So, now that our community garden is fairly well cleared out, we wanted to show you how we leave our garden going into winter. It might look messy, but there’s a method to our madness.
We heavily practice a concept that we call “chop and drop.” Basically, this means that as we trim up our veggies, especially at the end of the season, we just leave the excess in our walkways. You might wonder why we do this and it’s for a very good reason!
Over the winter, this material will essentially dry up and start the process of breaking down. It effectively composts over the winter, just without any fancy composting bins or other technical methods. We don’t worry about anything, be it temperatures, water levels, carbon/nitrogen mixes or anything that you might usually concern yourself with composting.
Come next spring, this material will be “mostly” broken down. From here, we can rake the material into our beds and then till it into the soils the next spring during our spring prep. This adds an immense amount of organics, and even actual compost, into our beds. The best part? It’s less effort than actually doing anything with our excess plant material!
When you practice this over the summer, which we do, the leaves can get a little “sludge like” and make it unpleasant to walk in your walkways. So, if you’re into “pristine” walkways, this method might not be for you. But, we don’t really mind it as we sort of treat our walkways as a place for plants to grow and take over during the later summer months. By spring, this material will be dry and mostly broken down. If you don’t use mulch (weed fabric) like we do, your beds are just as good of a destination for your plant excess!
Once you rake this material into your beds, it will provide several benefits. You, of course, get all the plant nutrition (major & minor nutrients) that you would get if you actually composted it. Any excess “rough” material will also aerate your soils a bit, preventing compaction. It also sets your soil up for longer term nutrients since the composting process will continue to happen in the soil. It also helps knock down those late season weeds, aiding in preventing their perennial return.
We’ve found this to be a very helpful shortcut to both composting and long term soil nutrition in our garden beds. It’s so much less work than regular trips to a compost pile!
You might also notice that we leave our plants in the ground. It’s far easier to remove them the next spring than it is right before winter. If you intend to garden in the same place the next year, it’s just more work to fully clear out the garden and it provides little to no actual benefit.
The great news is we have our community garden cleared out as much as we need it to be. We do still have late season kale and komatsuna, which we may still harvest going into the early winter. These plants are super hardy and simply produce far more than we could possibly need or use. We’re perfectly OK leaving a few plants, since again, we’ll just use the excess material in the spring in our beds.
