Hey, it's Jason again from Fraser Valley Rose Farm and to answer the question right off the top of the video
Yes
I am going to go ahead and use it fresh wood chips as a mulch in my garden
Amongst my roses and other perennials and I do so against a bit of common garden advice
Which says that if you put freshly chipped wood in as a mulch around your garden it will rob
Nitrogen from your soil and make your plants deficient
So I'll go ahead and show you why I'm so confident doing so I've researched the topic. I've had some experience with it
So let me share that information with you now on my farm here
I grow plenty of hungry plants and by that, I mean, I grow roses like these ones here
But I also grow other flowering shrubs fruiting shrubs lots of colorful perennials that bloom their heads off through the season
So routinely, I do a top dress of granular fertilizer
So a couple years ago
I had a
fresh pile of wood chips in my in my yard from from an ice storm that we'd had and the
landscapers had chipped that wood for us and the decision to make do I
Let it compost there in the pile or do I put it fresh down on the field and for me it was not a hard
Decision I have to say because honestly if I'm already fertilizing in the field anyway
What trouble is a little extra nitrogen?
So as far as garden problems go nitrogen is an easy one to fix. If you want to do it
Organically, you can add liquid fish fertilizer you can add
Alfalfa is fine to increase your nitrogen levels in your soil or if you're going chemically easy to add a little extra
Fertilizer or calcium nitrate as a liquid feed. So it really didn't give me any pause at all
I
went ahead and used up the fresh wood chips on some of my roses and then I waited to see would those ones there have
Any kind of a nutritional deficiency?
Compared to the roses that were not mulched with the fresh wood chips and I waited for nothing in the end
There was no difference between the two sets of roses. None of them had any nutritional problems
and so it got me to researching the problem or researching the question of
does
fresh woodchips raw nitrogen from your soil and as it turns out
It's kind of a misleading
Piece of garden advice you see the fresh woodchips do exchange nitrogen with the very top layer of your soil
That exchange of nitrogen helps to break down the wood chips the problem
Is that for deep-rooted plants like my roses or like my perennials or like my other shrubs
It has no effect at all. It doesn't it doesn't exchange nitrogen with those deeper layers of soil. So really that
robbing of nitrogen really can only affect the most shallow rooted of your annuals say something like
You know annual pansies or your your lettuce or something like that
May have a problem with fresh woodchips in your garden
But again can be resolved fairly easily with additional nitrogen fertilizer
so the other thing I will say about the
Deep-rooted plants like this is they benefit from that mulch in so many other ways there's the suppression of the weeds
There's the moderation of soil moisture and soil temperature and then of course
eventually that mulch improves the
Quality of the soil greatly by adding organic matter which improves structure of the soil. So actually let me show you real quick here
I'll
pull out some samples from an
unimproved portion of my garden plus one that I've improved with woodchips over the course of three or four years here and I'll show you
the difference between those soils ok still out here in the Rose Garden and I've taken a couple of samples here of
My garden soil and see this one here, and I hope the color shows up nicely on
This video is that this one is my regular unimproved river bottom garden soil
We're on a on an island in the Fraser River here. So all of this is pure alluvial soil and
This one here is the one where I've been adding woodchips for a number of years. It hasn't been tilled
That's not I've been pushing it in. It's just breaking down from top to bottom and you can see that the color is
darker between the two samples and
I actually can tell you that it's crumbly
A better quality overall garden soil so I'm very
Impressed with the the quality improvement that I've seen here
I made another video on how to improve
Or clay soils where I do a more in-depth comparison between my garden soils and the improved garden soils
But yeah, this is this will give you the gist of it
Anyway, alright
So that's my quick summary of why I never hesitate to add fresh wood chips into my garden
here on the farm
If you have any questions on the topic or even want to debate the point happy to take your comments down below this video
Thanks, as always