Build abundance with chop-and-drop

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What is chop-and-drop?

If you have been following permaculture or homesteading sites online you have likely heard of the term chop-and-drop. Are you familiar with what this term means? What about when is the best time of year to do chop-and-drop?

In the most basic terms, chop-and-drop refers to the practice of cutting either dead or living plant material and letting the cutting fall to the ground in the same area. This might be when you are trimming plants throughout the year or when you are cleaning up your garden in the fall/winter.

I love chop-and-drop because it makes it easy to add mulch on my beds and keeps the nutrients onsite.

In my blog post Chop-and-Drop: A Quick and Easy Way to Abundance I provide an overview of how you can use chop-and-drop to build next year's abundance.

I mentioned a couple of the benefits of chop-and-drop up above but here are 5 great benefits of chop-and-drop.

5 Benefits of Chop-And-Drop

- Supports soil life.
- Leaves the roots of the plants in the soil, which adds organic material deep in the soil as the roots decompose.
- Reduces water loss from evaporation.
- Slowly releases nutrients back into your soil.
- Saves you time and energy by eliminating the need to compost or haul the plant material away.

Can you think of any other benefits of chop-and-drop? Please leave a comment with your thoughts on the benefits of chop-and-drop.

I'm going to discuss chop-and-drop a bit more in this thread but please make sure to check out my blog post if you are interested in learning more about chop-and-drop.

Variations of Chop-And-Drop


I use a hori hori knife for most of my chop-and-drop work. I find it to be a very useful tool for my homesteading and gardening tasks.

I hinted at this subject a couple times in my blog post but I really did not dive into it but I thought it would be a nice addition to this post and good for a permies thread.

In my blog post I focused on chop-and-drop as part of the process for cleaning up your garden in the fall or winter. Basically, you got all these dead plants so what do you do with them? My view is that it is great to just chop and drop them all.

But there are other ways to chop and drop.

Sometimes I just pull up weeds and leave them on the ground to form mulch. Is this really chop-and-drop? I guess it depends on if you think leaving the roots in place is a required part of chop-and-drop. With other weeds I do just chop-and-drop when I'm not worried about them sticking around - I do this a lot with dandelions and plantains. My view is that pulling the weeds is not as beneficial as regular chop-and-drop but still provides some free mulch.

You can also chop-and-drop living plants that need to be trimmed or pruned. This works great for woody plants in addition to our regular non-woody plants. When you are using chop-and-drop in this way it is best to do it when the plants are not stressed for moisture. But some trimming in the hot time of the year is fine.

Comfrey is often talked about as a great chop-and-drop plant since it can be cut multiple times a year and produces a lot of biomass. I have been experimenting with native lupines to see if they can serve as a great chop-and-drop plant. Lupines are nitrogen fixers and still have big taproots and riverbank lupine so far is handling chop-and-drop well.

Another type of chop-and-drop is to plant a bunch of plants like red clover or others and then come through and cut them all at once creating a large volume of mulch. This type of chop-and-drop is often called green mulch but really is just the same as chop-and-drop but at a larger scale.

How do you practice chop-and-drop? Do you grow plants specifically for chop-and-drop?

What Do You Think?


A short video from One Yard Revolution on chop-and-drop

I would love to hear from you! Please leave a comment in this thread and don't forget to check out my blog post that this thread was based on. If you are one of the first to leave a comment on here you might even get a surprise in the form of pie or apples

What do you think of chop-and-drop? Do you use it as a regular part of your homesteading and gardening activities?

Thank you!

There are some specific instances where I will compost my dead plants rather than chop-and-drop.

If, for instance, I am cleaning up dead plant material that may harbour pests that I want to get rid of, that will go into a nice hot compost. Likewise if there were any plant contagion I want to be rid of, especially if I am planting plants of the same family in that space.

I really like the idea of intentional chop-and-drop with green manures, especially in conjunction with a well-timed seeding, such that quick-growing green manures out-compete non-crop plants. You get the first flush of "weeds" choked out, and a quick-growing green manure guild gets living root zones in the soil, supporting microbial life and getting the whole soil life bioreactor thing kickstarted.

