As many of you experienced gardeners know, not every aspect of growing is sexy and fun. We try to put at least a little bit of focus on those “less interesting” things, since they’re just as much part of the process.
So, today we’re going to talk about chop and drop. When we harvest out our plants or perform physical manipulation that results in a lot of chaff, we just drop the waste right into our garden walkways. Sure, we could go through the whole composting process and make some really nice compost with our organic plant waste. But, composting is a lot of work! And despite not looking like it most of the time, we actually are lazy gardeners!
We love chop and drop for a few different reasons. The biggest of which is that it helps to keep weeds down in our walkways, especially late in the season. Often times, our walkways are rather filled with overgrowth by this time, so weeding is difficult at best. Dropping the leaves on the ground helps prevent weeds from gaining a foothold, a major labor savings late in the season.
Also, while we aren’t purposefully composting our plant waste, it does actually get composted this way. The chopped materials will break down over the winter, functionally turning it into compost. We then rake all of this organic material back into our beds each spring, allowing us to get plenty of organics into our soil.
We’ve also found over the years that this process doesn’t always result in 100% composting and some organic material is leftover the next spring. This helps our beds too, providing aeration and looser soils, which benefits a lot of plants for root penetration. The materials will continue to compost in the soil and all of that nutrition will eventually become available to our plants.
Obviously this process doesn’t work across all types of gardens. You probably wouldn’t want to do this on wood chip manicured walkways or some other “nice” defined walking path. But, for many types of in-ground gardens, it is a helpful technique that saves a lot of time. Also, those side benefits are quite functional, providing direct benefit to our future gardens.
A lot of the techniques we use are designed to save us time. Scaling gardening to higher levels often means NOT doing things you might otherwise do. We couldn’t tell you how many trips to a compost pile this effort saves us, but it’s a lot. Much less turning those piles over multiple seasons. Versus just raking up the material into the bed it came from, the smallest possible movement. It all adds up!
