Chipless on Camano

 Our small farm is on the south end of Camano Island, making it a bit far for some professionals to make the trek. That includes arborists and all ranks of tree-tenders. It's hard for us to get wood chips.

Being a no-till farm, chips are a vital ingredient, providing coverage for walkways throughout our planting beds. Being a no-till farm, we add straw and compost on top of the native soil and build UP. Chips add height to the pathways, stabilizing the edges of the beds. Straw, compost, and chips create amazingly bountiful harvests.

Now, we could buy chips from a nursery or landscape supply business, but it's hard to fork out $400 - $500 for a load of chips knowing that they are available for $0 - $25 a load. Plus, we're on a tight budget, living on a fixed income, so practicality dictates that we spend money when we have to and save money when possible.

A local tree-trimming business did drop off one load, but they admitted that we were just too far away to make it practical for them to drop off more, even with a cash incentive. But we did get one load! That was a huge step forward.

How to make up the difference? We needed a second load.

Dambara, my husband, spent most of the winter months uplimbing the mature trees that encircle our property and taking out the tangle of smaller trees, bushes, and, you might have guessed this, brambles. A Pacific Northwest staple, those brambles. I'm in love with them for about 5 weeks each fall, when they offer up those delectable berries, but their prolific nature pushes them to invade every inch of land possible. So, Dambara has worked and worked, taming them back into a reasonable, manageable form.

. . . to this.

From this. . .

In the process of uplimbing and clearing, Dambara created two, gigantic mountains of brush. Enormous piles, stretching about 50 feet, 5 feet high, and probably 15 feet wide. Enormous. We joined forces with some local friends and rented an equally enormous chipper for a week, and we got to use it for three entire days.

To get this.

Three days was enough time for us to chip our way through those enormous piles, shooting the chips into the back of a friend's pick-up truck, and dumping them into the middle of our garden plot. From there, we wheelbarrowed them onto each pathway and spread them out with a rake. We laid down cardboard first, as a weed block. We covered the cardboard with burlap bags, to stabilize the layers.

To get . . . Chips!!!

That cardboard was a godsend come spring and summer. Our weed burden was minor. Minorly minor. We could pull weeds throughout our entire garden once a week, taking about a half an hour for the entire garden plot. Cardboard is a small-scale farmer's best friend.

Victory.

So, we conquered the chip challenge. Stage Two chip-challenge is approaching, since we'll add another layer of straw and compost to the planting beds, necessitating another 2" - 3" layer of chips in the walkways. We're on the list for chip-drop, so wish us luck. We can conquer the world with just two loads of chips.