The good ol' Chop and Drop

October 19th, 2021

Once upon a time, I subscribed to the tidy garden theory. A plant here, and another there, and nice clear black soil space in between (that had to be weeded regularly). 

That's changed over time. I took the Master Composter/Recycler course from the city of Edmonton 15 years ago, and learned many things. Through it, I rediscovered a friend/university buddy I hadn't seen in years. Mark had become an MCR educator who eventually became a Master Gardener/soil science fanatic too, and who tells me that bare soil is dying soil. 

Basically, bare soil is unprotected so it's getting baked and dried out, losing nutrients and moisture, and more susceptible to weeds. Mark taught me about using compost as mulch, and more recently, another MCR friend, Mildred, introduced me to her way of allowing plants to drop their foliage on the soil as natural fertilizer and protection.

Chop and Drop, she calls it, and I'm a convert. Rather than buying large quantities of garden centre mulch to cover soil and keep it moist, I use autumn leaves and leave my perennials to die back naturally in the fall. In the spring, I simply chop and drop anything that's left standing to tidy up my yard. 

Of course, chopped stems and stalks don't look quite as neat as bare soil or as uniform as wood chips, but they compost more quickly and actually started to feed the soil last fall as their nutrients leached into the ground during freeze-thaw cycles. Their stems are lighter and allow for some aeration as they decompose, even as they hold moisture in the soil.

In a world where we are facing so many environmental issues, Chop and Drop means that no garbage trucks are hauling my yard waste 85 km to the Ryley landfill, because it's being used to rejuvenate my soil. By reusing natural debris from plants to hold in moisture and enrich my garden, I'm not contributing to the destruction of trees for wood chips, I need no chemical fertilizers, and I've got my very own carbon capture and storage program!

April 29th, 2022

On April 29th, I chopped and dropped last fall's leftover stems and stalks in my perennial beds. It looks a bit messy at the moment, but once things get growing, it's barely noticeable -- except that it means I rarely have to water in the summer, and when I do, the moistened soil is protected by a layer of naturally composting leaves, stems and other plant debris.

The good ol' Chop and Drop is basically how God keeps things green and growing (the wind, birds, storms, and other natural things are the choppers and droppers). I highly recommend it. It can work in vegetable gardens too (but do it in the fall and dig the plant leftovers into the soil so they're absorbed/composted by spring). Your soil will thank you by being light and rich and full of life!

Give my front yard garden about a month and a half, and you won't even notice my chop and drop mulch...

Last June