Today’s video is all about chop and drop: the permaculture secret tree care specialists don’t want you to know about! There is no need for lots of expensive mulches and fertilizers for healthy and productive fruit trees, landscaping and gardening. With chop and drop gardening, you can repurpose free biomass for soil mulching and feeding!
This video describes how mulch works and how we can repurpose biomass to simulate a forest floor for the best soil mulching practices to keep your trees and veggie garden healthy and thriving. The goal is to reuse organic matter to create a sustainable system that requires as little input from us as possible, and that will make our plants and our wallets very happy. While some supplemental fertilizing may be beneficial in certain cases, the amounts required can be reduced dramatically, much to the chagrin of fertilizer companies.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
0:00 Chop And Drop Gardening Explained
3:46 How To Chop And Drop Demonstration
6:10 How To Fertilize And Mulch With Chop & Drop
9:56 Can I Just Use Fertilizers Instead?
13:04 Adventures With Dale
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46 Comments
If you found this video helpful, please “Like” and share to help increase its reach! Thanks for watching 😊TIMESTAMPS here:
0:00 Chop And Drop Gardening Explained
3:46 How To Chop And Drop Demonstration
6:10 How To Fertilize And Mulch With Chop & Drop
9:56 Can I Just Use Fertilizers Instead?
13:04 Adventures With Dale
I appreciate the chop and drop throughout my garden and trees. In the summer it's a great free mulch of nutrition and root protection during high heat. During winter ditto, nutrition and root protection. Win all year as nature designs😊
I chop and drop in my orchard, and also keep back a few leaves to add to a black trash can filled with water. I shred my leaves, throw them in with a handful of worm castings, stir occasionally and keep the lid on. I then use it as my liquid fertilizer in the orchard
My biggest problem in my young orchard is CRITTERS! The orchard is back a ways on farmland. I caged them to protect from deer but over the winter they (rodents, I assume) chew the base of the trees, even under deep snow. I’ve heard of sprays that last a few months, has anyone tried them?
Looks like you are cutting off at least 50% of your avocado tree. Is that going to negative impact fruit production? At what point is too much?
Very interesting. Thanks 👍
I'm researching my garden
HF Predator I found works well unless your going for the Popeye forearms. Ideally you want to plant legumes between your fruit tress for fast establishment as part of "chop and drop" permaculture design.
I don't know anything about your growing zone, but maybe you should have waited three or four more weeks before pruning the avocado. It still looked very vigorous and if your still getting warm days the pruning may just prompt new growth that could get damaged once the cold arrives. Once again, I'm in San Diego and know nothing of your zone.
This has come at a good time. I have let my back yard become WAY overgrown with "weed trees" (saplings basically). I know about chop & drop but haven't ever done it. I've been just ignoring thinking about what to do with all the material I'm cutting down and now I know! Thanks for the reminder! I even have a small wood chipper for the main stems.
Why would you not put the mushroom innoculant on top of all the branches so that gravity and precipitation would seed fungus over all material?
I hear that Tithonia Diversifolia is an effective chop and drop plant and in summer bought cuttings from Florida. Can chop and drop be used in vegetable beds? This is my plan, although I am not sure my timing is right. I am using it among winter greens and lettuces and where I will plant other vegetables in spring.
I agree on leaves. But pruning is artificial. If we see tomatoes, using its own branches may introduce diseases.
Great! I just got some corrections..
How about pear treees – do they benefit from this method?
Thanks for the Chop and Drop video. I had no idea how important this technique is for the plants. I appreciate the information.
So…this is the first year for Ms. Owari and Mr. Brown…they are in large containers and will go in my greenhouse for the winter. Should they be pruned?
And, my lemon and lime are laden with fruits… do they get pruned?
Atlanta location.
So…this is the first year for Ms. Owari and Mr. Brown…they are in large containers and will go in my greenhouse for the winter. Should they be pruned?
And, my lemon and lime are laden with fruits… do they get pruned?
Atlanta location.
Interesting! Hi to Dale!
I have to comment on this video. A while ago I bought a small electric shredder/chipper for my prunings for about $150. I just finished pruning some fruit trees like done in this video. I was amazed at how well the little chipper worked on the small leafy branches and all the branches up to about 1.5 inches diameter. Everything was ground up to bits and pieces less than an inch long. It was so easy to spread this fine mulch around I feel I should tell the viewers of this video. Two weeks later the mulch has turned from green to brown and looks just like the bagged mulch I used to buy. In conclusion, I get free mulch instead of buying it now, I don't have to load the branches up and take to the dump, and the little chipper will pay for itself in no time. The footprint of the little chipper is about 15 inch by 15 inch in my storage shed. Everybody should own one of these to make gardening easier, they do work really well for this application.