-CK

Chris Kott wrote:There are some specific instances where I will compost my dead plants rather than chop-and-drop.

If, for instance, I am cleaning up dead plant material that may harbour pests that I want to get rid of, that will go into a nice hot compost. Likewise if there were any plant contagion I want to be rid of, especially if I am planting plants of the same family in that space.

I really like the idea of intentional chop-and-drop with green manures, especially in conjunction with a well-timed seeding, such that quick-growing green manures out-compete non-crop plants. You get the first flush of "weeds" choked out, and a quick-growing green manure guild gets living root zones in the soil, supporting microbial life and getting the whole soil life bioreactor thing kickstarted.

-CK

All good points! Thanks for the comment - I'm careful with some plant contagions too though sometimes I just move the chop-and-drop material over to areas with different plants. Depends on what I'm dealing with. I'm working on planting more plants specifically for chop-and-drop. Lupine seems to be a good one at my place but I'm looking at others too.

We have so much red clay, I have been wanting to try this hoping it would help break things up without bringing in a ton of amendments. We have had slow gradual improvement, but I really want to see faster results as we are increasing the garden size this year.  Starting over with a new red clay section will be challenging.

I set aside one section of the garden to test.  I mixed together some leftover greens seeds and planted pretty thickly. I clipped down some of the plants because I got greedy for some fresh greens, but left the plant base in place instrad of just pulling the whole plant. I'm hoping for two things: that the plant matter will help to break up the clay and to get some super early greens.  

I have never tried this before, so am looking forward to experimenting with something new. I'm not really sure if it even counts as chop and drop, so I'm sorry if this shouldn't be posted here.

Great post on chop and drop Daron, chris brought up some of the caveats.

Tina, to speed up the process you would want to add one or more of these; wood chips, straw bedding from stables or chicken coops, compost, composted manures. This would need to be worked into the soil at least 6 inches for a startup garden space.
Good additions would be compost tea (aerated for at least 24 hours but not more than 48 hours), mushroom slurries, the two of these work in unison to help 1. break down the organic material into humic matter and 2. build the bacteria/ fungi microbiome that creates great soil.

Try 10 sq. foot areas for experimental purposes, I've found this about as small a space you can use for repeatable results.
lasagna bed, layered compost, straw, wood chip, mix of the last three, compost tea only, mushroom slurry only, compost tea/ mushroom slurry.
Those are some of the experiments I've run and found that all work fairly well, trials such as these are how you find what works best in your areas.

Redhawk

Thanks Dr. Redhawk. The area I tried seeding is about 9 foot square where it fit in behind my water barrels.  We do work in the compost material from the coop. Two years ago, my husband added a huge amount of manure from some local stables and the garden has acted weird since then. I think it was way too fresh and it "burned" the plants.  I found it done when I got home from work as a surprise...

This year we are debating two separate garden beds to see who wins with our different methods😀  We figure as long as something grows, we both win!

This would need to be worked into the soil at least 6 inches for a startup garden space.

Dr Redhawk, I am in the same soil type with heavy clay. I did a test site a little larger than you recommended when I started getting wood chips two years ago. The soil looks good and dark, but struggles to support anything, thankfully including bermuda. It's just now getting colonized by clover, which suggests to me that high clay and tilled chips make it anoxic for long periods of time, and consequently does not get to the point where the chips are not withdrawing nitrogen from the root zone. I think it may have been different with straw or even ramial chips (its been two years and I don't recall the composition of the chips), but I have avoided tilling chips since then. In one year I can top dress a heavy amount of chips (at least 12"), let them decay in place for at least 3-4 warm months, and then plant squash/melons and beans. The squash family seems to do well in the chips, I think due to the root structure because they get feeders at a couple levels of chips, some for nitrogen and some deeper for other nutrients but I am not sure. The second year basically I am ready for Back to Eden, the squash rapidly degrade the chips by growing in them, which I think is due to the shading they provide to maintain fungal growth in the summer.

