Fall Garden Prep to Build Soil

For a lot of people, garden cleanup means just tearing out all your plants, maybe even tilling the soil and leaving the earth bare. For me, it means building better soil for next year and feeding my chickens. Look at the size of that parsley. For most people, they'll come through here in the fall, pull out all their plants, maybe compost those plants, but I do things a little different and that's why garden cleanup in the fall gets me pretty excited. So instead of coming through and pulling out my plants, plants that have been taking nutrients out of the soil all season long, I want to return those nutrients to the soil. So what I'll do is I'll cut off all the supports for something like this tomato here and we'll take this tomato and lay it on the ground. So what's going to happen here is this tomato is going to lay on the ground throughout the whole winter. It's going to break down, help protect that soil from the extreme cold temperatures, and that root system underground is going to rot and feed the soil. And you wind up with a situation that looks something like this. Here's my border here. Here's all the plants that were growing throughout the season just laying here waiting to get covered with snow. They'll be matted down, get some good ground contact, and the soil underneath here probably won't freeze too deep so all the critters will be working throughout the winter to break this down. This is going to be an efficient form of chop and drop and compost in place. Now I used to take this material out, compost it, but I've found there's so much time between now and the growing season it's really not worth the effort to take it out of here just to compost it and bring it back in when everything is going to break down on its own. And it's going to leave me a nice layer of mulch to plant into next season. I can take some of the materials that sprouted in my walking paths that are going to do me no good in and I can just take these and throw them right on my planting areas. I can do the same thing with plants like thistles here with no seeds on there. I can toss her right in. All this seedless material even if it's weeds is all good stuff that's going to help build soil. And that's why I get excited for this because doing this for the past few years now it's helped me build a garden that I don't need to use any fertilizer, no water. Everything in your garden starts with the soil. And this time of year we're able to take everything we've been growing and put it right back where it came from. Let the critters underground do all the work. No need to till it up. And there's so much material to use here. You can see here when I grow stuff in planting areas it likes to come out. Stuff pops up in my walking paths. Now I'm not growing in my walking paths so anything that comes in here is fair game. All I do is I take it, kick it over to the planting area. Nice thistle there. There is still a lot of green material here. A lot of this stuff will push through the winter, eventually die back. So that's what makes this cleanup really easy as well. You don't even have to cut this if you don't want to. It's eventually going to get pushed down as long as it's not something like a tomato that's tied up. But all this stuff is going to fall down here and get matted down. Now if you're someone who wants to take this material and till it in, that's fine if you want to do that. But I'm advising you against it. As someone that used to till every year and has changed to a regenerative no-till garden, I can tell you if you follow these methods of just letting stuff rot in place, then next season pull it to the side to plant, you're going to save yourself a lot of headache. And this also helps combat some of the weed pressure. And here's one of your most important allies in the garden. It is fungi. Here we have a big old wine cap that's a little rotten. Laying there. We got some other kind of mushroom growing here. Looks like something you probably shouldn't eat. I don't know. I'm not going to eat it. But these guys are the key right here. Fungal network. This right here is just the part you see. Everything else is underground. Now that fungal network is alleged to be able to carry nutrients and water to plants that need it, forming a relationship with the plants. When it rots, it's also a good food source for all that good stuff that lives in your soil that makes your plants better. And I've never seen nature use a tiller and it seems like nature's doing just fine and way better than most gardens. Look at this honker right here. Now with my garden being constructed so close to the woods here, I get this added bonus of all these leaves. They're going to fall in here. So my strawberries, which also mulch themselves when they die back, are getting a nice layer of leaves to protect them and it's going to help fertilize them. And leaves are amazing. If you can, go around and grab the bags of leaves. People leave out in front of their houses. Bring them home and throw them in your garden. The same way we're dropping stuff on the soil here, go ahead take those leaves and cover the soil nice and thick. This garden cleanup is nice and easy. Basically, all you're doing is letting stuff rot in place. Give this a shot and I promise you're going to have fantastic results. Thanks for watching.