A pile of year-old chips partially transformed by white mold. These heavily-bearing blackberry plants have never been treated with anything but chip mulch. By Will Bonsall I’ve spoken and written extensively about using forest residues, especially shredded brushwood, or “ramial chips,” to build and maintain soil tilth. I’ve advocated incorporating them into gardens as short-term
Drawing by Toki Oshima By Joyce White My garden area in Stoneham’s stony foothills is ringed with trees, mostly ash and maple, that have grown very tall during the 21 years I’ve lived here. Their roots have grown very long, too, reaching beneath the soil of the whole garden area. Because of those roots and
By Céline Caron Recently I listened to “Dr. Mercola and Courtney White Discuss Carbon Sequestration” (YouTube, Aug. 27, 2014; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSgroKuuJFA). Both talked about incorporating wood chips into soil (with or without composting) and using them as mulch. Neither distinguished between wood chips and ramial wood chips. They obviously have not read my many articles about
Mark Fulford demonstrated how to prepare the soil for fruit tree planting at the Common Ground Fair. This area was later seeded to Geneva winter wheat, which will be harvested next July and milled into a flour, then used in a baked product for the 2000 Common Ground Fair; and Mammoth red clover, which will
Leaves from deciduous trees, once shredded, make excellent mulch for most vegetable crops, and they enrich the soil. English photo. By Will Bonsall Trees and their leaves are probably the greatest natural soil builders on earth, greater even than grasses. (I mean “on earth” literally, as I am not including the oceans.) The incredible proliferation
Toki Oshima drawing By Tom Roberts I get excited about chips. Not potato chips or silicon chips, but wood chips. I believe they are a vastly underutilized resource on the organic farm. Chips are coarser than the coarsest sawdust, shavings or shingle hair. They range in size from a quarter to a slice of bread.
by Ann Currier It has been encouraging to see the attention that Ramial Chipped Wood (RCW – chips of deciduous tree branches that are smaller than 7 cm in diameter) is getting in The Maine Organic Farmer & Gardener. I first read about RCW in this paper in an article written by Tom
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