Wood chips for raised veg beds?

[the_hobbitish]

Has anyone used wood chips to mulch their raised veg beds?

I have a huge pile of chipdrop free wood chips from the fall that I used for paths in my veg garden and around bushes/trees. I usually top off my raised beds with bought compost, but last year what I ordered had obvious signs of herbicide contamination (crops with weird abnormal growth or no growth). I only used half my wood chip pile, so I'm considering using it in the veg beds and the back flower bed, but I'm not sure how it works.

Can I plant into a 2-3in layer of wood chips over soil in my raised beds? How does seed germination work? Do you add a pocket of compost to plant into? Do you have to use seedlings instead? How long does it take for the wood chips to break down or does that even matter?

Please explain your wise permaculture ways.

[LostGirl]

Are these the contaminated ones but you think they are good because they are old?  If you thought they were contaminated last year, I would not use them for gardening this year. 

If they are clean, I would mix them in lower or use them as a soil building base almost like mini hegelkultur (look it up). The wood will take a while to decompose and in planting beds, I usually plant things pretty close together so you'd have to avoid all the stems. Vegetable plants will not want them up against the stalk.  In short, top dressing with wood chips isn't going to get you the performance you are looking for and would just help retain moisture more than anything. 

[the_hobbitish]

The contaminated stuff was garden compost I ordered by the yard last spring. It looked beautiful but lots of my vegetables grew with weird curled and twisted leaves. Some plants didn't grow at all, despite testing that the seeds germinated well.

This is a pile of free wood chips from a locally cut tree. @RetiredAt63 suggested buckwheat for my weed prevention problem so I think I'm going to use that and comfy for my soil improvement needs this year. I might lawn mower some leaves for leaf mulch too.

I may just get ambitious with the path building with the extra chips instead or cover a whole area for a new in 2023 flower bed...

[RetiredAt63]

Cardboard with wood chips on top make good paths, but they are not permanent.

Your compost is contaminated.  It was probably made with ingredients (like lawn grasses) that were sprayed with herbicides.  Many take more than one year to break down. 

Not as good for weed control but good for erosion and soil enrichment is field radish.  Mine grew really well last summer/fall.  It will be interesting to see what the soil is like this year as all the roots decompose.  It was the bed that had garlic - the beans were OK but not great after garlic but the field radishes did well.

[the_hobbitish]

If money were no object I'd do brick paths, but I'm happy with the free wood chip ones.

I really hope everything fares better than last year. Some of the articles I've seen say it can be at least a year for microbes to break down herbicides, more if you're not regularly tilling, which I'm not.

[Fishindude]

I till my raised beds each spring.   Wood chips could take a couple years or longer to break down, making things tougher to till, so I would not use them.

[moustachebar]

The compost sounds like it was contaminated with dicamba. It will eventually degrade to the point that it doesn't affect the plants. It is getting very difficult to find compost that is not laced with it.

Chips are good to mulch with as long as they aren't black walnut, with has allelopathic compounds. Maybe not as good as compost but not bad. My understanding is somewhat incomplete, but if slightly aged they won't steal nitrogen from the plants.

I've enjoyed Lee Reich's Weedless Gardening and his blog for info on mulching, cover crops/ green manure and no-till gardening. He's a big composter but uses all these together.

[herbgeek]

Wood chips suck up all the nitrogen in the process of breaking down, so I would not put it around annuals plants that need nitrogen. 

[Weisass]

Here’s what I do with my wood chips: I use them on my paths, then dig the broken down path into the garden bed the next year, and put new chips in the path. It avoids most of the issues with fresh wood chips mentioned above, and when you mix in compost/hay/ash, you can get a really good thing goin.

[moustachebar]

Wood chips suck up all the nitrogen in the process of breaking down, so I would not put it around annuals plants that need nitrogen.

I think that's the story/ reason behind using wood chips that have aged.

[lhamo]

Have you watched Charles Dowding's No Dig channel videos on Youtube yet?  Amazing resource. He has several on how to tell if commercial compost is contaminated (IIRC pymetherin is the main culprit in the UK, where it is a huge issue).  He mulches all his paths with woodchips, and feeds his no-dig beds with one application of compost about 2 inches thick per year.  No other fertilizers, etc.  He grows an intensive market garden with  multiple crops per year on a small space.  It truly is a beauty to behold. 

Here is his latest garden tour video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nY32M39jQ1k

[Weisass]

I love his garden so much.

[lhamo]

My yard is challenging for vegetable gardening due to the steep slope and the fact that I have two ginormous conifers in the middle of it that cast a lot of shade, but watching Charles and other market gardeners cram so much into a small space has inspired me.  This is what the southern half of my yard looked like in late summer 2020 after we built structured terraces into what was previously a dry, sandy mess of mostly grass and weeds into the middle section of the slope. 

It has been a lot of fun and I am proud of what I have accomplished so far with a challenging site, but I intend for my next house to have a larger, sunnier, flatter yard to make things a bit easier.

[moustachebar]

Beautiful!

I will check out the no-dig info. Sounds great, thank you!

[Milspecstache]

I have probably 15 chip-drop loads on my property at this time.  The blueberries and blackberries and grapes love it.  Great for trees as a weed cover.  The veggie gardens are a bit more of hit and miss.  I'm going to lime heavy this year to see if that is the problem.  In the past, when converting, I always spread lime and chicken manure then tilled it all in, covered with cardboard, then piled the chips on top of that.  For terrible weeds I even (gasp) used roundup to kill everything first.  This was wildly successful until last year's summer garden when I couldn't get anything other than butternut squash and pumpkins to grow, both of which like a slightly acidic soil and produced bumper crops.  Everything else seemed to struggle.  My winter garden (kale, collards, broccoli) was similar and has struggled.  I am thinking that lime is required again.  So in the next week I am going to haul in a truckload of lime and start spreading to see the effect.