Yet another reason to love wood chips

I have an area that we don't really do anything with. I covered the area with wood chips a couple years ago.  Last year I covered some of it with weedcloth, and Wood chips. I got large nursery pots put a bunch of holes in them and planted them to the top rim. My hope was I could grow veggies, fruit, herbs, & flowers in these pots. My thoughts were soil life could get in, but not gophers.  The cantaloupe, and calendula did very well in one of those pots, but nothing else I tried did very well.  This year I made a small raised bed. I removed the wood chips and weedcloth, and dug a 2' deep hole slightly smaller than the raised bed.  For a hugel beet style bed.
Even though it hasn't rained for a while. I don't  water in this area, and it's been quite hot recently the soil was super easy to dig. This time of year if you try to dig in uncovered ground, good luck. It's like chipping away at concrete.  I literally have to water, dig, fill the small hole with water, the next day dig, and so on. So easily digging a 2' hole is nothing short of a miracle, a wood chip miracle.  

Having the microbial life and moisture that comes with woodchips is amazing. I recall mid-summer of the first year I put woodchips on part of my garden. (I ran out, or would have put them on all of it). I had two rows side by side with woodchips on one, and what seemed like hardpan on the other. Under the woodchips, I could push my finger in easily as far as it would go. The uncovered row, I tried to push in, and I couldn't. I could barely scrap to dig a hole with my finger. The soil had been treated the same, except for the woodchips. I love the way it works.

Weeding an area that has had woodchips ontop of it for some time is more a fun activity rather than a laborious chore in my experience.

There isn't much out there that is more satisfying that pulling the entire dandelion root out of the ground in one pluck.

Something fun I have found, chickens love to dig through wood chipped pathways to get to the delicious bugs that are found within them. When I rotate 'pasture' for my birds half of them spend time in the grass while the other is interested in wood chipped areas. They have become professional mulch diggers.

The area I refer to as my "new garden" truly amazes me.  This is my third year growing in the area in which the soil was so poor that grass only grew sporadically.  Beds were constructed of scavenged concrete block and paths were mostly covered with cardboard that first year as I didn't have enough wood chips to go around the entire garden.  Last year I was able to put about a 6" layer of woodchips in the paths and this morning when I went to plant some comfrey starts along the fence, I was amazed at how easy the weeds came up and even more amazed at how dark and rich the top 2-3" of soil was!  This makes me extremely happy as I'm extending the area except I'm going to be planting directly in less than perfect soil and mulching with wood chips.