture doesn’t focus on planting native plants (and removing invasives) amidst food. Also, do you have a deer problem?
We generally do value that. Many people also understand that pretty much everything was non native at one point. Just because it has been native for 500 years doesn't mean it's native. That's why there is the saying "native to when?".
There are nasty invssives like Dog Strangling Vine, Kudzu, black wattle, soapbush. These things strangle out ecosystems and kill life. Then there are plants on invasive lists like seabuckthorn, which builds soil, and its entire goal in its life is to turn devastated land into a healthy forest and cede back and die once that is done.
Humans have destroyed out forests, clear-cut and destroyed our soils. Just because something does a very good job at fixing that and restoring our soils, doesn't mean it should be invasive just because it grows well on dead soil. It's only temporarily invasive, and if it's healing the planet quickly, then we literally need that right now as a matter of existential crisis. Nothing is black and white.
For deer, I have tons of deer, but not really a problem. I talk about this in a few videos but maybe I will make a video exclusively about it.
What kind of plants do you use on the edges of your newly mulched and planted area to keep the root growing grasses from creeping in at the sides. Iam thinking Jerusalem artichoke, comfrey? More ideas?
I used to use a few things, but comfrey works so well I use it almost exclusively.
A weed by one definition I've heard is any plant growing someplace you don't want it to. Once I found out that dandelions were not the enemy my life has become easier.
Yeah I like that. Also the saying "right plant, wrong place".
I have my off-grid property in the south of Portugal (Alentejo) , were the temperature reaches 47c on the summer (the well dryed on the spring) and in the winter around 1 or 2C with occasionally some frost.
Now the question is, if I stop to use mulch paths and leave it to grow wild is it not gonna deplet more the water table?
No, because the leaves will transpire. Well, more accurately, yes it will in the very short term. However it will be beneficial in the long term.
Sometimes it's easier to see something if you consider the opposite scenario. For example...
The worst scenario for dryness is bare soil no plants. (i.e. desert). So yes, having plants, anywhere, is better for the water cycle.
Excellent videos! I've watched 2 from the last 6 months and am now subscribed. I noticed that you haven't mentioned irrigation. Do you irrigate? If so, how? Thanks!
Not really. I do my swales, which catch a ton of water in the snow melts, and spring rains. Then summer gets really dry, but the woodchip mulch helps. Then fall rains come and I'm good. The last 2 years I watered only 1 time each, ajd did it with my house hose.
I know we get good rainfall here, but swales are honestly amazing water storage systems. I made a few swale videos if you are interested. They work best in dry climates actually, which may seem counter intuitive. But they recharge underground aquifers.
Walking path is a salad plate😄
LOL
Greetings, I'm new to permaculture, and started a food forest this year. I have been sheet-mulching with woodchips, and have designated walking paths as you describe. Your point "nature will put a plant there" makes a lot of sense. I like the idea of the clover paths that you have. Can I just throw clover seeds on top of the woodchips, and they eventually sprout? Or am I going to need to remove the woodchips? I know planting into woodchips is wrong, that we need to plant into the soil, but from what you shown it looks as though the woodchips are still there under the clover. It's been a lot of work to put them down, I'm sure you're aware, so I am hesitant to remove them. I will if I have to, of course. Thanks. Wisconsin, zone 5a.
Clover of all things can do okay sowed directly into wood chips because they are Nitrigen fixers and can get what they need from the air. So they do okay. I have myself sowed clover directly into woodchips and they grew.
That being said, optimal way could be to pull back *some* chips, sow clover and let it get strong this season.
Then after they go dormant in the fall, increase the chips a bit. With a strong root system they will have no problem at all pushing up through the chips.
And just do this each season. Add a little more chips, and build that mulch layer, but a bit by bit only, so you dont smother them. Maybe 2 inches per year is no problem.
Wood chips do a really good job of building soil structure, and combined with the nitrogen from the clovers, the carbon and nitrogen ratio is perfect to "compost" with over the top soil. I plan on having a meadow like system where I live once I pull out all the invasive ice plant
So what do you in winter to keep the mud down?
