(upbeat music)
- Hello and a very cold welcome back to the garden.
No matter what the season,
there's always going to be plant material coming
out of your garden.
In this video, I'm gonna show you how to use
this to your maximum benefit,
to really help promote soil fertility
and help you grow better crops.
Now, I see, we all know of what at least have heard
of chop and drop.
It comes from permaculture and it's very much and does
what it says on the tin.
You chop down plant material,
and then you drop it on the surface.
There's a lot of information out there on how
to do chop and drop,
but not really enough about why,
and it's the way that's gonna bring the biggest differences
to your garden.
Permaculture is all about working with nature rather
than against it and using nature to help inspire us
to create effective systems.
So, for example, most plants in nature,
they will just live, grow,,
and then die back down in the exact same spot.
So as these leaves and stems decompose,
they're returning the nutrients back down
into this very soil that they grew from,
as plants die down,
they're providing organic material to the soil,
which over time turns into soil organic matter,
organic matter is what we need to take seriously
it is a reservoir of nutrients and water for our plants.
And on average, for every 1% increase of soil
organic matter in a square meter,
that square meter of soil will be able to hold an additional
four UK gallons of water.
For my rough calculations,
if I increase the soil organic matter of all of the raised
beds in this garden, by 1%,
this garden will be able to hold around 320 gallons,
more of water within the soil,
that's the equivalent of about 150 full watering cans or one
and a half IBC tanks.
Now on average,
increasing soil organic matter requires quite
a lot of organic material,
so you need around 10 kilos of organic material to create
a kilo of organic matter.
Now, compost isn't even fully broken down organic matter,
but it's one of the best ways along with chop and drop
and growing cover crops that die back naturally
in increasing your soil organic matter naturally.
On the subject of organic matter,
I wanna share a quick extract from the Noble Research
Institute, which I think really helps linking chop and drop,
and also no-dig.
So organic matter is stable in the soil,
it has been decomposed until it is resistant
to further decomposition,
usually only around 5% of it mineralizes yearly
that rates increases if temperature,
oxygen and moisture conditions become favorable
for decomposition, which often occurs
with excessive tillage.
And what we get from this is two things,
(a) is a fact that a little bit is mineralized every year,
which means we shouldn't stop striving to build soil
fertility and build organic matter levels,
and the second, is how excessive tillage can naturally mean
that we lose that organic matter rate a lot quicker
than we ever want.
So for that reason,
I feel that using chop and drop in the right context,
as well as applying compost,
using no-dig principles over your beds is gonna
be a winning combination to improve the health
and fertility of your soil.
"How can we fully utilize chop and drop to our advantage
in our quest of increasing the percentage
of soil organic matter?"
The first one, is that there's actually two different types
of chop and drop,
there is a normal chop and drop where you clear a bed,
you chop up the material and then you replace it directly
over the same space, and the second, is chop move and drop,
this is where you may have a comfrey patch,
you collect it and you move it to where you want it,
for example, your tomato plants and drop it there and then.
There were two really important factors
for chop and drop,
the first is ,"how thick should the layer be?"
So for slug prone climates like here in the UK,
I recommend a light covering of roughly around
half a centimeter to a centimeter thick,
now, if you don't suffer from slug problems,
being my guests make it two, three, four inches thick,
seven centimeters thick, if you have enough plant material,
absolutely go for it.
The second fundamental for chop and drop is actually,
you want to leave your plant roots in the ground,
this is all organic material that is going to turn into
organic matter, you might as well leave it there,
it's also great for the soil biology,
so just chop your plants at the base and by leaving them
in the ground, it also means less disturbance to the soil,
again, helping promote the soil health,
and just a little tip for slug prone climates,
as well as you don't want to drop big leaves
like that on the surface,
because it's gonna be perfect to have a tougher slugs
to hide them underneath.
So all you do is use your triceps to chop these up
nice and finely,
or you can actually run a lawn mower over your plant
material to chop it up quickly,
and then you can spread that over your bed,
chop and drop, isn't just something you do when you clear
old plants out of a bed or at the end of the season,
it's also as you're going about and you're harvesting crops,
here's a swede, AKA, a rutabaga.
So what you do is you harvest a vegetable,
and then before heading down into the kitchen,
I was gonna put that to one side and then these leaves,
I can just go along,
And drop the plant material back where it grew,
just like in nature where the plant grows and then dies,
it's returning the nutrients back into the grounds.
"What about just putting all the material on a compost pile
first?" Well, when you think about it in nature,
you don't have a plant material being removed and then
decomposed and turned into compost and then brought back
and that's a bird obsessed with a certain fruit tree.
What happens is that, as I said before, in this video,
the nutrients stay in that place.
So I like to use a hybrid around maybe two-thirds up to 80%
of my plant material will go into a compost bin.
But what I'm moving towards is using more chopping job,
because if you think about it, especially in peak summer,
when you're not actually mulching your beds with any compost
using chop and drop is a great way to apply a little boost
of fertility to your beds.
So what about, woody material,
"how suitable is this for chop and drop?" Well, not at all.
The idea with chop and drop is to only use that soft annual
growth because you want that material to break down
as much as possible.
This woody growth is something that I will chop up a bit
to put it on a compost bin to let it break down
over a year or two.
I hope that this video makes you think a little bit about
how to use chop and drop and how to add it as part
of your kind of soil building toolkit.
But even though that's a great job to do at this
time of year,
nothing is better than at the end of the gardening day,
having a fire,
drinking a cup of tea and letting those long evenings
take over.
(gentle music)