hey welcome back today we're talking about ramuel wood chip
and how we're using it in the market garden
i really believe that ramuel woodship is probably the next big thing
in market gardening and not that many growers know what ramuel wood chip really is you perhaps have
heard about it people definitely know about wood chips and their importance for bringing carbon
back to the gardens or to the market garden but but ramuel woodship is is something else
it's one step further it was developed here in quebec canada in the 70s and 80s the logging
industry the forestry industry was looking for ways to use byproducts of forest cuts and they
did a lot of research in agriculture to see how you know wood could be used in farming systems and
they developed a set of pretty simple rules about how to best use the power of everything that's in
especially hardwood trees top branches of hardwood trees and so what ramuel woodchip is is hardwood
trees and you cut them with a chipper like i'm doing today in in early spring or just
like when the the energy of the tree starts to go into the leaf and the leaf starts to come out
at that point the the branches are still very young very tender they're full of enzymes
they're full of microorganisms they're full of nutrients and you're chipping this and then
you're putting that into the market garden and if you know a thing or two about using wood chip
in the garden the the key feature is that it brings carbon lingen carbon
a lot of it back into the garden and it's slow it's slow building humus that will be
there for many many years and the trick when we're using wood chips and ramuel woodship
what we do is that we put them not into the bed but we put them into the aisles and the
aisles because we work on permanent raised beds the aisles are a bit lower the beds are higher
and so there's a depression there there's there's more moisture there's more water there when it
when it rains and then the wood chip will slowly colonize you'll see a lot of shrooms
a lot of fungi developing there and the reason why we put them into the aisles also is that if
you put those wood chips straight onto the bed it's going to take a lot of energy to break down
and the microorganisms that are doing that they're using nitrogen and so you might have
a nitrogen loss if you're growing crops you can really easily see it some crops might turn yellow
and just not be as vigorous and so it's better to have all the micro organisms break down
the the lingan and the wood chips into the aisles for a first year and then when you're ready to
raise your beds again the wood chips will go back the only thing is that you need a lot you need
a lot of branches to make a little bit of ramul wood chip and so what we do at the farm we do one
quarter of the farm every year and so we want to do all of our different field blocks in four years
and you know it's really hard to measure the impact of adding ramuel wood chip into our system
but man for just seeing the energy that it has
and just seeing the bloom here in the springtime i think it's amazing and all the literature
points out to say that it's adding a lot of good stuff so i think it's really cool
so this is it for this week's episode i hope you enjoyed it ramuel wood chip is such an
interesting part of what market gardening can be working with nature and using the power of
plants to help heal the land and do amazing stuff while we're busy growing so this is just one thing
that i want to share there's so much more so stay tuned make sure to subscribe to the channel if you
want to learn more about how i farm check check out the market gardener's master class and check
out also the courses that we give at the institute there's a lot to offer there and if there's
anything else i'll see you next week hope things are growing hope you guys are well j i'm out