Virginia Home Grown
Gardening with Wood Chips
Clip: Season 23 Episode 2 | 2m 19sVideo has Closed Captions
Conserve water and suppress weeds by using wood chips in the garden.
Shana Williams shares tips on how to use wood chips in the vegetable garden to help keep weeds down as well as protect your soil. Featured on VHG episode 2302; April 2023.
Problems with Closed Captions? Closed Captioning Feedback
Problems with Closed Captions? Closed Captioning Feedback
Virginia Home Grown is a local public television program presented by VPM
Virginia Home Grown
Gardening with Wood Chips
Clip: Season 23 Episode 2 | 2m 19sVideo has Closed Captions
Shana Williams shares tips on how to use wood chips in the vegetable garden to help keep weeds down as well as protect your soil. Featured on VHG episode 2302; April 2023.
Problems with Closed Captions? Closed Captioning Feedback
How to Watch Virginia Home Grown
Virginia Home Grown is available to stream on pbs.org and the free PBS App, available on iPhone, Apple TV, Android TV, Android smartphones, Amazon Fire TV, Amazon Fire Tablet, Roku, Samsung Smart TV, and Vizio.
Providing Support for PBS.org
Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship(jaunty music) >>We are now at the garden, and this is our small garden, but we wanna talk about helping you to conserve water and protect the land.
So one of the things that I like to do is, I like to use wood chips.
What I will do is I'll get some wood chips, find someone who's cutting down trees, and ask them, "Can you dump a load of wood chips in my yard for me?"
And what I'll do is I'll take some of this cardboard, make sure that I remove all the tape off of it, place it down on the ground, take some wood chips, a lot more than this, of course, and then start tossing it onto our cardboard.
But as you know, we don't always get all the weeds, so often we might have different things growing along the side.
We have to pull those up.
And if you notice, hey, these are scallions.
I gotta hold on to some of these and use these later.
I have our regular type of wood chips here, which are just freshly cut, and I like to put those on our walkway.
And then I'll have some aged wood chips here.
Those sat around for about a year, and often I might mix in some manure.
But the key thing about this is these wood chips will help me do several things in my garden.
They will help eliminate soil erosion.
So as the wind continues to blow, what happens is my soil dries out and it starts to blow around, of course, and over time, I have decreased soil.
So as I add wood chips, that'll help keep my soil in place, but another key thing that it's going to do for me is allow my soil to stay moist between waterings.
So as I water in my garden and water in my plants fairly well and as the rainwater, guess what, my soil, my roots, they'll still stay moist because the wood chips are allowing a lot of that moisture to stay in the soil, and over time, guess what's going to happen?
My plants are going to be happy because they're going to have a lot of the moisture that they need and I get to be happy because I get to water less often.
Happy gardening.
Video has Closed Captions
Learn about efforts to protect and restore natural areas in Virginia! (26m 46s)
Video has Closed Captions
Explore Virginia’s first state park dedicated to honoring Native American history. (7m 11s)
Video has Closed Captions
Learn about a mining company’s industry-leading environmental stewardship program. (7m 57s)
Video has Closed Captions
Learn about native tree species being encouraged to grow at Machicomoco State Park (5m 55s)
Video has Closed Captions
Preserve soil on sloped landscapes by planting groundcover. (3m 7s)
Providing Support for PBS.org
Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorshipSupport for PBS provided by:
Virginia Home Grown is a local public television program presented by VPM