- Joined
- May 27, 2012
- Messages
- 5,192
- Location
- Bellmere, QLD
- Website
- www.selfsufficientme.com
- Climate
- Sub-Tropical
Up until now, I have never used woodchip as mulch in my vegetable garden beds because I have always heard woodchip can deplete the soil of nutrients (particularly nitrogen) and that's not a good thing when growing a food garden.
However, something deep down in my instinctive gut kept nagging away at me over the years urging me to use woodchip in my patch even just as a trial... And, lately (the past few years) I had been reading and seeing videos about others who do use woodchip in their food gardens with only positive results!
So I decided to finally give it a go in my raised garden beds and see what results I get. In truth, I have been mulching around my fruit trees with woodchip from when I first started our orchard and all the fruit trees seem to have done well - I've certainly seen nothing negative.
We have a lot of established trees on our property and they tend to drop a lot of debris, plus the odd fallen tree or big branch, not to mention the pruning I do, and all this gets chipped into mulch once or twice a year. It always made sense to me to use it as a free mulch around the ornamental garden and orchard, therefore, I'm thinking why not in the vegetable garden!?
What do you guys think - use the attached poll to cast your vote and post your thoughts why you believe woodchip is good or not in the vegetable garden?
Here's a video I knocked up on preparing one of our raised beds with woodchip.
However, something deep down in my instinctive gut kept nagging away at me over the years urging me to use woodchip in my patch even just as a trial... And, lately (the past few years) I had been reading and seeing videos about others who do use woodchip in their food gardens with only positive results!
So I decided to finally give it a go in my raised garden beds and see what results I get. In truth, I have been mulching around my fruit trees with woodchip from when I first started our orchard and all the fruit trees seem to have done well - I've certainly seen nothing negative.
We have a lot of established trees on our property and they tend to drop a lot of debris, plus the odd fallen tree or big branch, not to mention the pruning I do, and all this gets chipped into mulch once or twice a year. It always made sense to me to use it as a free mulch around the ornamental garden and orchard, therefore, I'm thinking why not in the vegetable garden!?
What do you guys think - use the attached poll to cast your vote and post your thoughts why you believe woodchip is good or not in the vegetable garden?
Here's a video I knocked up on preparing one of our raised beds with woodchip.