I want a fast BTE garden

I am new to this...just started gardening this summer.

I hate weeds so much. I live in a condo complex that has "garden spots" behind the visible facade of each building. Mine happens to be south facing.  Lucky me!? i live on a volcanic South Korean island and have EXTREMELY limited options when it comes to gardening supplies as Korea just doesnt have many options to so many things. I have decided to make a BTE garden to save lots of money so I dont have to spend 1$ on a small beefsteak tomato or other crazy prices. I am a tinkerer and builder and love creating new things and have watched many youtube videos and read many posts from all over the interweb but I want opinions before I proceed next.

My dirt is clay with about 25% rocks.....some of them really big. I have dug about 3 feet deep and seperated all of the rocks from dirt and then put all of the rocks in the bottom. I added some loose dirt on top and then flooded it with water so the dirt would settle down and between the rocks and repeated many times so as not to have an insane depression in my garden the next year when it rains heavy. On top of that I added rotten wood(I could break it apart with my hands, it was dark brown, not light at all), and then kitchen scraps such as egg shells and (mostly banana)fruit and veg peels. I then put my crappy but chopped clay back on that and mixed it with my newly discovered "free" compost. I also added coffee grounds.

My free compost is from a deciduous forest. I scraped back the fresh leaves and gathered the top 1/2 inch of soil and will use that as compost. It has some small roots in it that will stay but what is left is dark brown gold looking. It has some worms so that is a good sign i think. I am assuming it is essentially leaf mold. Where I live the leaves havent fallen yet so my plan is to make big piles of last years fall and harvest them next year for my garden. I will scrape the leaf mold from 2 years ago and mix it into the top few inches of soil. Picking out shallow roots from baby trees is a pain in the ass but what I am getting for free justifies this work.

I cant get 1 or 2  year old woodchips so I know I am playing with disaster. I can only get fresh course sawdust.

My question is this. Can I layer my mulch with 1 year old leaves, then some sawdust?

Is this better than just straight sawdust? I can find "some" woodchips but they are all green.

I want to have a break from the fresh sawdust and am thinking leaves would be a good candidate.

My soil would go as such
1. 12" clay mixed with leaf mold and used coffee grounds
2. 4" leaf mold
3. 2" 1 year old leaves                MULCH
4. 2" green sawdust.                   MULCH
5. 2" green woodchips                 MULCH

Will my soil still breathe?

Because where I live is so windy I have to cover my mulch so it doesnt blow away into my snobby neighbours garden and will have to cover it with some sort of barrier. I already have weed suppression with the wood so I am thinking about using burlap coffee sacks to keep things from blowing away.

I had to look up BTE garden.

My advice is simply this: Go out and find out how the locals garden and what they use to build soil. This will have been adapted to local conditions for hundreds of years. Don't get hung up on methods, especially what someone says on the internet (including me!).  What I don't really understand is digging a 3' deep hole but not wanting to put the minimal effort into shepherding your garden around the weeds.

In other words, you seem to be making things considerably harder than they need to be. You can sheet mulch/compost your way to good soil and simply adjust what you plant to fit your soil condition. Start with shallow-rooted crops that don't require much fertility like greens and radishes and whatever, then work your way up to tomatoes.

But honestly, the answers you seek are likely right in front of you. Also: fish & seafood. If you can get some waste products from that it is a fantastic addition and with the mix you describe you will need more green, ie nitrogen, proteins, etc.

I didnt dig the hole to stop weeds......i dug it because I had so many rocks....big ones....small ones....fat ones....skinny ones that it would have drastically impeded the roots of whatever I was growing. I also have clay soil so I had to break it up and will mix sand with it when I happen to come across some that isnt too salty. I dont want to buy much more than a shovel.....which I could not do without. The hard work now with the shovel was free exercise.

I am in Korea on a volcanic island and the locals here make piles of rocks and dead plants/weeds in the middle of their fields/gardens. I can only say this is most likely due to copycat behavior and really serves no purpose. I watch one of my neighbors spend countless hours once a week pulling up weeds in a field he only uses as a pumpkin patch. His plants are 100 feet long if you include all of the offshoots. I wonder why he doesnt put cardboard down on the 95% of ground that these plants occupy. The plants need a small root area but massive growing area...it makes no sense. The field is only tended to by hand with no machinery. His "trash" pile is an oval about 15' long' 5' wide and 4' high in the middle of his 50'x50' plot.