I guess I don't care as much about rapidly building soil depth due to the wood chip cover holding moisture, I actually like having a well-defined soil interface because the tubers are all in one plane! Ask me again when we get a borer problem.

Would I have benefited from tilling (actually discing in my case) to reintroduce oxygen to deeper layers? My anticipation is that that would just remove the carbon through combustion like any other tilling or discing.

hua kola Tj. When you disk or till in wood chips, ramial or not, it really helps for there to be aged or composted manures added at the same time.
The other really good addition at that time is fungi, that helps break down everything but the lignin and that brings some nitrogen to the party.
I love wood chips on the surface both for moisture retention and for soil conditioning which comes from the rain seeping through the woodchips and leaching small amounts of nutrients each time.
Squashes do exactly as you have surmised, the upper roots gather in the water soluble nutrients like N, P, K and Ca, the deeper roots bring up other minerals brought to the roots via bacteria interactions.

As you know I do believe in one time tillage/ discing to incorporate organic materials but for simple oxygenation I would go with a sub-soiler since it disturbs with out disrupting the soil layer structure.
When we are adding organics, we are also introducing new bacterial and fungal life so turning the soil over will be counteracted by our additions, especially if we get a good cover crop going right after our intentional disturbance (disruption).
Using the Sub-soiler we are literally dragging a blade through the soil and this blade also lifts from the bottom (it forms a wave within the soil which can show as a bulge if the implement has large enough "wings" at just above the tip.

I use mostly straw since I rarely have downed trees that don't go for fire wood and I am now leaving the decomposing trees where they fall because I found that some of our wild animals use them or the soil under them for homes.
Straw is cheap here and plentiful, we use it for animal bedding and then it gets cycled into soil amendments either as compost for teas, mulching or directly incorporated into a new garden bed.

Clovers are telling you that the soil is good enough to benefit from some nitrogen fixers and it tells you that the soil is beginning to get crumbly in the top few inches.
Chop and drop or turning the clovers under are both good ways to keep the improvements moving along. (I much prefer the chop and drop but if you turn it under some will regrow fast, chop and drop and some of the roots will bring forth new plants too)

Thanks for the reply. I think the drainage and infiltration potential are my limiting factor in this particular area, it stays pretty damp. Interestingly, the same soil near the chip delivery area (which gets driven over and disturbed several times a year) is incredible. I think my drive to disturb only once has limited the potential. Fortunately this was purely a test area that I was using to create lots of silt to seal a rice paddy, but I was trying to see if I could have my cake and eat it too. Maybe I still can! There should be a massive fungal input already, there is a large chip pile immediately uphill that leaches into the area and physically connects to it along its entire length.

I thank you for providing this valuable input, because it corrects a misjudgment between the two priorities of low disturbance and biological introduction, one I wish I had internalized earlier. I guess I need to borrow a subsoiler.

Tina Hillel wrote:Thanks Dr. Redhawk. The area I tried seeding is about 9 foot square where it fit in behind my water barrels.  We do work in the compost material from the coop. Two years ago, my husband added a huge amount of manure from some local stables and the garden has acted weird since then. I think it was way too fresh and it "burned" the plants.  I found it done when I got home from work as a surprise...

This year we are debating two separate garden beds to see who wins with our different methods😀  We figure as long as something grows, we both win!

I suspect that the manure was from digested, treated hay that can produce the effects you mentioned and indeed, fresh or any manure not at least 1 year aged will burn plant roots (lots of nitrogen content).
The best way to remediate this glut of N is to get some mycelium growing in that soil, if the manure can be had with straw bedding it will compost nicely and that will reduce the high N and at the same time buffer all the nutrients as it heats up in the initial stages of composting.
Pure manure can be simply piled up into a heap and left alone for at least 4 months, if it was fresh you will probably notice mushrooms popping up after rains, that is a good thing since that means mycelium are running through that heap of manure.

Good luck and if you have any questions, ask, I'm happy to be of help.

Redhawk

Thanks all and great conversation! Sorry I have not been around to engage in this - I was doing some repair/improvement work on my “DIY Beaver Dam”. Lots of great advice from Dr. Redhawk.

My soils are also mostly clay – I have been focusing on adding organic material to the top of my soil but I’m getting more interested in one-time-tilling. But I’m also considering preparing sites in stages using plants like daikon radishes and other tap-root species that I would chop and drop or just let die with the frost and rot in place.

Basic idea would be to prepare the area with animals first, then get a crop of plants established to chop-and-drop and let rot in place. In the fall I would add a bunch of leaves and then potentially plant perennials into it to be core plants for the area.

I like trying to include as many perennial vegetables and other edible perennials as possible. This includes some native edible vegetables (miners lettuce, Pacific water leaf, and some others soon). I find these types of plants seem to do better in the clay than the annual vegetables. Plus, they come with other great benefits.

Tina and TJ – have either of you tried focusing more on perennial vegetables or other edible perennials?

I have just started with learning about the idea of perennials as far as vegetables other than asparagus.  We do have fruit bushes and and an herb bed. Some of what I'm trying, I'm not sure is consdered perennial vegetables.

This may sound odd, but I have a section of garden that I am encouraging plantain and lambsquarter to grow.  I like it cooked and I figure the deep roots may help break up the ground.  I also just started a section where I let some chard and kale go to seed.  I realize they are biennial, but I have had volunteers especially with the chard so I'm hoping to get results from a deliberate patch lft alone.  

I started last year with letting lettuce go to seed and got a bunch of early seedlings that seeded themselves.  We also like bolted lettuce cooked so the results of all the extra greenery is welcomed.

I also let cilantro reseed and go crazy. The bees love it, I get free plants and we eat a ton of it.

The radishes did great two years ago reseeding themselves, but not this year. That one was an accident anyway.

This year was 4th wettest on record and I kept having to replant drowned plant life so hard to compare with last year when I was just barely getting my toes wet with this.

Sounds great letting plantain and lambs quarter grow - I agree that both can be good for eating. I especially like lambs quarter and I want to try growing a cultivated variety that has some nice pink coloring at the base of each leaf. Just looks nice :)

I really like plants that self-seed - well at least most. I did have arugula just go crazy with self-seeding to the point that I had to thin it fairly heavily. It was literally a carpet of arugula!

I have not tried cooking lettuce - I will give that a try next year. That sounds like a good use of lettuce that starts to bolt.

Wet conditions and clay is hard... I struggle with that at my place too. Especially since I want to retain water to get through the summer droughts we always seem to have here but I need to be able to plant in the spring when things are still wet... I have been relying on raised beds for most of my vegetables as a way to get the plants a bit out of the water.  Do you use raised beds Tina?

I chop and drop all my deadheaded flowers!  and flower stems, cuttings, etc.  Except for a very that tend to harbor bad stuff - roses and tomatoes mostly.

Love this and am going to go check out the blog post!

Sandy

Thank you Sandy! I hope you enjoy the blog post!

I use a variation on chop and drop. I call it chop and rotate.  

It addresses some of Chris' earlier concerns about diseases.  I have a food forest. When I chop something from my apple tree, I don't leave it under the apple tree. I'll throw it near, say a paw paw tree.  If I have leaves, rotten fruit or wood from the paw paw tree, I'll throw it near the pear tree.  Then pear stuff near the persimmon tree, etc.  I am rotating the organic material from the plant I pruned to an unrelated tree.  I don't always know if the material has some microbes that are disease causing, but I do know that I am furthering the diversity of my yard, and I know that apple diseases and pests don't attack my pawpaw tree.  It lets what Rachel Carson called "the balance of nature" take care of the problem.  With my perennial vegetables, I do the same: artichoke leaves can go under a fruit tree or asparagus, Alexander's , black salsify, or curly mallow.  Herbs follow the same process.  My food forest is mature enough that I don't need to bring in more organic material.  I also have clay, but it has turned from the worst clay ever to pretty nice soil after a few years.  I have added wood chips most years.  