It's not really a problem. The pathways have living roots in them and even when they are flooded, we don't really get any mud. I don't trample around out there though.
If you have a heavily traffic area that you need to walk in when it's soaking wet, then I would recommend mulching with woodchips and then sowing clover into the woodchips, and add a few more woodchips in the winter when the clover is sleeping. Not a ton, enough that it can push back up through it.
Walking on roots and woodchips will prevent mud problems.
The other option if for whatever reason that doens't work, would be to hardscape it, and maybe line the edge with a french drain to allow the water to drain off the path.
Thank you, I've learned so so much of which I will now change and implement.
A lot of new people seem to be finding me through this video. Glad you enjoyed. Make sure you check out my video called "This will change how you garden forever". It has my main rules to follow, and explanations why this all works. You should enjoy it a lot :)
Thanks for your knowledge.....you’ve been an inspiration for our piece of land, I intend on doing something similar as what you’ve done to your pond and falls to mine ... as soon as I can find the massive rocks you have that makes yours look like you found a natural oasis .....any suggestions to where I might be able to start looking.... keep pushing !!! You’re doing it!
I always like going local, especially for something as big as rocks.
I would just start calling around landscaping businesses and see what kind of rock they can get a hold of.
I sheet mulched with newspaper and woodchips 3 years ago and bindweed has taken over. Could I cut it back and throw down clover seed in order to take up the space? Will it out compete the bindweed as well as fix nitrogen?
Not much will outcompete the bindweed, but if you get a nice short clover and sow that in, and mow repeatedly at a height just above the clover, then the bindweed can be used as a organic matter booster for fertility, and the clover can coexist with it.
You likely won't be able to eradicate the bindweed, but you can learn to live with it and not hate it.
I haven't dealt with it directly myself, so take that all with a grain of salt. I just know its reputation.
Whatever you do, don't till or dig in the area, or you will just multiply it.
Another thing that can work is a full season reset. A thick dark tarp for a full season will kill everything underneath it. Then resow the aea to clover next spring. It's not nice having a giant tarp there (and they can be expensive!), but that will kill anything.
@@CanadianPermacultureLegacy thank you so much! I will be seeding clover today.
I'm seeing all those medicinal herbs and you're calling them weeds.
Trust me, if there's someone who values weeds it's me. If you ever hear me call something a weed, you'll know I'm "air quoting" the word "weed" super hard. You'll see that as you get into more of my videos. Some of my favorite plants: Purslane, Lambs Quarter, Plantain, Comfrey, Dandelion, Amaranth, Clover, Creeping Charlie, Garlic Mustard, so many plants that people call weeds which are amazing plants.
Hope you share what early summer blooms you end up adding!
To be honest my flower game need work. If anyone has any suggestions I would love to hear them. Ideally they are edibles or medicinals also.
It's also likely that these problems are already solved with wildflower hill that I planted out. It's just starting to come up now.
@@CanadianPermacultureLegacy I'm in zone 6a in Washington and we have chives, poppies, and iris in bloom. I've been working on propagating them since the deer leave them alone and the pollinators love them.
@@CanadianPermacultureLegacy I'd reccomend some false indigo. Mine blooms May to early June in zone 5b in shaded areas. Nitrogen fixer, good at attracting pollinators, and numerous supposed medicial applications per Native Americans -sore throat, vomiting, cleansing wounds, et. al.
Definitely on the lookout for it. Edible Acres talks about it a lot.
great info thank you..clover any others
I'm not sure to be honest, because clover is just so perfect for it. Anything with a large broad leaf that grows short is going to work well. The large broad leaf helps it resist foot traffic (similar to a snow show by distributing weight and impact). Short growth is handy for pathways, but more importantly it means that the stem won't snap.
@@CanadianPermacultureLegacy
Thank you, so where in Canada are you folks?
