It feels like the quest for the Holy Grail.

Producing fertility in a food forest WITHOUT importing any fertilizer, compost, mulch…

It’s hard to achieve, that’s true, but it can be done by utilizing resources produced on-site. The trick is to identify or intentionally place ‘elements’ that will provide you with the resource you need, then supply it to where it’s required.

It’s another application of the permaculture idea of the creating “closed loops” on your property, whereby the output of one system supplies the input of another.

Ok, so how do you do this?

Let me explain by giving you an example from my farm.

​A few weeks ago I showed you how I use grassy vegetation in between my food forest trees and shrubs as a resource for boosting fertility and mulching.

That’s one way of supplying the resource on-site, and it’s pretty darn effective and easy to execute - you cut the grass/cover crop and move the biomass to your trees just a few feet/meters away.

However, to build fertility for the year that’s not going to cut it, plus the grassy biomass as a mulch tends to decompose rather quickly, so I need other things to add to this protocol.

Enter chop and drop mulching…

In my food forest rows, in between each fruit or nut tree, I have planted a nitrogen-fixing tree - mostly black locust. I’ve done this intentionally to boost fertility and provide some shade from the scorching summer sun. N-fixing trees grow quickly and produce a lot of biomass every year.

So what I do is this: I go once a year, ideally early September (but you can also do it midsummer, if you are not in drought), and I cut/prune all the overgrown branches, and place that free biomass around my fruit trees and shrubs as mulch. This woody material is full of nitrogen, giving another fertility boost to my trees, building the organic matter, and smothering the weeds.

Here’s the video where I explain this chopping and dropping:

Again, this is very easy to do, as N-fixing trees are inches away from the main crop trees. This is another example of permaculture loops: minimizing inputs required as the input is growing on the site, I just had to place it there and make the connections between the trees and the nut/nut crops.

The best thing, this requires only an hour of my time yearly but I have provided a much-needed input.

This task stacks literally and figuratively on the other mulching efforts I showcased before. It’s part of my food forest supermulch protocol.

1. Mulching with grass/cover crop in early June and August
2. Mulching with woody material from pruning N-fixer trees in September
3. Mulching with [x] October (I guess you’ll have to stick with this newsletter to see this one)

When you map it across the year it looks like this:

But a word of warning:

I know a lot of homesteaders who started chopping & dropping after getting inspired by a YouTube video, and later realised with horror that it was actually SLOWING the growth of the fruit trees they were mulching.

One person even KILLED all his young saplings. And another accidentally ended up propagating some bushes he was trying to get RID of.

Anyway, I bring this up because what got these homesteaders “death by chopping & dropping” was a very common mistake that they could have easily avoided. A mistake that has gotten probably many a grower in trouble. