I'm Aaron Graber with Ventrac and today we're at my house and we're moving a lot
of wood chip mulch
so on my property I have a massive project in the backyard
where I am building a food forest.
A food forest is a concept where you plant a
bunch of different perennial plants and then the goal is to end up having
basically a system where you kind of are hands off and it's kind of lazy man's garden.
What that's going to require is about 2,000 yards of wood chips which
sounds crazy and it is a little bit but I've got a local tree service that
delivers wood chips to me whenever they have in excess or whenever they're in
the area they drop them off and very grateful for that.
Wood chips are great because they replicate what nature would do
automatically. If you walk into the forest you just look around and look
underneath and maybe dig away to the dirt underneath the dirt is really super
nice under there it's aerated very well it's not compacted and the
reason it's like that is because it has years and years and years of falling
decayed branches and leaves and just debris of all sorts of variety and it
just layers and basically what nature does is it builds its own layer garden.
By doing that we keep the temperature a little bit more stable it
stays warmer longer into the fall and retains moisture better all throughout the year.
What that does is protects the soil from erosion it traps
all the nutrients it builds super good soil so the goal is that once this is a
functioning system basically you never water anything you never worry about
that because it takes care of itself. Once it grows dense enough all the
foliage that falls and all of the stuff that you hack off and let fall and decay
kind of keeps rebuilding and so the system takes care of itself in
perpetuity and woodchips help do that from the start because they're an
instant way to get a good hearty layer of biodegradable mass onto the soil and
trapping moisture and water and starting to build the soil from the top down as well.
Last year during the middle of August/July time we were kind of in a
drought here we hadn't had rain for probably six weeks and I walked out to
the veggie garden for the first time in a while
and I took about two to three inches away and it was completely saturated
underneath that so it was a great medium to grow things like vegetables that need
constant water in an environment where you don't have that consistency and when
I just don't have the time to water it daily or every other day.
I'm not your typical gardener who enjoys spending hours and hours and hours just
meticulously tending to things I'd rather kind of take an efficiency
approach to it and that is another thing that is an advantage
with the wood chips because they suppress weeds. Which are the bane of my
existence when I'm growing things because I don't want to pull them I
don't want to deal with them and I want to have to spray them for sure because I
don't want those chemicals in the food I'm growing so the thing that wood chips
do is they snuff out weeds and they don't let them germinate because they
keep the temperature too warm for the seeds to germinate and also any weed
seeds that would be in the soil which there are millions all over the place
every time you till you're gonna put bring those back up so any of those
seeds that would be in the surface they cover them and keep them from getting
any light and getting any chance to sprout up and start robbing any
nutrients from the vegetables around them. The few weeds that do pop up are so
loose and they have such a terrible root structure because they've had to snake
through all the woodchips to get out I can go over and I can pluck them out
just with my bare hands no effort at all so it's really easy to do.
Given the weed explanation you might wonder how things that I want to grow actually grow in the
garden and that's a great question because you have to be very careful when
you plant what you're doing is you're taking the woodchips and you're scraping
them away getting back down to the soil. You're planting your vegetables or
whatever plants into the soil and then once they get big enough and they can
handle it then you're brushing the woodchips back up to them so that they
close off that soil and keep it moist and give the vegetables a chance to
really spring up and be very productive.
Now that we've given a background of my crazy project that I'm doing we do need to address why is it on this
channel. First of all, because it's me, and we thought it'd be interesting but
second of all what I've been moving all of this mulch with is wood chip mulch is
the ventrac 4500 and the power bucket with mulch extensions and that has been
invaluable and there's a few reasons why. I planted most of this area before
getting the mulch well that poses a very big problem
because I'm also planting pretty dense in this system so when I go to dump
woodchips and I go to move them around I am almost always right next to a plant
or a tree or a shrub or something that I don't want to crush so it makes it
impossible to do anything in this area with the machine
other than pretty much a ventrac because it's so compact because it articulates
because it also oscillates and allows me to drive up and over mounds of things
easier and not be unstable.
There's a lot of different options for using equipment
to do this you could go the hand labor out which just clearly isn't gonna work
for the scale of project that this is if you go with a much bigger machine which
would be nice if it was possible if you could really do it but what I found is
that even though the ventrac is a little bit smaller capacity wise it's actually
faster than a little bit bigger bucket on a compact tractor or a skid steer
because you have to be so careful with those and you have to drive in straight
lines only and you really basically end up not being able to use them in a lot
of areas of the food forest because things are already planted but the
ventrac allows me to get right up next to a plant or a tree and see exactly
where I'm dumping exactly what I'm doing and be very careful about where I'm
putting things and what impact I'm making on everything around me.
To date I have probably got about 50 different varieties of fruit trees and
other edible plants in this system and that might amount to 100-150 individual
plants because some of them are doubled or tripled up my goal is to just keep
going until there's no more space so I want to just keep putting new plants in
and expanding a space until the density is such that there's really no more room
to do anything like that and the reason I want to do that is because I want the
ultimate in biodiversity and I want a lot of variety of things that I can eat
personally and I want to try new things that are hard to find in grocery stores
around here or farmers markets and I want to have things growing on this
property that helped to build the system into a fully functioning self-sustaining
food system that keeps itself up and helps expand itself anywhere that it may.
