GRASS - The Most Valuable FREE Resource for Growing Food

Hello and a very warm welcome back to the garden. Now, I wanna talk about grass and grass clippings today. I think that it is perhaps one of the most important resources that all gardeners need to take more seriously. And of course, it's a free resource. This video is packed full of ideas and ways that you can use grass and grass clippings to help you grow more food and have a more productive and healthy garden. It also goes without saying that all the grass and grass clippings you should use in your garden should come from places that don't use any chemicals. From what I've taken from the gardening community, I feel that grass clippings are misunderstood. Very often, whenever I mention them, people will talk about them just creating a sludge in a very anaerobic environment. But that happens when you place them too thickly. So on a compost, they're actually an invaluable bulk ingredient. But what you want to do is apply them in layers that's no thicker than about an inch or two to three centimeters, or actually mix it in with other material. You're not gonna get the sludge and you're gonna get all the nutrients and benefits from the grass. Now, I honestly feel that you can actually make a really good compost by, in volume, going 50-50 shredded up cardboard and grass clippings. And if you turn it on a daily basis, you should get compost in around two months. And it's just a really simple, free way of creating a bulking compost for your beds. Grass clippings are usually seen as a nitrogen-rich compost material, also known as a green material. And things like cardboard are carbon-rich materials. However, you can actually turn your grass clippings into a carbon material by drying them out. Usually, if you have a few nice days, or if you have a polytunnel, spread out a tarpaulin, or even some cardboard, and then loosely sprinkle grass clippings over there. Flip them over once or twice a day. It's quite labor-intensive, but you can actually make, if you've got a big enough area, a lot of brown material, which I usually actually find the hardest to get a variety of. But then, suddenly, you've got, using grass clippings, a brown material for your compost bin. Next up, we're gonna explore the multiple mulch options of using grass in the garden. The two core benefits that you can get from mulching with grass clippings, in particular, is weed suppression and moisture retention. And then, of course, it's gonna add organic matter to the soil. But if slugs aren't a worry, or aren't an issue for you, you can mulch your plants, and here I'm mulching purple sprouting broccoli, with around two to three centimeters, or an inch, of grass clippings, just like the same layer you would apply on a compost. Now, if slugs are a concern, you can still mulch with grass clippings, but what you want to do is just barely cover the surface. So aim for a mulch of just under a centimeter, or just under a half an inch. And yes, it's not going to suppress as many weeds, but it's still really gonna help to create a nice layer of insulation to retain moisture. For me, I'm not so worried about slugs, so what I like to do with grass clippings is create that thicker inch layer to put around my plants, and usually it's easier to do when the plants are smaller, rather than having to rummage in and around, but this is just such a great way of eliminating any kind of weed issues, keeping in a lot of water, and then when it breaks down, it's gonna provide organic material to the soil, and that turns into soil organic matter, and a single molecule of soil organic matter holds onto four molecules of water, so this is going to also help improve the long-term water retention of the soil itself. I'm actually using this mulching method for my container-grown potatoes. Here are my main crop sarpa mirrors, and you might have seen that video already, but basically, it's plant the potatoes and then stick a load of grass over the top. These have now broken down to a bit of a thinner layer, but it's looking really good. What I'll do in perhaps two or three weeks is go around and just top them up with another centimeter, but it's my hope that using this method and with how good it is with retaining moisture, I won't actually have to water these at all. So another really cool thing about using grass as a mulch is that it actually makes watering a lot more efficient and effective. So the issue with just having soil or compost is that if it's quite dry, what can happen is that rain falls and then it actually runs off rather than going deep into where the roots are. So what the mulch actually does, these are broad beans which are mulched with grass clippings, is that it actually captures the rainwater and slows down the process and allows it to then gently go down into the roots. If you have suddenly a lot of water and it runs off, what happens is that the mulch allows it to go down and stay down. You don't just have to stick with grass clippings for mulching. I've just been chopping down some of the longer grass with some shears, and this stuff is great actually for mulching around your perennials. This is a fig here, and I'm just gonna place a nice thick layer around