About 2 hours east of Toronto
If I were looking for bee forage at the end of the daffodil season I'd look at the trees. Maple flowers aren't showy, but are good nectar producers. Looking at the landscape from the bees perspective really changes what you value. Pussy willow is the earliest pollen source, so swampy ground is good. Sumac produces nectar at about the #100 honey/acre rate. Red maple has long nectar season and is generous. Sugar maple is the least value maple. The timber value of a tree is usually a small fraction of its bee forage value (or grazing value), so if you like trees but have to justify the carrying costs...
Really great info there. We can all learn so much from eachother and all our collective experiences. Thanks so much for sharing.
Eyeballing your plants, you have many flowers. White clover, dandelion, lovage, some bushes. The bees are not hurting there/then.
After many very short-staffed & tough yrs on our family farm, by the time I met my now-husband, we had small ( up to at least 3 feet tall !) trees & weeds growing on the top of some of our chopper boxes ( metal box on wheels, open to the front, for transporting & unloading chopped hay ( haylage ) ) ... growing in a few inches of old chaff & what-not, on top of the roof. I don't know that anyone ever did do anything about them...
Hahaha awesome. Nature is nuts. There was a 6 foot tall tree growing out of a streetlamp post 1 inch crack where it meets the pavement. Found that at work.
Nice video. The lovage looks a lot more like wild valerian than lovage. It should smell like valerian, too!
Indeed!
Dandelions are NOT ugly!!
They are such a good medicine in addition to all the foods you listed.
Just saying !!
Sara
Alabama Herbal Permaculturist
I agree and I actually said that in the video :)
I said the whole part is edible, flower, leaves, roots, stem. Also early bee food when they have almost nothing to eat. Amazing plant.
Great job. Very nice video.
At 3 minutes, it is not lovage but Valerian...
Thanks, indeed you are right.
Thanks, great video. That's a beautiful place. Good lesson on cramming plants everywhere.
One suggestion: the shakiness of the camera while you were moving around I found rather unpleasant. I would recommend a gimbal or tripod. But besides that it was great thanks
Thanks, I have one. Sometimes when I'm out harvesting or planting I only have my phone with me, and I think of something just start filming. I will be better about going inside to grab the gimbal.
This video is Pure wisdom. Nature abhors a vacuum!
Thanks Chris!
Great video. Looking good. Very sound advice. Love what yr doing there. Cheers from Melbourne, Australia ; )
Thanks Peter :)
Q: I read that slugs like clover, and there is a major slug issue here. They ate anything I tried to plant when we first moved to our new place in July 2020. We killed the sod with cardboard and mulch and wondering - would the clover bring more slugs or fill them up so they don’t eat our other plants? Also, do your other plants require multiple loads of mulch by chance? Was watching a permaculture video and they kept 6” of mulch on pathways and once a year old, scooped it onto the beds, replaced the mulch. Sounds like a ton of work!!!
For the mulch question that entirely depends on how fast it breaks down. How fast it breaks down depends on many things - type of trees in the mulch, parts of the trees in it (is it just heartwood or is there a lot of leaves and twigs and bark), amount of sun it gets, amount of moisture it gets (maybe the most important thing). If you have a really dry place that is either super cool or super hot and your woodchips are all heartwood chunks (like you'd buy at home depot), then it may take 2 years to break down. If it's all cedar or locust, it may take 10 years to break down.
However if the mulch is a nice mix of species, and a mix of types of wood with lots of leaves and branches, and you get a lot of rain and warm (but not scorching) temps, then your mulch may break down in 3 months.
Using woodchips in pathways and scooping them out on the beds is a great idea. And honestly it's a little work - not as much as you think - but what's more work, an hour in the fall or weeding your paths all year long? Then those weeds creep into the garden beds, etc. My opinion only: no matter how much work doing mulch is, it's WAY less work than the alternative of weeding all year long.
For slugs, I'm not sure. We get some slugs, and they eat some stuff, but so do other things. And I'm sure birds are eating the slugs. I think they are part of a healthy ecosystem. If you get a ton of slugs though, you can lay down planks of wood at night and the slugs love the environment under the board. Early in the morning go lift up the board and they are all there. Go scoop them up and do whatever you want with them.
