Thou Shall Not Rely on Woodchips Alone

Good Evening, Morning, or Afternoon Steemit folks.

It's been weeks since I've posted anything. We've had a super busy last couple of weeks, and tons that I could write about... but this one's good info for anyone as inexperienced in permaculture as myself.

This row of trees that we have facing East our our door has been one of the multiple things that we've been working at the past couple weeks. When we moved in, there was this black fence that was propped up, and zip tied to steel rods in the ground - separating the two row of trees. I am pretty sure that the intent of this was to discourage the deer from coming in and destroying the trees until they were large enough to "fend for themselves". While this was successful, it also left the yard even uglier than in this picture where the black fence is gone. Unfortunately the orange one is a requirement right now (again, to keep the deer out - and to give us a bit of a break between us and the crop that's poisoned multiple times per year.

It wasn't purely the fence that made the area ugly, but also that thee was grass and other weeds that were over grown, making it look like a jungle mess.

We wanted to change the area, and be able to utilize squash as ground cover for in between each of the trees.

I found this great load of wood chips and have been slowly chipping away at making them all MY woodchips.

We've used these chips for the pathways in the no dig raised garden that I finished up earlier today. Also, a little bit, and in the future a lot bit will be used for the food forest.

I've been unloading the chips on top of the organic straw and grass clippings in the food forest, and it seems to be working pretty good to keep the grass from coming through.

I need a lot more chips.

A few days back I unloaded a half a dozen loads of woodchips from the truck and covered the front row of the tress, or the row that's nearest the house. It looked pretty good, so I went to the row back and used the mower and weed wacker to cut down the grass/weeds and then covered them with wood chips. The next morning things looked REAL good.

Today when I went back to continue laying chips, I noticed that there was a lot of growth coming through the chips in grass form:

Here's a shot at the end of the night, the bit on the right is the original stuff I lay, the stuff on the left is moved chips onto paper that I rolled out to better suffocate that grass and have a more efficient ground cover. My hope is that with the paper under the chips the weeds wont break through. We can move some chips aside and tear a hole for our squash plants to grow here this year.

It was kind of a make-work project laying the first bit of chips before putting down the paper, but lesson learned. Will see if this paper makes the difference that we're looking for. I will keep you posted as usual!

It was a tiring day, we had a real nice view at the tail of the day:

Questions, comments, feedback - lemme have it!

Hope this note about ground cover is useful to you. Stay tuned, more mistakes to come! :)