It’s a permaculture concept. There’s lots of videos on Youtube that explain it. And Brad Lancaster talks a lot about it in his “Water Harvesting for Drylands & Beyond” books and related videos.
It’s the pinnacle of lazy gardening. But in specific terms, here’s what you do:
- everything that you trim from your trees, bushes, etc., chop it up into smaller pieces. Ideally, no more than about 4" long. But honestly, most of the time, I don’t do that. For example, when I pull off the brown/dead sugar cane leaves, I just drop them on the ground as is. They eventually break down on their own into smaller pieces.
- You’d do this over and over and over again over the course of the calendar year. Drop the trimmings around stuff like trees, bushes, etc. in order to create your own organic mulch.
- Don’t put it right up against the base of trees.
- Bacteria and fungi and worms in the soil will do the work to break it down.
- You can speed this up if you want by also ordering a Chip Drop (from www.chipdrop.com) for free. Gets you about 14 yards’ worth of wood chips from local tree service companies who would otherwise be dumping that stuff at the local landfill.
- You’d also put any “chop and drop” stuff in your backyard composting pile.
First thing we did when we moved in to our house 4 yr ago was I got 2 chip drops and spent a couple of weeks spreading it all over the backyard. Neighbors all thought I was nuts. Laid it down about 12" thick. Within 3-4 months, it was only 6" thick. Now I get a chip drop once a year, usually order it in December so I don’t have to move all of the mulch in the super hot desert heat.
The mulch keeps my frost sensitive trees warmer in the winter. And in the summer, it keeps their roots cooler & it means I don’t have to water as often.
Within a year, our rock hard desert soil which had zero organic matter in it was then covered in a thin layer of dark black soil. Now it’s about 1-1.5" thick on top of the native soil, once you scrape away all of the wood chips on top.
So when I trim my bamboo? I just chop it into smaller pieces right there and dump it on the ground in place. So the bamboo mulches itself.
When I hack back the vetiver grass? Just toss it on the ground. It’ll eventually decompose.
Whenever it rains here, it’s usually a gully washer. Because of all of the organic mulch in the backyard, my garden now absorbs a lot of that rain and there isn’t as much run off into the gutter and on down the street, which also means that I have to water less frequently when it rains.
I also tossed in this michorrizal fungus stuff in every planting hole when I planted everything…in the dirt when you see this white spider web looking stuff? That’s what that fungus is. It attaches itself to the plant roots and has a beneficial relationship with tree and plant roots. Now there’s that stuff all over the yard. And worms showed up, too. When we first moved in? No worms.
With ‘chop and drop,’ you basically are mimicking what happens in a normal forest out in the wilderness…trees drop stuff and it creates a carpet of stuff which breaks down and eventually turns into this rich soil.
Because it’s so dry here, when I get a Chip Drop, what I usually do after I spread it in the backyard is I water it all down with the hose. Speeds up the decomposition process. Wear a mask if you’re prone to allergies, of course. I know that things are going really well when little mushrooms show up all over the yard.