I did bring in plantain to eat, as medicine, and as diversity.  I also brought in some other edible weeds, and spread leeks, oregano, and rosemary for that reason.

John S
PDX OR

Daron, I have done raised beds in the past.  We pulled them out three years ago for several reasons.  I am clumsy and tripped over the boards more than I care to admit 😏. Using the boards as a tightrope to avoid compacting dirt didn't help.
We also started getting infestations of black widow spiders (twitching just typing that) that wanted to nest in the boards. The chickens helped take care of that, but at that point I wanted them gone.  I also found it a pain to use the hoe to get the weeds without knocking it against the boards.

To add further insult, the area of garden without beds produced better!  No more raised beds except a small side one for herbs that oregano took over.  I am apparently the only person I know who can't keep mint alive.

As far as the bolted lettuce, some types are pretty bitter. We happen to like them for the variety of flavors and grow extra to bolt on purpose. Sautéed in a little bacon grease, salt and pepper - yum! An arugula carpet, I will have to plan for that, great idea!

I keep a pouch of seed out with me when weeding. When I pull one and leave a hole I’ll drop a seed in. Pull a weed, plant a seed. Most of the time it’s a nitrogen fixer. In the summer it’s cowpea or sunn hemp. In the fall it’s Austrian winter pea. Sometimes it’s a marigold.

I do a variety of things with my "weeds", chop n drop, compost or weed teas. I also grow comfrey along the border of my main garden area specifically for chop and drop. I have also considered growing miscanthus over my septic leach field to harvest nutrients and use as mulch in my garden beds, but not sure growing a vigorous perennial grass over my leach field is the best idea. Perhaps it would be wiser to grow vigorous annuals like sunflower, amaranth, pearl millet, sorghum, etc? Anyone care to share their experience trying to harvest nutrients from an existing leach field?

I've also considered in new garden areas planting every other bed to perennial dynamic accumulators like comfrey, alfalfa, clover, etc as a source of chop n drop mulch for the other beds. Anyone doing this?

Cheers,
Kirk

Can poison ivy be used for chop-and-drop? I ask because I have a ton of it that I'm trying to eradicate. I've gotten most of the English ivy out, and I've got wild grape vines I'm trying to encourage to take over in the areas I won't be planting with much of anything. Virginia Creeper, too, that for now I'm leaving in a few places. I'm making progress, but I've still got PI coming back up. Can I cut it to the ground and leave it, and would this be sufficient to discourage return if I keep at it every time I see it? I could lay a black block-out tarp over sections of it, then plant ground covers, but I'm a 66-year-old little old lady and my chainlink-fenced wooded back yard is not accessible to heavy equipment. I've got a big pile of wood chips rotting down in the front yard, but I find it very difficult to haul enough of it into the back to get the coverage and depth I need. And too strapped for cash to hire anyone else to do it.

My strategy right now is to clear along the inner back ~160' fence (where a stand of trees beyond the fence is covered with PI as old as the dinosaurs), lay down very thick sheet mulch consisting of gazillions of reports printed on white computer paper (I was literally given two truckloads of it, and it's what I have), lay large sheets of paper (plats) on top of that, then lay brush and small cut saplings and logs on top to anchor it down...then pray for rain to soak it good. I've cleared and formed beds closer to the house that I'm planting in cover crops and whatever vegetable seeds I toss out there that might come up, focusing more right now on slow soil-building where I've cleared those beds and trying to stay on top of the PI. I've sprayed the PI three times in the last two years with triclopyr, but I don't want to do it again if I can avoid it.

Here's a picture of kind of where I'm at right now:

I weed with a cordless electric hedge cutter. This can't be used in all places, but it works very well if there is at least 6 in between plants that are to be kept. I do it while kneeling and I don't get distracted, since one wrong move would chop off the good plants. It does take a bit of precision. I could trim my toenails with it.

This method is good for clearing the weeds around things that are well-defined. It's exceptionally good for clearing around small trees, especially those that are more than three quarters of an inch in diameter, since they can't be accidentally cut off, due to the guard teeth.