So here we are in the garden and we're just going to take a quick tour kind of
show you around what we're working with why we're doing things here so the first
thing we'll look at is over here.
This is the veggie garden now that I was talking
about before and this I have a veggie garden over on the other bottom side of
the hill and this one here this one is actually a Hugelkultur bed, a small
one, so it's not super tall or deep but it's very it's very big.
Underneath this plot this gray area are probably five or six full-size ash trees cut up and
layered down and that's another concept but Hugelkultur is kind of
you're putting wood underneath the soil and that also helps
with water retention and decomposition and just temperature control that sort
of thing but it still functions the same as the rest of this on the top because
over top of that wood is probably a foot or so of topsoil and then these wood
chips and this is a good example of what we're talking about so these were these
were raked out at the end of last year and haven't been touched since you can
see they're kind of sunburned just gray and and
haven't been had nothing nothing's happened to these in a while but we
haven't gotten rain in a few days so it actually is kind of dry right now even
though it's in spring and this stuff you can see is really dry on top there's
almost nothing to it you can see if you just lightly brush it it's a little bit
powder you can see there's some dust but it doesn't take much you just take one
little one little swipe here and look underneath and you can see it's
completely wet under here all that moisture is working away if you see this
right here all this decomp happening that's what
you want to see because that stuff is breaking down the woodchips and
eventually will be some of the best soil you've ever seen.
So that's the top two to three inches and we've got probably a foot of wood chips on this
area even though it doesn't quite look like it because they're pretty compacted
this is a good example of pulling weeds through the woodchips so what I do is I
taper down towards the tree and that that way a lot of trees are mulched
improperly they they've just put mulch and they pile it up and it goes right up
to the base of the tree and it kind of looks like this and that's actually the
wrong way to do it because it's not good for the health of the tree so your mulch
needs to be taller on the outside tapering down to the tree and what that
results in are weeds closer towards the tree just because the mulch is a lot
thinner and what I was talking about earlier is it's it makes it easy for
management of these weeds because since they have to fight to get through the
root structures really weak and here's a cluster of grass and you just pull it
straight out. Very loose under there the soils not compacted and this
basically it had to do a lot of work to get out to the top roots aren't very
good it just comes right out and there's no seed pods or anything on this so just
throw it on top let it decay and that's just more organic matter.
This area here is where I'm going to hold in some of my trees that I'm going to start with root
stocks and just grow some different varieties of things test those trees
will grow in here and then I'll swipe them out of that area and put them where
I want to later. This transitional area is just mulch
because I don't want to mow it this right here is a full-size cherry tree a
baby full-size it will be one day and that's kind of the concept so if you
look out over this this area this inner inner line right here are all of the
full-size trees so you go from cherry to an almond to just pass that is
the jujube and then after that you have a mulberry a black walnut and around the
corner you have a persimmons and another almond and those trees are all
full size trees and trees that will grow to be anywhere between 40 and 80 feet
tall probably and so that's the tallest layer this is the north side we've got
north south east and west so the north side has all the tall trees and then the
whole thing will taper down from there. So at right after these you've got the
semi dwarf fruit trees you've got a row of apples and then a row of pears and
nectarines and then a dwarf cherry behind those and those will be continued
to be planted with other fruit trees down through the next row and then after
that if you want to walk over here so this is an apple tree I don't know what
kind it doesn't matter because I'm going to plant all kinds. This is a pear tree
so you can kind of see this was these were planted well before I started any
of this so they're a little more symmetrical than I would like now but
eventually they'll fill out and they're planted a little bit close but that's on
purpose because we want everything to be super dense and touching and just
sharing all their root systems and everything so after the dwarf and semi
dwarf fruit trees we start seeing things like your hazelnuts are here and then
over here we've got blueberries over here we've got raspberries
and then kind of filtering over to all of our gooseberries and currants and
everything else that is of that size just put this one over for now and the
goal will be to kind of mimic this structure all the way down and then the
further we get towards the south this stuff I haven't really planted yet
because it's the fastest growing so it's been the lowest on my priority list but
along this whole southern tier we're gonna have all the ground cover stuff so
that will be your strawberries your your herbs and mints and a bunch of other
different varieties of things and then the last layer is your vines so your
vines I also haven't planted yet we're gonna be doing a bunch of hardy Kiwis
which yes they do grow in Ohio they're about the size of a large grape or or
maybe even a little bit larger than that they're not so not like the full-size
Kiwis and they're not fuzzy but they do grow very well here we're gonna be
planting those basically back towards the tallest layer and let those climb.
Initially some posts and trellis and then eventually in one day hopefully
some of the taller trees so that and then that will tie everything together
and that'll be your last layer of the food forest. The goal will be once we're
done here like right now it's springtime you can see through everything it just
looks kind of bare the goal will be that one day you could stand at any corner of
this and not see through to the other side to be that thick and lush and
everything will be growing and be well basically just walk through paths
through the woods and everything you see is edible.