Beekissed
Mountain Sage
Someone asked and I waited a bit to see if anyone else would, but they didn't. 
So, whilst resting my overworked knees, I will get one rolling. Please feel free to add your BTE here, pics and videos are most helpful, but explanations work too. I'm sure there are other people out there who are more successful than I am at this method and it would really encourage folks to see some good BTE gardens on here .
Here's the film I watched that started me on this path:
http://www.backtoedenfilm.com/
That was three years ago....unfortunately, I first watched it mid to late winter, so the bee got in my bonnet and I couldn't get it out. Instead of waiting until fall to start it, I tilled up my heavy clay garden 5 times and then started putting on chips~not the recommended start but I rarely do things the way people recommend.
The first loads of chips were really crappy, no greens in them at all, huge pieces of wood from crappy chippers. I rented a UHaul utility trailer and drove about 100 mi. round trip three times in one day to get those chips...had some help from my family on loading and unloading or I could never have done it.
Then came the spreading of the chips evenly...that took some time, some work, still haven't gotten them evenly spread after 3 yrs.
The woman you will see in these pics is the Ol' Bat, my 82 yr old gem of a mother...the work horse on this homestead!
Not recommended to plant into fresh chips but I did anyway, using plenty of chicken litter as side dressing.
It wasn't as bad as I expected it to be and we got decent crops but not as good as traditional tilling and growing in this plot had been.
The flowers loved it, in the veggie garden and also in the beds around the house.
The second spring things didn't grow as well and I got blight all over the garden....I had dumped around 200 bags of leaves there, let them sit all winter and few composted, then removed most of them before planting. BAD year, lots of weeds, lots of bugs, lots of fungal infection....don't put leaves on top of your chips. That leaves a layer of stuff composting on TOP of the chip layer, where weed seeds can get a good grip...ordinarily the chip layer is supposed to suppress most of that kind of growth. Bad idea and I'm still paying for that in this third spring.
Will be placing more crappy chips on top of that layer of compost this year in an attempt to restore the balance there. Ideally, one would want ramial wood chips, with all the leaves and end branches ground up in the chips for added nutritional compost as the chips decompose, but that's not always possible.
Our biggest problem thus far for this type of gardening and seems to be the problem of most other people? Getting chips. Out in the country, and especially if one lives way back from the hard road, chips are like the Holy Grail. I've only had 2 loads delivered here for free and that I didn't have to fetch myself and those were just freak accidents of power lines back here being cleared.
Will post more pics as we go along, of the before and after on the soil quality, of other growth, of the weed removal....yep, don't let anyone tell you that you won't get weeds in the garden with this method. Weeds love compost too! They are just really, really easy to pull out of the garden now and kind of fun, especially if it's big clumps.
I've made a lot of mistakes with this method and am still learning as I go along. I'm still not sure about what I've done here~some of it I love, some the jury is still out on~ but now I'm committed to it and there's no going back. If you are unsure, it's best to do a test portion of your garden to see if you will like it, if it will work for you, so you can compare it with growth in traditional till gardening, etc.
So, whilst resting my overworked knees, I will get one rolling. Please feel free to add your BTE here, pics and videos are most helpful, but explanations work too. I'm sure there are other people out there who are more successful than I am at this method and it would really encourage folks to see some good BTE gardens on here . Here's the film I watched that started me on this path:
http://www.backtoedenfilm.com/
That was three years ago....unfortunately, I first watched it mid to late winter, so the bee got in my bonnet and I couldn't get it out. Instead of waiting until fall to start it, I tilled up my heavy clay garden 5 times and then started putting on chips~not the recommended start but I rarely do things the way people recommend.
The first loads of chips were really crappy, no greens in them at all, huge pieces of wood from crappy chippers. I rented a UHaul utility trailer and drove about 100 mi. round trip three times in one day to get those chips...had some help from my family on loading and unloading or I could never have done it.
Then came the spreading of the chips evenly...that took some time, some work, still haven't gotten them evenly spread after 3 yrs.
The woman you will see in these pics is the Ol' Bat, my 82 yr old gem of a mother...the work horse on this homestead!Not recommended to plant into fresh chips but I did anyway, using plenty of chicken litter as side dressing.
It wasn't as bad as I expected it to be and we got decent crops but not as good as traditional tilling and growing in this plot had been.
The flowers loved it, in the veggie garden and also in the beds around the house.
The second spring things didn't grow as well and I got blight all over the garden....I had dumped around 200 bags of leaves there, let them sit all winter and few composted, then removed most of them before planting. BAD year, lots of weeds, lots of bugs, lots of fungal infection....don't put leaves on top of your chips. That leaves a layer of stuff composting on TOP of the chip layer, where weed seeds can get a good grip...ordinarily the chip layer is supposed to suppress most of that kind of growth. Bad idea and I'm still paying for that in this third spring.
Will be placing more crappy chips on top of that layer of compost this year in an attempt to restore the balance there. Ideally, one would want ramial wood chips, with all the leaves and end branches ground up in the chips for added nutritional compost as the chips decompose, but that's not always possible.
Our biggest problem thus far for this type of gardening and seems to be the problem of most other people? Getting chips. Out in the country, and especially if one lives way back from the hard road, chips are like the Holy Grail. I've only had 2 loads delivered here for free and that I didn't have to fetch myself and those were just freak accidents of power lines back here being cleared.
Will post more pics as we go along, of the before and after on the soil quality, of other growth, of the weed removal....yep, don't let anyone tell you that you won't get weeds in the garden with this method. Weeds love compost too! They are just really, really easy to pull out of the garden now and kind of fun, especially if it's big clumps.
I've made a lot of mistakes with this method and am still learning as I go along. I'm still not sure about what I've done here~some of it I love, some the jury is still out on~ but now I'm committed to it and there's no going back. If you are unsure, it's best to do a test portion of your garden to see if you will like it, if it will work for you, so you can compare it with growth in traditional till gardening, etc.
The first year I did that, I had millions of volunteer tomatoes in the garden....I was pulling up those little guys all season. I let some of them grow if they were in the right place and they were healthier than most of the tomato plants I intentionally planted but it was still a bad, bad idea.