Mine is a two-handed model made by Stihl and I also have the long-reach hedge cutter which is great for clearing blackberries and other large chop and drop stuff.

I have use a one-handed unit, but I've never used the one made by Stihl that is pictured here. I want one. This one is made for pruning topiary and it's bound to be better than the crap sold at Walmart.

The weeds are left where they fall. Some of the roots die and some come to life again, but by the time they do they are shaded by the primary crop.

I have also tried those big two handed shears that look like a big pair of scissors. Not bad in the right spot but primitive by comparison. I tried a one-handed unit that was meant for light hedge trimming. A squeezing action causes multiple blades to cross one another. I felt the burn within 1 minute. You'll get forearms like Popeye using that thing.

Daron,

Do you do anything special with your comfrey when you chop and drop?  I just this year have enough healthy comfrey (6 plants) that are deep rooted and established enough that I can basically harvest at will.  However, when I chop and drop, the leaves just dry up in place but don’t really break apart, just laying there on the surface.

Should I be cutting/chopping/shredding into fine pieces?  Lay down and cover with more chips?  I really want to get all the comfrey goodness back into the ground and would appreciate any feedback.

Thanks much,

Eric

Diane,

Can poison ivy be used for chop-and-drop?

Yes but the oils are a problem for a couple years. Don't ever burn them! The thing I would suggest is that you will have vines. If you don't replace the PI (like allowing the creeper) you will just get it right back. You could allow honeysuckle or trumpet creeper or something, but if the ecosystem didn't have room for vines, they wouldn't be there. I machete the PI vines as low as I can go (or even use a chainsaw or limbing ax) to take away the upper leaves reaching light. then I allow the preferred vines to stay. I'm decreasing the PI, but something will climb the trees. I also like wisteria, but please don't plant it if it isn't already around. I hack the wisteria back every two years as a chop and drop. The trees love it. The bees are totally into it. It does spread a little, and you have to keep up with it. Grapes are awesome but your shade is probably too dense.

Tj Jefferson wrote:Diane,

Can poison ivy be used for chop-and-drop?

Yes but the oils are a problem for a couple years. Don't ever burn them! The thing I would suggest is that you will have vines. If you don't replace the PI (like allowing the creeper) you will just get it right back. You could allow honeysuckle or trumpet creeper or something, but if the ecosystem didn't have room for vines, they wouldn't be there. I machete the PI vines as low as I can go (or even use a chainsaw or limbing ax) to take away the upper leaves reaching light. then I allow the preferred vines to stay. I'm decreasing the PI, but something will climb the trees. I also like wisteria, but please don't plant it if it isn't already around. I hack the wisteria back every two years as a chop and drop. The trees love it. The bees are totally into it. It does spread a little, and you have to keep up with it. Grapes are awesome but your shade is probably too dense.

Ah, thanks for the good advice! I don't know about these wild grapevines here. They seem to be doing just fine in the shaded areas where they've gotten a good toehold, and they are outcompeting PI in those areas, so I'll just encourage them. I've got honeysuckle (the invasive kind, but also some native honeysuckle I'm encouraging) and think I might see if something from the mint family might make it in the areas where trees have come down and there's more sun now.

I've got water celery taking over around my pond, and I've noticed it grows well even if planted in concrete blocks in dirt. I'll try some of that, too. And a friend gave me some Bignonia capreolata rooted pieces that I'll try putting out in the fall as well and see what happens.

Someone mentioned using manure (fresh?) to amend the soil behind their water collection barrels and that the garden didn't "act right" from that point.  They wondered if the manure was "too hot".  I'd suggest considering whether the animals were being fed toxic hay/feed from alfalfa or hay that was sprayed with roundup or other weed kill chemicals (broadleaf plant sprays?).  Do s little research on it and you'll see that it is being done more commonly and it's important to find a source of organic straw, hay, alfalfa for the garden and if contaminated crops are being used for animal fee, it can destroy the soil for many years.