the fig, and that there is such an easy mulch that's gonna help it hugely. Now for what I think is actually the most exciting potential that grass can bring to a garden and for grown food, and what it involves is creating a JADAM Organic Farming Amendment called JADAM Liquid Fertilizer or JLF for short. I will introduce JADAM properly in a future video and why it works so well with the whole project leaks that we're doing on this channel. But the founder of JADAM, Mr. Yongsan Cho in his book mentions how grass and crop residues make fantastic liquid fertilizers. I'm gonna show you how to create a grass JADAM liquid fertilizer. It is a slight adaptation because it's a lot more made for a home scale, but we're gonna run through exactly how to make that. Last growing season, I started making JADAM liquid fertilizers, and grass is one that I'm really trying to focus on this year, and I can see it playing a really important role for this space. So according to JADAM, a JADAM grass liquid fertilizer is pH neutral, helps with balanced growth, and should be applied throughout growth. So my take is up until kind of flowering or fruiting stages for plants. Obviously it's gonna contain a lot of nitrogen, being grass, but it'll also contain a respectable amount of potassium, phosphorus, and also some calcium. Now let's run through how to make grass JLF, and then how to apply it. Here's a process to make a grass JLF. First thing you need is some rainwater. Then I've got some, this is actually some leaf mold from under an old tree. However, if you don't have access to leaf mold, I'd say some really old homemade compost that's still in a compost bin, one or two years old is great. That's to inoculate everything. Then some kind of bucket or tub. What I actually have here is a plastic beer keg that I got for free from my local craft beer place, and I can get up to 10 of these free every single week. I've cut it off, and then I've got a compost bag that I've turned inside out, and I'm gonna place that inside because what that does is help exclude the light because light isn't always the best thing when we're doing a fermentation. The microbes aren't as happy with it coming through. Then you need some kind of lid, but we'll come onto that later. And then, of course, some grass. This is some grass that I actually scythed down. This is nice and fresh grass, and then this is what goes in. So the first stage is to actually fill this with grass nearly to the top, and I'm just pushing down as I put in the grass just to make sure that I can get quite a bit in. So you don't need to press down too much, but you do want a decent amount of grass in here, say up to about 75% full. And as I'm doing it, as I push down, I'm also lifting up this compost bag because we need a bit of overhang on the top. So the idea with the water is to use rainwater and just to cover above the layer of grass. In this old beer keg, we'll be able to fill it with the equivalent of around 25 liters of water. Obviously, it's not gonna be as much with all of this grass in. So that's nearly full now. I'm just pressing it down. Grass will float, but that's absolutely okay. I'm really happy with this layer. The final thing that really I need to do in terms of adding stuff is to just sprinkle this leaf mold over the top. So I sprinkled the leaf mold over the top. That's just to inoculate with biology, to help with decomposition. Now we're gonna close it. It's actually gonna be more of an anaerobic fermentation. So I'm just gonna fold in the compost bag like that. Now the compost bag isn't gonna hold onto water, but that's okay because that's what the role of this keg is for. And then I place this bit of wood over the top just to stop it unfurling. And that is the simple process of starting off a grass JLF. So two weeks after you've created your first batch of grass JLF, you can start using it. Dilute it one parts JLF to 30 parts water. So this is a 10 liter watering can. So I've put roughly a third of a liter and it's good to go. Now JLF is described a bit like a fine wine. You know, it gets better with age. Mr. Yong San Cho says that it's almost like soy sauce. The longer you leave it, the better it gets in terms of production. So after two or three months, you then want to start diluting it one to 100. And then you can even keep it going for a year, two years. That's when you start diluting it three to 400 to one. It just gets stronger and stronger with age. I will be doing a dedicated video about JLFs, but another thing just to bear in mind is as you're removing water, keep all of the solids in. You can top it up with more solids as they'll start to disintegrate and water as it goes. So you just need one tub and you can keep on using it for years and years and years. You'll be seeing me use grass a lot more in the garden this year. And I'm also going to be putting it through its paces with our new experimental garden as a part of Project Leeks, which I've mentioned before in this video about the project. But if you don't know what that means, this video here will show you my plan to help make gardening more accessible and also more affordable and to try and improve and build upon no-dig. This will be the thumbnail. We got it.