Yet at the end of the driveway there is a parsimmon farm that lays down cardboard all over the ground to supress their weeds. You would have thought this guy would have seen this and wondered what they were doing. This orchard is the only place I have ever seen weed suppression used besides a western style hotel that used wood chips.

Another neighbor lets his tomato plants grow 3', then he cuts off the top as soon as he sees tomatoes. He gets his initial tomato harvest but it is only the first growth that he keeps. He cuts off the suckers and then he gets no tomatoes for the rest of the year with his beefsteaks. His cherry tomatoes were indeterminate and managed to pop out a few extra fruits but not nearly what they could or should have.

Another neighbor grew and threw out yellow cucumbers all summer long because she doesnt water enough.

One neighbor decided to sweat herself to death clearing out weeds in the middle of summer to plant lettuce and didnt water it so it died.

i have driven past many different feilds of corn that had about 2" spacing between each plant. There were no rows and the corn it produced was very very small. And no......it wasnt the baby chinese corn.....I had to see what it was so I stopped and picked an ear at a couple places and it was full sized kernels....very few of them.

Here they love to use fertilizer....and sprays. Small gardeners and big farmers alike. Black plastic is a staple to keep weeds at bay. Buying food here is something that must be done with pure ignorance as to how it is produced.

I have very few good examples to draw from the local farmers or gardeners here.

When I want to use the BTE gardening method I am doing it for all of the right reasons. I don't want to feed my family chemical crap from the supermarkets. I have done most of the hard work already and am going to collect the final resources(sawdust/woodchips) to finish it off. I just want to know if my plan has any problems or if you have any recommendations.

I'm sorry if my post was frustrating for you. It's not my intention to criticize so much as steer the conversation toward looking at the problem in different terms. I'm not going to mince words because I think I have something very important I can help you learn, if you care to listen. If you do, it will make you a better gardener and will save you work and frustration.

It would appear you seek easy instant answers that will provide you a complete solution with minimal fuss. Nothing wrong with that -- many people seek to solve whole problems all in one go by adopting frameworks or guidelines or structures from which they cannot then see the trees for the forest -- the rampant misinterpretation of permaculture is the perfect example. But then is one understanding strategy and underlying principles, or just tactics? The obsession with ponds thread discusses this a little.

You look around you and see things that make no sense to you so you assume they must be wrong. Just like my neighbors here look at my practices and assume I'm an idiot -- they literally tell me this to my face. And yet, who is the one producing food? Who is the one with yields that blow the doors off non-organic yields? Everything I do on my farm is done for a reason. Sometimes those reasons are better than others and sometimes they are even accidents or failures, but if you look at them without knowing any of that and with no understanding of the context, you can of course interpret it any way you want. Usually existing prejudices or ideas about how things "should" be done are going to inform that interpretation, aren't they? Just look at that idiot, he can't even water his tomatoes properly! What an amateur!  Actual quote, btw. Since they didn't understand why I was doing it, they assumed it was wrong.

At the core of my recommendation is this: ask why the local gardeners and growers are doing these things rather than just assuming that you have the answer already. That pumpkin grower... how many more pumpkins has he grown than you? Did the person who threw out yellow cucumbers harvest any good ones? Was that more than you have grown and harvested? Why were they yellow? Did you ever talk to this person?

I could provide you any number of explanations for things you see. The corn? Kernels are a function of pollination. 2" spacing? Spacing is a function of fertility and what you want out of your plants. Baby corn are just immature corn, not a different variety. You didn't know that, did you? It's entirely possible that they wanted baby corn, thus the tight spacing, but as in many places in Asia are having serious pollinator problems.
Weed suppression in pumpkins? Doing what you suggest makes no sense and you need only think about how squash grows to figure that one out. Suppressing weeds among persimmons? Absolutely, and using carbon mulch is an ancient practice in Korea, China, and Japan. Black plastic is extremely common and is used as much to warm the soil as cut weed competition. You may think the plastic itself is wrong but thats the material used, not the tactic.  Piles of rocks? In one place I have visited farmers believed that rock piles would trap evil spirits that might otherwise cause their crops to fail. It might even be some of that. Or it was just less work to put them there.