I’m in a 8a area in Texas and have Meyer lemon I’m trying to grow along with some other trees (dwarf cherry, peach and fig) that I’ll use this with. So far they are still small so hopefully they’ll take off next spring. It’s the avocado that I’m growing that I really want to get in the ground so I need to find your planting of yours for help. Thanks for this video.
Thank you very mulch!
Great information. I do this with my house plants. Plus gather leaves from a field and add to my garden for winter time
Great video. I had some extra help with my chop and drop activities recently by telling my little cousin to chop my corn stalks from the summer. I use the same chop and drop method as you with my shrubs in the front of my house and it helps with shrubs like azeleas etc.
Thank you
Do you feel like leaving fallen leaves is just as good? We have a very large bed for trees and I never remove the leaves in the fall. My chickens do a decent job of turning leaves over. I’ve △⃒⃘lways felt like it was better to just let them decompose.
Love this. Because I am on land with lots of older fruit trees already (my grandmother planted many of them in the '60s), I don't usually use anything more than chop-and-drop even for young trees, because we are on ancient soils which, without a healthy fungal network, are more-or-less unusable, so because I have time, I avoid added fertilisers in order to keep our funguses alive.
This does mean a lot of trees take a while to get going, but many of the trees planted this way seem a lot more resilient to bad weather than some of the older trees that were coddled more when they first went in.
(I do also periodically add some kitchen compost around the canopy line of some trees, and do try to mix and match the dropped prunings from different trees to keep the topsoil a little richer).
Vegetable gardens benefit from covercrops. Search for fall+cover+crop
I will chop and drop my summer garden in November. -Tx 8a
I literally live in a forest and have decades of broken down leaves that I use in my garden.
Hey MG! I hope you’re doing well this fall! I was wondering, do you read many books on this subject or gardening? Because I think if you haven’t already, you should check out JADAM organic farming and try out some of the techniques that they prescribe. It’s not a super long read, it’s well illustrated and written by a multi-generation family of South Korean organic gardeners. Even if you don’t agree with everything I personally believe this would be right up your alley, and maybe you could make a video discussing low cost organic gardening with the JADAM philosophy in mind.
Thanks for reading, have a happy Halloween!
Permaculture the suburban backyard lazy mans way to grow stuff… not a commercial way to make money. The average Permaculture person had 5acres and still couldn't feed his family. A man who had 1.5 acres had 7 employees and was making $370k a year from it.. That's the difference. Real Farmers have a bottom line.
I thought pruning occurred in winter?
Do you prune the fig trees?
ive been doing this for years with all my fruit trees. Your avocado got HUGE!
Why are you fertilizing before winter? I've read that can cause the tree to try to grow when they should be headed to dormancy.
I don't rake up the grass clippings, I leave them to compost in. Seems to make my lawn really happy.
You used hand tools for that entire prune job?
This actually explains why a tree I pruned had grown like crazy the next year. I happened to leave the prunings & hedge clippings underneath to decompose.
Thank you, brother, thank you.
I'm on the west coast, and just moved in to a home that has fruit trees. They are all overgrown, but given I have never owned fruit trees before don't want to do the wrong thing. I'd hate to kill them. They've all established trees. I'm guessing they're all between 8-10' tall. And abt 7-9' wide. And they're all pretty dense. I don't want to prune too much, or maybe I'm not supposed to prune at all till early spring. Seeing you cut yours back got me wanting to do the same thing. Actually though, the citrus trees are still producing. As is the apple tree. Should I leave them alone. I love your channel. I think I learn more from your channel than any other garden channel. Thank you!
Your prunings all look beautiful and healthy. If some prunings are not so healthy looking, should those be hauled away / burned with the bigger branches and thorns?
The meaning is obvious from the name.
Also, you can't do this with conifer saplings, unless you want acid soil.
If you had to chose one, figs or persimmons? I don't have the space to really put in a persimmon tree anywhere, unless you think it would grow in a pot? I know figs do well in pots.
I’ve heard comfrey is good for hop-and-drop for most plants. Do you agree?
Great information! Thank you for getting it out there! 😊
I was wondering, how did you learn so much about the subject? Where do you find all that information?
You’re very knowledgeable and it’s enriching! Thanks again! 😃
This is a terrible idea for many people because they are growing trees outside of their natural range. In PNW this would be an awesome way to infect your entire orchard with diseases. Diseases will Winter over in the leaf litter and infect our trees in the Spring. Removing leaf litter is one of the #1 recommended biological controls in this region.