@@CanadianPermacultureLegacy thank you! Maybe I’m all mulched out from our recent truckload of mulch (hours and hours of wheelbarrowing). Definitely happy to have it as an option but wondering if it is possible to eventually have a system that doesn’t require 37 truckloads of mulch? (That’s the number they used!) do you still need to bring in mulch or are you now at a point where you can just use chop and drop?
I mostly chop and drop older areas. I may add some chips to some spots of the 4 year old garden. I mainly get woodchips now because I'm expanding so much constantly.
Namaskaram,
I am contemplating a lot about paths. As I mentioned we are mostly on a rather steep slope, +20°, so especially during the wet part of the year, lets say from october to february march, the grassland we inherited, which is a polyculture with lots of mosses inside, becomes just a slippery slide. We need to use these paths quite a bit, especially with loaded wheel barrows, so we were thinking to woodchip them as this should provide a firmer path.
I really love your solution of having green paths, but would clover survive a full on pushing wheel barrow road or would it just slide away as well?
Do both! I use clover in my footpaths and my garden, and in my garden they are planted right into several inches of woodchips. I literally just scatter them right on top, and they will grow into it. That's the nice thing about clover - it can get it's nitrogen from the air.
So get a few inches of woodchips down on your path and scatter clover seeds right on top. The clover and woodchip combo will withstand food traffic really well, and yes even wheelbarrow traffic. Where it gets worn down a bit, it will just creep and re-fill - that's the nice thing about using a ground cover - it just re-fills in open holes.
@@CanadianPermacultureLegacy Awsome, we'll do that
LOL that emoji. Love it.
I try to fill in before the sheep's sorel take over the place but man this plant is hard to control and I think it strangle to death everything in it's path, even raspberry. I have put a thick wood chip mat on top and it is beginning to coming out of it. I don't care for a lot of "weeds". But this one, it is insane.
Just remember, no plant can survive constant harvest of leaves and being starved of photosynthesis. Some will really hold on and fight for their lives but nothing, nothing at all can survive that if you keep on top of it.
Often it just comes down to how much you have and how much time you can devote to managing it. If that's the case then focus on a manageable area and chop and drop that area constantly to kill it. It will give up... eventually. It's just pure energy in vs energy out.
Great info !! I’m in California and star thistle is horrible!! Maybe buy good pasture seed and try to crowd it out? I’m digging it up by hand what I can I’m on 2 acres with animals it’s awful stuff
Remember also, all plants are nature screaming at you, telling you what state the soil is in. Any kind of thistle growth is telling you that the soil is depleted and pioneer plants are growing.
Build the fertility of your fields up and the pand will transition past the soil condition that the pioneers germinate in.
Lots of woodchips, tons of composting, sow lots of nitrogen fixing plants like clovers and vetch and cow pea. Your field soil will build in fertility and your land will transition into Savannah and scrub land.
Canadian Permaculture Legacy ok I’ll do that I have a lot of walnut trees I heard they kill plants around them I just found your channel thank you! I’m learning!!
Yeah, walnuts have juglone. The highest concentration is in the husks of the nuts, in the nuts, and in the leaves, in that order. And each one is about 10x more than the next. So as long as you are able to get the nuts and husks off the ground, and as many leaves as you can, then you should be okay.
Also for what it's worth, black cap raspberries, currants, paw paws and elderberries are all very tolerant to juglone. Only problem is, you miiiight be a bit too warm for most of those.
What is the tree at 19:10? It looks like it is being smothered by all the tall greenery but I only saw the trunk and not the branches. Did you plant the tall stuff? What is it?
I have quite a few areas of my property that stay wet because of the clay layer under the muck lands. So I am interested in what you are growing in your wetlands. Are your wetlands man made or natural?
I’m going to try and see if you have a video on what can be grown in wetlands but if you can post a link then I will be sure to find the video. 😊👍
That's a peach. It gets all the sun it could ever want, it's way up above the groundcover layer. I'm not sure if you have seen this one yet, but make sure you check it out. Here's a timestamp where I'm at the same location (that peach you mention): ua-cam.com/video/cFLyGVhu0bY/v-deo.html
But the whole video is really important. Those groundcover plants don't starve nutrients to the peach. Much the opposite, they are feeding root exudates (sugars) to feed the soil life, and the peach tree can now use that soil life to go get nutrients and make them bioavailable for it.