It's really easy to criticize when one has not been successful or when ignorance prevents understanding the reasoning behind a practice. It's easy to not see good examples. Of course some practices are bad for the environment or would not make sense in a good organic garden, but is that because the tactic itself is bad or because that particular application is bad? Black plastic, for example. It's the plastic, not the tactic of mulching or in hilling/coloring soil to trap heat.

Look for that underlying reasoning and you will have all the successful tactics you need for a bountiful garden. And I beg you: Read Farmers of Forty Centuries by Franklin King. Those are my recommendations.

I also dug out my entire garden because it had so many rocks.  It was definitely worth the effort.  My personal belief is that your method will work if you can provide some pockets of good soil to plant in while the layers decompose.  Thing might not grow too well the first year because the organic material will be in the process of decomposing.  But it should improve after that.  

Paul Gurnsey wrote:
My soil would go as such
1. 12" clay mixed with leaf mold and used coffee grounds
2. 4" leaf mold
3. 2" 1 year old leaves                MULCH
4. 2" green sawdust.                   MULCH
5. 2" green woodchips                 MULCH

Will my soil still breathe?

Green wood chips are fine, I have used tons around my plants. Don't dig them in, just as a topping though.
Sawdust I would stay away from. It's too fine and can compact quickly with the potential to seal off your soil. It's like cement when it gets wet and dries out in my experience.

I have experimented with the BTE approach. I have had some successes and some problems.

It works really well for my in areas where I can grow plants without needing to disturb the soil. It is great for things like strawberry plants and berry bushes, and around fruit trees. It works less well where I have things like potatoes, which need digging.

Additionally, I have decided that the biggest impact is actually the regularly raking and hoe-ing to disturb any developing weeds.

Looking at what you've already done, it sounds to me like you've created a fantastic lasagna bed. Add in a thick layer of organic mulch to suppress weeds and I think you're ready to grow.  Depending on your climate, you will need to maintain that layer of mulch at a certain thickness to continue suppress weeds and replace what breaks down into fertile compost over time.

As I understand it, one of the facets of the BTE method is that he has abundant chicken manure to add additional fertility to the wood chips. Without the addition of manures I think the remaining techniques are more closely described as deep mulching. This is a technique that I'm quite fond of. In my area it doesn't entirely eliminate weeding, but it does make it a much less painful process. Plants rooting into a deep mulch have nothing solid for their roots to grab hold of, and so are nearly effortless to pull up. The hardest part is the bending over to reach.

As for whether or not to use the sawdust, if you mix it with other materials (and those leaves would be ideal) you can help prevent it from forming into an impermeable layer. If you area is as chemical mad as it sounds, I would be more concerned about what may have been sprayed on those leaves. I'm fairly comfortable using leaves in my neighborhood because most of my neighbors don't do more than mow their lawn, the few exceptions grow organic foods or wild life habitat. There are places near here where I wouldn't trust that.

Nothing was sprayed on the leaves. They are from a natural forest where bee keepers make honey from low light tolerant plants that flowers in the summer. I didnt disturb them all and am far enough away so that my leaf mining will have no impact.

I am most concerned about the leaves smothering the soil and preventing it from breathing.

Also....that honey is awesome.  

I dont have any chickens but only a 3' x 10' x 5' x 10' plot.

I have coffee grounds!?!?

In my experience leaves don't smother the ground so long as they have varied sizes and shapes. If you're gathering from a natural forest, then you probably already have mixed species with varied leaves. It sounds like you're already off to a strong start.

Coffee grounds are great additions to the garden, and like leaves they are great for attracting earthworms. They do not really add a lot of nitrogen. With the green materials and compost you've already added you should be in good shape. Add your carbon rich materials (leaves, woodchips, ect) to the top surface of the soil and the soil life will slowly but surely bind atmospheric nitrogen as it composts in place. While this is happening you will have the benefit of weed suppression. It might not be quite as fast, but you will still have a steady increase in soil life and fertility.

