For those of us who may have been blissfully unawares or even asleep for the past couple of decades, the wood chip revolution is well and truly upon us as a nation, and it’s changing our lawns, gardens, and properties forever. It’s causing us to rethink age old habits and practices, and is providing many wonderful and very low cost alternatives and improvements to what we do in our yards.
Wood chips are wonderful for many different reasons. We can put them down anywhere we like and we have a surface that never gets soggy or muddy, that can be walked on with ease, we can drive our cars on them and park our cars on these areas, they are very low cost and easy to put down, and they can be easily removed if we ever want to.
Wood chips provide a natural water saving mulch to garden beds, and they will break down slowly over time to naturally feed our soils as well. Many people now are also no longer putting down paving as walkways in gardens, but using wood chips as natural paving instead.
Wood chips are most often applied very thick in density, this slows down the decomposition and so requires top-ups of the material less often. The thicker we apply the wood chips we can also then too notice that steam can come from these garden beds as the materials break down at a faster rate, thus supply more natural nutrients to our soils.
When applying wood chips to garden beds however, we don’t want to ever dig them into the soil itself. By digging wood chips into soil we are then causing the soil to use its Nitrogen to break down the chips, and so we can create Nitrogen deficiency in our garden soils as a result, which can have a negative impact on the health of our plants. Instead we always want to apply a thick layer of wood chips to the top of the soil only, and instead of leaching Nitrogen out of our soil, the wood chips can put Nitrogen back into the soil as they decompose.
Wood Chips Everywhere
So just how did this little garden revolution happen? It’s probably impossible to pinpoint every single thing which has happened that has led onto this progression, yet here we are and the wood chip movement continues to grow stronger every year.
In recent decades we know that many councils either gave away wood chips for free to their residents, while other councils may have charged a small fee. These wood chips came from their own maintenance programs for trees in their areas, and so a method to dispose of all these wood chips had to brought into practice, and what better way than to have them put back into their own residents gardens as mulch.
As more and more people began to utilise these natural resources, so too did the popularity of their use spread, as did also the many different ways people began to use the abundance of these little wonders.
That is one beginning. But there is another also.
Back To Eden
Many decades ago an ordinary man moved himself to a new property in his home country of the America, his name is Paul Gautschi. He quickly found though that there was very little water at his property for what he wanted to do there, which was to be more self sustaining and having his own gardens and fresh food which was free of chemicals.
Over time, and upon many realisations and with much inventiveness and trial and error, Paul soon came up with a new system by which he could indeed conserve so much water and make the most out of his soils, that he could have a garden after all. And what has grown from this single humble man’s changes to how he gardened has been a worldwide revolution and movement, which you yourself may actually be practicing without ever hearing this man’s name your life.
In essence what Paul Gautschi did was to begin using wood chips in his gardening, and this grew over time to always improving upon and always learning more about how to gain the greatest benefits possible from this very low cost and highly effective gardening method.
The movement and system is now known as Back To Eden, and it’s taking over the world. It’s not the intention of this article to go into all those details, only to show how such ideas have spread to us too, even though we may not realise it. Even this article has foundations with Paul Gautschi, as does your own wood-chipped garden beds.
I would highly recommend everyone learn about this gardening system, and one such place to begin to look is https://www.backtoedenfilm.com there are also many many videos available online to watch for free by many different people the world over on this subject.
Wood Chips As A Lawn Alternative
Yes, you read that correctly. Now obviously we wouldn’t want to be playing cricket in the backyard on wood chips, and that’s not the intention meant.
Instead, we all know of so many gardens in our own yards or in the yards of neighbours, or as we drive down the street, that are entirely under-utilised, or there is lawn which is not needed yet costs money to maintain, such as on council verges. All of us too know of back yards which may have great areas of lawn which is also entirely unnecessary, not used, and is a waste of water, time and a lot of money to maintain it.
So many of us could convert unnecessary and unused lawn areas into wood chipped gardens, with almost no cost to set up or to maintain. And we might do this if we don’t want to replace our lawns with traditional types of gardens which may require a lot of maintenance of a different sort, such as pruning and hedging.
In such cases we could remove the lawn and wood chip these areas instead, and plant out only a few native plants perhaps, leaving an area which is clean, of near no maintenance, which is still cooling for our home like lawn, and which doesn’t store heat like paving or concrete, and which is always ready and available to us should we wish to use that same area for any other purpose, like even planting our own Back To Eden vegetable garden.
Or we could make up some raised garden beds around our yard to grown plants, palms or vegetables etc, and then all our walkways around those raised garden beds could be wood chips instead of paving, giving us a surface to walk on while also providing cooling to the plants on hot days.
There are many different ways we can turn unused and costly lawn areas into areas which are much better utilised, still clean and appealing, and which could in fact be a marked improvement to our present situation.
It’s worthwhile considering, especially as we watch more and more people doing the exact same.
Lawn just isn’t the go-to ground cover of choice for many of us anymore. So many of us are waking up to the fact that there are some wonderful alternatives available to us, with wood chips being a marvellous one. Turf is expensive to buy, wastes water if the area isn’t ever used, and costs an incredible amount of time and money to maintain over the years of the life of the lawn.
For so many of us, the time has indeed arrived to look at other alternatives.
Rethinking Our Verges
Ugly, ugly, ugly, is all that can be said of many of todays Australian home verges. As Australia has changed so incredibly so quickly, so too do we see these changes apparent in many areas of our lives. The same is true in this instance of our home verges, whereas in times past we had a lot more free time and we were much more interested in maintaining our homes and yards in a particular way, but not so much anymore. Today we can drive around and see many ugly and completely disregarded verges to properties everywhere, often entirely overrun with weeds and other times being left not mowed or in any way maintained should lawn grass still be present.
And for those of us who still persist in growing lawns on verges, there is the ongoing cost of watering, fertiliser, weed control, pest control, disease control, and lawn mowing costs over the entire life of the lawn, even if we never even use the lawn for any purpose at all. All this without even considering the high cost of installing lawns onto verges in the first place.
A wood-chipped verge however is extremely low cost, almost costs nothing to put down, requires no soil improvements, no irrigation system, no watering costs, and no maintenance costs whatsoever. The chipped verge can be useful as extra parking spaces for cars, and can be attractive enough all on its own, with the only ongoing costs being to top up the wood chips every few years.
Wood chipped verges naturally suppress weeds so long as we keep the wood chips refreshed and to a reasonable depth. Any weeds which do appear in our wood chipped verges can be quickly taken out with a regular garden hoe, no poisons required, no getting onto our hands and knees either.
Many people are complementing these wood-chipped verges with a small number of native plants that require no water or very low water, neither do they require fortnightly lawn mowing costs. These wood chipped verges with native plants are growing at great speed in popularity everywhere around the nation right now, and so they should. They are inexpensive, have negligible maintenance costs, and best of all is that they truly are a beautiful addition to our gardens and a huge improvement to the appearance of our homes and properties, most especially when compared to those ugly weedy verges we now see so much everywhere we go these days.
Now That You’re Aware - Look Around
We often don’t start noticing something until it has been brought to our attention by someone else, and I hope that will ring true here too. Now that the wood chip revolution has been brought to your attention, I guarantee that you will start taking notice of the gardens and verges you see as you go about the city or town where you live.
All of a sudden you may well discover that there are a lot of these types of wood chipped gardens and verges springing up absolutely everywhere, and you may be very surprised just how many there are, and how rapidly this new idea is spreading.
And you may just start wondering why you never noticed it before.
The wood chip revolution is truly upon us.
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