Here's a link to start your research on contaminated hay/feeds:  https://thegrownetwork.com/hidden-dangers-straw-bale-gardening/

https://alfalfa.ucdavis.edu/+symposium/proceedings/2006/06-95.Pdf
Sorry about multiple posts.  It's late and I'm real sleepy/dopey right now.

Denise Cares wrote:Here's a link to start your research on contaminated hay/feeds:  https://thegrownetwork.com/hidden-dangers-straw-bale-gardening/

Wow. I read this in the nick of time. I was about to have a truckload of straw bales delivered. Thank you!

hau Diane, if you can, talk to the person selling the straw, asking about spraying is always a good thing, usually you can locate someone using organic methods but most will tell you they spray.
When you find that organic grower, buy all you can from them but do it over a series of purchases if possible so they will see you as a long term customer.
Our organic straw provider has a very large buyer base and he usually has 2 full barns of square bales and two more of the large round bales.
I show up to buy about 6 times a year and I always buy at least 5 bales per trip.

Redhawk

*when you are getting stall clean out materials you want to know if the animals are getting wormed as well as if they were given antibiotics, was the bedding material sprayed while growing is also a good question to ask.
Most animal people know about the materials and their animals, if they tell you they don't know about their bedding materials, I would pass on the manure and bedding mix unless I was getting it to compost for use next year.

Today many of the farmers are switching to no-spray but they don't advertise that fact, you have to ask, and just because there is a trend developing doesn't mean every area has no-spray growers.

I'll add my support for the hori hori gardening knife.
I have the same one as OP (thanks for suggesting it) and its still newish and razor sharp and I've never been so tool-smitten.
It's a perfect chop n drop tool for my needs (though a machete might be preferable in the tropics).
I like using it to knock all the leaves from large palm fronds (swoosh! - done in seconds), then using the saw to cut big bunches into strips for a broadleaf mulch. (Which surprisingly smell sweet like sugarcane)
The fronds get burned otherwise and are widely scorned as trash and/or snake habitat.

Daron Williams wrote:
All good points! Thanks for the comment - I'm careful with some plant contagions too though sometimes I just move the chop-and-drop material over to areas with different plants. Depends on what I'm dealing with. I'm working on planting more plants specifically for chop-and-drop. Lupine seems to be a good one at my place but I'm looking at others too.

Just looked into ordering Lupine seeds and the vendor site had the following warning "All parts of this plant are poisonous, including the seeds. Exercise extreme caution around children and pets. The purchaser assumes all liability relating to the use of this product."

My personal preference is lucerne (alfalfa) over any plant that is toxic. If you add comfrey you can have even better mineral content in mulch or compost.

Redhawk

I just ordered the hori hori knife that you recommend. I used one a couple of weeks ago For the first time while helping out on a friends urban farm and I too was totally smitten. Where has this tool been all my life? Thanks for the recommendation!

I don't like the look of chop and drop, when I renew my garden (like starting the spring garden)  I love the dark soil, clean plant in me look.  I know the benefits of chop and drop, so to please myself I chopped and dropped my peas which were done a couple of weeks ago.  Then I put compost on top of that.  I think this is a good compromise.  It pleases my eye, but the soil still gets the benefits of chop and drop.  As the seeds start to grow, and the plants get bigger I will chop and drop, or bring in chopped stuff or other mulch as needed.  I just enjoy that smooth dark surface to start with.  
Chop and drop has also made a big difference with my weeds.  We only have .99 of an acre, and there are several building on the property, but I am the only one who tends the yard, with the exception of getting one of my sons to mow occasionally.  Keeping the weeds down is very hard, especially where I can't mow.  I mow some weed wack some, and I am slowly making more and more spots using wood chips, but there are still tons of weeds that get to be about 3' high and dry out and then are a fire hazard.  Through posts like these I have discovered when I weed a spot I do pull it because it will be a foot tall the next week if I don't, but I throw the weeds I pull on top of weed I know I won't get to and they get smothered out and take a long time to come back.  This is a huge time saver and better for the earth, because I use to pull the weeds cart them back to the burn pile and burn them one or two times a year.  I kill twice the amount of weeds with the same effort, I'm not wasting time carting weeds from one place to another, and I don't have to waist a day polluting the air with the burn pile.  that's a win, win, win.  Chop and drop is totally my friend!