In my climate a wood chip mulch seems to break down approximately one inch per month. That is to say, if I put 12 inches down I can expect to start seeing bare soil about a year later. In a warm wet climate that pace will probably be faster. We're usually on the dry side here. If you can keep a layer of undecayed carbon three to four inches deep you can keep nearly all weed seeds from ever germinating. I've already commented on how easy it is to pull those that do. That's assuming you don't just regularly scuff the surface of the mulch to stir up anything that is starting to sprout.

Used coffee grounds are 2% nitrogen.

I am starting with some of these techniques as well as some Ruth Stout mulch techniques.  I have a few years experience with deep mulching.  With the Back to Eden system, from the videos I've watched on it, it is best to stay away from sawdust, even 'green' sawdust, as it is quite a bit of concentrated carbon with very little nitrogen or nutritive value (specifically in the early stages before fungi get into it)... unless you are adding lots of nitrogen.  Manure, or kitchen scraps, or compost, or seafood waste, are good ways to get the nitrogen and other nutrients into the sawdust {just make sure it's mixed up well}.  It helps to get your woody material good and wet as well when you are starting out, rather than your soil [more about that below].   As a contrast to the sawdust, most arborist chipping waste includes some actual greens, and sappy bark and cambium wood.  The resulting mix of chips are much more nutrient rich than straight wood sawdust, and more complex for your long term nutrient gains than straight wood will be. They also have larger air pockets than sawdust, and tend not to compact in the same way.

My free compost is from a deciduous forest. I scraped back the fresh leaves and gathered the top 1/2 inch of soil and will use that as compost.

I do this for my potting mix.  It is great high quality nutrient dense albeit fungal dominated compost/soil.  Good intuition going for that stuff!  Right on.  Now, when contemplating building your garden, think about what was happening in the forest:  If you think about how a forest floor is, there is always a transition from new material that is not broken down proceeding downwards to stuff that is partially broken down and then to things that are fully broken down; and this will correspond with an increase in moisture as you get into the more broken down material.  While there is a lot of nutrient potential in the dry leaves on top, it is the leaves below that that are more consistently moist that begin to make those nutrients available through fungal interaction.  If you follow this pattern with building your mulch up, then you should get the right activity out of the fungi and other microbes in the soil.  

Saturating the soil, as you wrote about here

I added some loose dirt on top and then flooded it with water so the dirt would settle down and between the rocks and repeated many times so as not to have an insane depression in my garden the next year when it rains heavy.

seems excessive to me. This has taken all the pore spaces out of your soil, and forced your water to compact your bed.  You have eliminated the oxygen from your soil matrix, and probably made mud.  The way I see it, the soil life doesn't like mud as much as just the right amount of moisture.  When you ask:

Will my soil still breathe?  

I might think that it is struggling from the over-watering situation more than your potential mulch plan.

So with your questions and statements:

Can I layer my mulch with 1 year old leaves, then some sawdust?

Is this better than just straight sawdust? I can find "some" woodchips but they are all green.

I want to have a break from the fresh sawdust and am thinking leaves would be a good candidate.

Yes you can layer 1 year old leaves under your sawdust.  I think that in your case, I would add old leaves before sawdust, and perhaps if you have enough leaves, mix some of the leaves and your coffee grounds and a bit of your leaf mold (to inoculate it with local microbes) with your sawdust, and make sure it's all damp before it goes in.  Green woodchips are good woodchips!  

 It has some worms so that is a good sign i think.

If you have access to worms, get some in your bed.  They will help to move the carbon into the soil in usable forms; they also make everything in your BTE system work better.  One way to collect worms fast is to get an old sheet or towel, and get it wet.  Place it on the forest floor in the evening, and go out in the morning and lift the towel.  There should be worms underneath it, working in the leaves.

I only flooded a few inches of dirt that i put over the rocks i burried.there were many different sizes of rocks and so much empty space that it was needed. I didnt do this to the material i put over the rocks because i dont want my clay to compact together again.

I only flooded a few inches of dirt that i put over the rocks i burried.there were many different sizes of rocks and so much empty space that it was needed. I didnt do this to the material i put over the rocks because i dont want my clay to compact together again.

 Oh good.  Sorry I misinterpreted what you wrote.  I wish you success, Paul.  Good luck with your garden!

