Wally Jasper

Hau Redhawk.

Great tip. Will definitely ask my grocer to save ruined mushrooms. What a waste to just throw them away.

That makes total sense. I also got my chips from our county recycling. And they had leaves and all. The pile that was bone dry after our rain was the pile I had raked up after spreading it, so all the leafy stuff and smaller chips got left behind on the ground. What was raked up into the piles was mostly just the larger chips. That may explain why the chips that got spread stayed wet and soggy whereas the pile didn't absorb the water nearly as well. So with this latest information, I'm pretty sure that the piles from the raked up chips will probably be most useful as mud barriers for walkways and paths rather than as garden mulch and soil building. Next week I'll go back and get a couple of loads of the fresh leafy stuff for composting.

Ah, gotcha. Great.

Wow, that slurry sounds delicious! (Not for me but for all my little soil buddies.) I'm gonna do that. I like trying all things that sound this good.

PS   And a good helping of Redhawk's mushroom slurry added in should do the trick.

Cecile, my soil is clay. What I have found is that it turns into a beautiful rich soil when lots of organic material is added and mixed in and watered. After one year I was thrilled to see earthworms in the newly conditioned soil. Many thanks for all your advice and help. I see your zip code is in northern Wisconsin. Yeah, I bet your hardiness zone is a 4b, way up there. How the heck did you get a persimmon to grow there? Is it inside your house? (Or are persimmons a lot hardier than I thought they were?)

Good to know that. Will save the mycogrow for more plantings. As for mushroom slurry, there are no wild mushrooms around right now. We've had a "nonsoon" summer instead of our expected summer monsoons. So I'll have to buy the mushrooms. And the challenge will be to keep myself from eating them instead of blending them up and throwing them on the ground. I assure you that will be a very big challenge.

Thanks Redhawk. Will do. I only now saw that I replied to your reply to Douglas and saw the message about mushroom slurry. A couple of years ago I bought some Mycogrow from Paul Stametz. Would that serve the same function as the slurry? I used to when I was planting my fruit trees, pouring it around their roots. Still have some left.

Hi Douglas,  I live in the high and dry country of the US southwest. Not much rain but some winters see heavy snow.  Last night we got a nice unexpected rain storm that dropped about half an inch. This morning I was again working on taking down my wood chip piles and spreading out the chips. What I saw convinced me that spreading them out is the way to go. The rain had only penetrated about a half inch down; the whole pile below that was bone dry. The chips I had spread out were nice and soggy. I also checked under the chips to see what the soil got, and it was wet underneath too. I'm spreading the chips not as thick as I did at first, because I want the ground to get water. So I think this way the chips will help hold the water in the soil better, rather than leave it open to evaporation. (I also covered the chips with a layer of partially composted pine needles. On other areas I laid down the pine needles first and covered with the chips. So I'm experimenting to see which way works best.) What do you think of all this?

Thanks, Cecile. Great information about the chickens and good to know the timing of woodchips decomposing and taking your cue from the weeds of when the chips were ready. I just love all this so much, learning from the land and the weeds and the chickens and insects..... and the wonderful people here on Permies, which I now realize is a kind of home. We can come here and find not only the information we need, but wild ideas, support and commiseration for our misdeeds, friendly tips and comaraderie. And we know that all of us here share our love for this amazing and beautiful life being lived by countless critters and beings, all of us playing our parts in the whole interwoven web of life. What a great place.

Wow, am I ever happy that I found this thread. I found a free and abundant source of fresh wood chips and I've been hauling load after load to my land and spreading it thick around my land, around some fruit trees (but not too close), in my raised beds, everywhere. Then I went to a local permaculture training and the guy teaching the course said that we need to compost the chips before spreading them; otherwise they will never decompose. So I've spent the last few days raking up all the chips I've spread out, collecting them in piles so I could compost them. I went to this thread today wanting to find out the optimal dimensions of a composting heap of wood chips and lo and behold, Bryant says, no, don't compost them.... just spread them out thick. Well, I know who I'm going to listen to. Now I'm out with the rake, shovel and wheelbarrow spreading them all out ....again. It's a good thing I really love doing this work. And I've learned something very important: when in doubt, come to the Permies forums first.