When lots of carbon is added to the soil without much nitrogen, the fertility goes down for a while, as the carbon soaks up nitrogen, and once the nitrogen “capacity” of the carbon is filled, the fertility goes up past original levels. When lots of nitrogen is added without much carbon, the effect is almost like that of NPK: the plants start growing really fast, they get burned, the microorganisms get burned, and the carbon gets burned, so the eventual fertility levels of the soil are lower than the original.

This is such an interesting concept! I didn't realize this was a thing, but I like it!
I have three extremely large rosemary plants in our front bed, and did something like this last year (because we didn't have the money for mulch). This explains the massive growth-spurt that they (and the rosebushes) had!
I am going to have to try this with the lemon balm and my veggie beds next!

Do you think it would be beneficial to add some of the rosemary clippings to those beds too? I have a massive 6 ft pile of rosemary and rose branches.

Thank you for this thread, and for your blog!  We are starting up a desert farmstead and have years of soil-building to do.  We got some local sheep manure and also have added charcoal from our fires, spent coffee grounds, bokashi-fermented food waste, sawdust from the local sawmill, and wood chips from our piñon/juniper woodland.  We don't have enough of most of these for a garden the size we are starting.  We have broken down and purchased soil amendments to get some food from our own land into our bellies this year (perlite, mushroom compost, peat/coir), which we are mainly using to start plants, and then they need to make it on their own in our garden beds with the local amendments.  We've also started a worm bin, but there's only 2 of use, so it's slow going.  We'll also get chickens eventually, but not until we have a roof and walls for us and are out of our tents.

Chop & drop from this first season of growing will help!  Here are my questions (we have an outdoor garden and the greenhouse):

In your blog yiou say that we should wait until the rainfall exceeds evaporation.  That doesn't happen here (Colorado Plateau), and the rainiest time is July/August, when things are busy growing.  So do I just ignore that and chop & drop outside at the end of the growing season?  Do we need to greywater it in?

In the greenhouse, on the other hand, it rains more than evaporates whenever I want it to.  We are sort of planting and harvesting throughout whenever... So do we just chop whenever something needs chopping, and drop it wherever it looks like it will benefit most?

In our greenhouse we hope to garden year-round.  After chop & drop, do you want the land to lie fallow to let things decompose?  Or go ahead and plant new plants into the green-mulched area?

Thanks again for sharing your knowledge and experience!  Such great resources.

I think  I'd love to get a hori hori knife.    But.....  how often do you need to sharpen it, and HOW do you sharpen it.   I see that the one you recommend comes with a sharpening tool, but that still doesn't explain how to do it.   I've tried to sharpen other gardening tools that I have - and have failed miserably.  I end up just buying a new one because they are never again sharp enough.

Carolyne Castner wrote:This is such an interesting concept! I didn't realize this was a thing, but I like it!
I have three extremely large rosemary plants in our front bed, and did something like this last year (because we didn't have the money for mulch). This explains the massive growth-spurt that they (and the rosebushes) had!
I am going to have to try this with the lemon balm and my veggie beds next!

Do you think it would be beneficial to add some of the rosemary clippings to those beds too? I have a massive 6 ft pile of rosemary and rose branches.

Yes, is the short answer, the only time you would not see benefits would be alopathic plant materials.

Redhawk

Loretta Liefveld wrote:I think  I'd love to get a hori hori knife.    But.....  how often do you need to sharpen it, and HOW do you sharpen it.   I see that the one you recommend comes with a sharpening tool, but that still doesn't explain how to do it.   I've tried to sharpen other gardening tools that I have - and have failed miserably.  I end up just buying a new one because they are never again sharp enough.

Sharpening does take some practice and attention to maintaining the correct angles. Do a search on garden tool sharpening, you should find several sites that have good visual guides you could print off for reference.

Redhawk