Paul,

Let me chime in --- a bit late, but I've been following this thread from the beginning.

I've used wood chips generously in my garden for years, long before the Back to Eden film was ever made.  If there are two words/phrases that do NOT go well together, they would be FAST and BTE.  There are some things that simply cannot be hurried -- fungi, most significantly.

In fact, if fast is your value, you'll find yourself working against the natural systems that will (in the long run) make your garden fertile and productive.  You just can't hurry the decomposition of wood chips.  It is helpful (as you have done) to spread compost and manure, as these provide nitrogen and more importantly, the microbes needed to colonize your chips.  You don't need to import worms.  You don't need to create fancy fungal innoculants.  You just need time.

Rain events are nitrogen events.  Snow brings even more nitrogen, waiting to soak into your chips.  If you can seed a N fixing cover crop (by pulling back the chips to create rows where the seed can contact the soil) it will speed things along.  Give it 3 years.  You will be surprised by how many worms you'll have in just a year, and by how quickly those chips will disappear.  

Go slow,be patient and let the worms and fungi do their thing.  You can't hurry mother nature.

Here are pics of what i didto amend my super rocky clay soil. It was good exercise.

Look at all those rocks....i had no choice.

I have woodchips and kitchen scraps burried a foot under the initial grade. I self nitrogenized it after soaking the chips in water. I filled it back up with native soil and added sand and forest mulch and mixed it in.....the top 10 inches only. I am gonna add compost then leaves then chips on top of that.  

I did my garden like this in 5 foot by 2~3 foot sections.

Some might say that the building of garden beds in such a manner as is described and photographed in this thread is counter to Nature, and by looking at Nature in thousands of places I can honestly say that I've never seen nature come up with this combination of materials and methods.  That's not saying that I wish to discourage you, Paul, but I'm attempting to make a point about horticulture, especially with deep preparation such as you are doing, and about Nature.  

While normally I would completely agree with most things that Marco writes in threads, with this quote from Marco's post above I can't help but to differ:

Go slow,be patient and let the worms and fungi do their thing.  You can't hurry mother nature.

I believe that you can accelerate patterns and functions which already exist in nature, or help them along, which is a lot of what horticulture is.  So when Marco wrote the following quote, I have to also respectfully disagree.  

There are some things that simply cannot be hurried -- fungi, most significantly.  

In fact, if fast is your value, you'll find yourself working against the natural systems that will (in the long run) make your garden fertile and productive.  You just can't hurry the decomposition of wood chips.  It is helpful (as you have done) to spread compost and manure, as these provide nitrogen and more importantly, the microbes needed to colonize your chips.  

You can accelerate the decomposition of wood chips.  Simply by soaking the wood chips, you accelerate the process, for instance.  Anything that you can do to keep them moist (not soaking wet, thereafter), will also help accelerate the process.  Also, inoculation is an accepted and proven technique for accelerating the process of breaking down woody material.  While fungi will naturally gain purchase on wood that is in touch with soil, over time, it is not working against nature to add some of your own, or try to get a desired fungi to dominate.  In fact, if you were so inclined to spend a bit of money to order some spores, you could have an additional harvest of edible fungi in the process, stacking the functions.  This is not working against nature, particularly if you are using self made, locally gathered inoculations, but even if you decided to order oyster mushrooms from Fungi Perferti, you wouldn't be doing any harm to natural processes any more than growing tomatoes in Korea.  It seems from what you posted so far in this thread that you don't mind doing a bit of work, Paul, so I mentioned a few things that might help to boost your system.

While this next quote from Marco is absolutely true:  

 You don't need to import worms.  You don't need to create fancy fungal innoculants.  You just need time.

, it does not mean that you should not go beyond the minimum needs to boost the system, to kick it into gear as it were.  

There are few things in horticulture which are truly natural processes.  We, as horticulturalists can and do try to mimic or emulate Nature, and we can work with natural tools and natural functions and the techniques which Nature uses, but the cult of cultivation, of planting and selecting seeds, of nurturing plants... these are only as natural as being a human at this time on this planet can be as we quest to produce our own food.  To further this, we can never separate ourselves or our actions from Nature, since we are intrinsically one with the planet and the cosmic forces beyond.  While we can do nothing, and allow the apparent externalized Nature to function in her due time, we as stewards of our garden plots can and do constantly, by our every action try to tilt the ecosystem in our favor.  Whether this is natural, anthropocentric, egotistical, all three, or some other combination of possibilities, I can't tell you.  

