Over at our Survival Gardener community, Brian asks two questions about using wood chips in the garden.

Wood Chips in the Grocery Row Garden

David, I have a couple of questions regarding wood chips.

1. You advocate for wood chips in your Compost Everything book around trees. With the grocery row garden concept would you advocate for wood chips in the entire bed (annuals, bushes, trees, everything)?

Yes, if you have wood chips available. We use them in the beds and the paths when we have them.

When we don’t, we mulch with other things, including grass clippings, non-sprayed hay, fall leaves, chop-and-drop plants and prunings, etc. We’ve even mulched with shredded paper, but it looks ugly so we try to avoid it.

There are times when we haven’t had enough wood chips available, so we’ve simply left the pathways bare.

It’s not ideal, as erosion can take place, but it’s better than not growing! With the bare paths, we used a wheel hoe to weed.

Another alternative if you don’t have any mulch is to plant your Grocery Row Garden and then cover-crop around the plants with something like Southern peas, mung beans, clover or even sweet potatoes. This helps stop erosion while keeping the ground cool and keeping weeds out. We’ve also planted the pathways with clover and rye grass in late winter.

Wood Chips in Row Gardens

2. Let’s say you’re breaking new ground on a new property and you’re making a fairly large vegetable garden. The soil is clay, zone 9b. Let’s say you till once and mound up the rows. How would you mulch this considering it is a large area, a new area, you don’t have compost already made, and is just for vegetables? Use wood chips? Some other strategy?

I prefer to use old hay (that I know is not sprayed with herbicide) to mulch row gardens… if I even bother to mulch them. Sometimes it’s just not worth all the effort and handling of materials, especially on a new property or where you’ve had to expand fast to grow more food.

This is what we did in 2020 when we moved back to the States during the pandemic:

The only mulch there is a few leaves that dropped from nearby oaks.

I prefer to grow mixed beds of perennials and annuals with permanent mulch, but I have no problem tilling up an area or double-digging some beds and having bare soil if that gets me food fast.

How to Garden Without Mulch

In the case of a profound lack of compost or mulching materials, just:

1. Till an area
2. Make your rows and plant them
3. Keep the rows weeded
4. Feed with compost tea/fetid swamp water/whatever you have available

This works fine in sand and in clay – we’ve done both.

Remember: the main point is to grow food.

I prefer mulch as we grow a lot of long-term perennials and they really appreciate the soil improvement and slow feeding that mulch gives them:

…but don’t worry too much about trying to follow a particular method perfectly.

If you have mulch, it’s good. If you don’t, you can still grow food. Many farmers have grown plenty of food without wood chips over the last 6,000 years. You can too.

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