I had been beekeeping for a few years when my neighbor told me to watch this video:
I decided I'd watch about five minutes of it so I could tell her I watched it. But an hour and a half later, after the video was finished, I rewound it and re-watched several parts of it again. I knew right away I needed to apply the simple principle of covering my soil with wood chips.
I'm in the northern hemisphere and have a south-facing hillside and the soil is "mostly dead" (Princess Bride) and constantly baked by sunshine in our semi-arid climate. It's a euphemism to even call it soil...it was nothing but "dirt". No worms and hardly anything grew besides goat-heads, thistles and bind-weed. Undaunted, I decided to plant three apple trees to get started. This was late winter 2014 in March. Digging holes in the soil was difficult because the soil was so hard. After hours of laborious digging, I finally completed the three holes and planted the three apple "whips". About the same time I started adding wood chips atop the soil.
Soil surface before wood chips
Soil beneath the surface - no worms and little organic activity
In the fall of 2014, for my birthday, I received a more mature Honeycrisp Apple tree for my birthday from my family. I dreaded digging an even larger hole after my experience just 8 months earlier. But I was more excited because Honeycrisp are my favorite, so I went ahead and started digging. Much to my surprise rather than jumping into the air and landing with both heels on the garden spade, I could move almost an entire shovel full by leaning on it with just one foot! Such a miraculous change in just eight months! Still there wasn't much organic activity or worms, but the soil was moist and so much softer!
Again, all I did was dump wood chips atop the "dirt". And there are amazing changes happening!
Soil after just three years of wood chips on top of the soil.
It's not all that easy to tell from the photo because there are wood chips mixed in with the soil. But you can see how dark and rich the color is. And it has an "earthy" smell to it so I know that there is plenty of organic activity going on. Also, you'll not see a garden spade in the picture. Why? Because I was able to move the wood chips out of the way and dig into the soil by hand. I didn't need a spade!
I was working on another project this past summer which required me to dig a trench in my garden area where the wood chips were. Here's a picture of that project:
I'm not going to get into the details of the project, but as I was digging down about 18-24" I sliced through hundreds of worms! This is something I've not seen before! In addition to the worms, moving the soil was much easier--even down deep. Absolutely amazing!
Needless to say, I'm very excited! My wife and I are going to grow lots of vegetables this year. And also, the trees are certainly benefiting from the moist rich soil as well. I had a master gardener come and look at my project last year and she was quite impressed with how healthy my apple trees are.
More posts to follow.