It's not that allowing nature to do it's thing is necessarily a bad thing, not at all, but if, for example, I allowed nature to take it's course then my field would be a dense forest which would produce no vegetables at all.  I have to intervene and go against nature in some ways in order to have my gardens exist here for very long.

I have woodchips and kitchen scraps burried a foot under the initial grade. I self nitrogenized it after soaking the chips in water. I filled it back up with native soil and added sand and forest mulch and mixed it in.....the top 10 inches only. I am gonna add compost then leaves then chips on top of that.

 All you really need now is a planting plan, some seeds, or some transplants.  The more plants that you get growing in your beds, the more the microbes will thrive.  Everything else is cake.

As Tyler wrote here:

I also dug out my entire garden because it had so many rocks.  It was definitely worth the effort.  My personal belief is that your method will work if you can provide some pockets of good soil to plant in while the layers decompose.  Thing might not grow too well the first year because the organic material will be in the process of decomposing.  But it should improve after that.  

 It might be a good idea to place little pockets of that rich forest soil in little openings or pockets in your mulch in order to give the plants more of what the want.  You can put a light amount of chips over the soil, and after the plants get established you can bring more of your chips over to cover the pockets of compost/soil deeper to keep weeds out and hold moisture in.  

For 10 bucks i can get an inuculated mycelium log of iether king oyster or matsutakie mushrooms. I was thinking of placing this in the compost/leaf layer but have some concerns about creating a dominant fungi that will smother other fungi from starting like microrhizal fungi. Would the mushrooms do this and consume all of the leaves and leave me with a nutrient dead layer? The mushrooms will not take hold of the pine woodchips....pine isnt to their liking. All I can get is pine. Good idea about making pockets of forest soil where I am gonna plant...it will really speed things up.

There's no telling exactly what will happen with fungi.  There are so many spores floating around in the air, inoculating whatever they land on.  

You could get the log and put it in one bed, to see what happens, while inoculating the other beds with fungi from pine forests, if so desired.  

There will not be a nutrient dead layer because of fungi.  Though it will tie up nutrients as it takes hold in the system, there is no loss in the system over time, except in what you harvest.  There will be a layer dominated by fungi (as opposed to bacteria), and those fungi function to break down certain materials (usually the woody stuff) in the leaf mold and branch into the surrounding soil strata, and mulch.  They might not prefer pine, but they will likely interact with it to a degree.  I doubt that you will stop a fungi that prefers pine from entering the system, and if they interact with pine, they will not need the leaf mold.  In fact, with the majority of your upper layers being pine it is likely that a pine dominating fungi will arrive on it's own.  However, if I were you, I would consider going to a pine forest nearby and getting some deep mulch right from the base of mature pine trees.  As you dig some up, look for white hairs in the pine mulch.  Also look for fully rotting pine wood that is broken up naturally into blocky forms; best is if these are loose enough that your can pulverize them.  Take some of these and mix them with the pine mulch, in a pale of water, and use that water to inoculate your top mulch.  Any old dead pine wood laying on the ground with white hairs, will have good fungi that thrives on pine, place some of these in the top layers of your pine chips, dampen them and put some chips on top.  Some mosses and lichens from the pine forest might be good choices to place in one of your beds also, just to see what happens.   These pine associated species, especially the fungi, and other fungi from the air will involve themselves in the leaf mold (which already is being broken down by fungi), and consume the chips, and in time will create a great layer of soil as the pine chips break down.  Fungi in the chips will hold water, and they will draw nutrients into themselves.  At first, since your soil system is young and not fully interactive with all of it's layers working as a single system yet, and also since the fungi is young in the system, the fungi will be locking some of the nutrients within itself for it's functions.  However, as your system matures, and the soil food web takes hold, the nutrients will be released due to fungal hair die off, with predation on the fungi by other beings, and via the fungi interacting with plants to exchange minerals and nutrients for sugars.