Wood Chip Myth

Interesting articlies, but where does one find something that translates
them? Does it do it instantly or what, it looks like a really lovely public
garden. I would like to be able to look at it translated.

Where I live we have so much rain that getting the water to penetrate the
mulch is no problem. It tends to break down rather fast here. If I put on
2-4" of chips in 2 years it is pretty much decomposed. Because of that much
rain the soil on the mountains is actually rather poor, the rain washes
decomposing litter down and it gets deposited in the valley, there is a
market for good rich black river bottom soil here. There is not the lovely
dark layer of decomposing forrest litter that is found in most eastern
forests, the rain washes it down hill.

I had to be aware of the soil layers when I constructed my rock garden, I
mixed the soil and then incorporated a portion of it into the soil that I
was covering up so that there was not a sharp line where they meet. It has
seemed to work, I have no problems with the plants in the rock garden.

On Mon, Mar 27, 2017 at 4:18 PM, Louis Richard <louisrichard11@gmail.com>
wrote:

We use about 120 metric cubes a year of Ramial chip wood each year and it
improved our work and the health of our plants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramial_chipped_wood/

Many people confuse Ramial chip wood with chip wood while it's not the

same

product.

Here's an interesting link for those of you who can read French (and you
might also use a translation site!).

http://agriculture-de-conservation.com/Le-bois-/
rameal-fragmente-un-outil.html

Regards,

Louis Richard

Matane, Québec, Canada (Zone 4b)

http://www.jardinsdedoris.ca/index.html

https://facebook.com/pages/Les-jardins-de-Doris/…

2017-03-27 15:42 GMT-04:00 penstemon <penstemon@q.com>:

It takes a lot of water to wet the soil below the chips.

Exactly.
Here, if it rains in the summer (which it does, occasionally), the rain
only penetrates the first few millimeters of clay soil, and the water
evaporates rapidly. Mulch on top of this soil does not reach the soil
surface. It would have to rain for days on end for water to penetrate

the

mulch and then get far enough down to plant roots.
Which is why the garden in the back yard here is a series of mounds, or
berms, mostly of clay soil, with a lot of gravel mixed in. The only

time

the mounds get sufficient water to reach the roots of bulbs, etc., is

from

melting snow in late winter.
I also, incidentally, have a couple of “rain gardens”, which are
constructed in exactly the opposite way such gardens are usually made:
raised beds of sand and gravel, nothing else. Highly-permeable “soil”

which

allows rain from a brief thunderstorm to penetrate down to roots.
One of these beds, which has too much sand, has been a spectacular
failure, since I overlooked the possibility of a perched water table at

the

interface between a pile of sand and gravel, and clay soil. The sand

also

remains wet at a greater depth than anywhere else in the garden; bulbs
planted from the middle to lower end of the sand pile tend to rot.
Bob Nold
Denver, Colorado, USA
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