The peach has no concerns about plants underneath it, only plants above it which may shade it.
If you want to see a better view of that peach, check out this video here: ua-cam.com/video/QTg520N44JE/v-deo.html. That's a time stamp about 20 sec before I sit down on the swing there. The peach in question is at 31:20, towards the top right of the screen. No shade at all is being cast on it from the understory layer. It's happy to be "smothered". :)
@@CanadianPermacultureLegacy 😄😄😄 Thank you. You didn’t mention what the tall greenery was surrounding your peach tree was.
Clover, strawberries, Egyptian walking onions, watercress. Behind that is native cattails.
My wise gardening mother-in-law always told me a weed is just a plant out of place.
Exactly. I like that saying. I also like the saying "a weed is just a misunderstood plant".
Nature uses fire 🔥too, so a flame thrower used on poisonous plants would probably be within permaculture bounds 🤷🏻♀️ The “weed” flowers fill in those gaps for your pollinators it seems. Thanks for sharing your learning curve. I enjoy David The Goods approach and his is more like natures too, and in a subtropical climate it requires a lot of work or a monoculture to keep things “perfect” to human eyes. TY again.
Indeed, excellent point. I had about a 2 minute segment discussing that, but it hit the editing room floor... video was a bit long.
Indeed, lightning does this naturally in nature (and much less efficiently), and the making of biochar is essentially the "controlled burns" of the forestry service, but done in VERY controlled way.
A blowtorch is a method many permies do to control weeds, and will actually release less carbon than chopping and dropping. It just gets a bit hard to do without damaging nearby plants.
So what flowers did you end up planting for bloom in late spring? (if you did)
Just off the top of my head:
Early Spring (weeks 1-4)
⦁ Snowdrop (Galanthus nivalis)
⦁ Winter Aconite (Eranthis hyemalis)
⦁ Danford Iris (Iris danfordiae)
⦁ Crocus (Crocus spp.)
⦁ Glory-of-the-Snow (Chionodoxa luciliae)
⦁ Siberian Squill (Scilla siberica)
⦁ Striped Squill (Puschkinia scilloides)
⦁ Grecian Windflower (Anemone blanda)
⦁ Common Grape Hyacinth (Muscari botryoides)
⦁ Early Daffodils (Narcissus spp.)
⦁ Netted Iris (Iris reticulata)
Midspring (weeks 4-8)
⦁ Checkered Lily (Fritillaria meleagris)
⦁ Species Tulips (Tulipa spp.) Early Tulips (Tulipa spp.)
⦁ Early Alliums (Allium spp.)
⦁ Hyacinths (Hyacinthus orientalis)
⦁ Summer Snowflake (Leucojum aestivum)
⦁ Medium-Cupped Daffodils (Narcissus spp.)
Late Spring (weeks 8-12)
⦁ Dutch Hybrid Iris (Iris hybrids)
⦁ Midseason Tulips (Tulipa spp.)
⦁ Late Daffodils (Narcissus spp.)
⦁ Late Tulips (Tulipa spp.)
⦁ Alliums (Allium spp
@@CanadianPermacultureLegacy - thank you!
Alliums for late Spring early Summer! Thank you for this, I am a newbie. I have subscribed
You aren't kidding! My chives are flowering like crazy. I keep meaning to expand them, but I always eat them all! I should give them a season break and work on expanding to make more of them, so that I always have a silly amount of surplus!
Some rosa rugosa would flower in that late spring early Sumner window. Then they produce hips in the fall
Thanks! I have some younger ones that are still developing. That's good news. My sage is also now flowering and looking all awesome. It looks like it was really only about a 1 week dead window. I added a bunch of stuff and am interested to seeing if I covered that window next year.
Self heal/prunella vulgaris is a useful flowing pathway plant :)
Thanks 😊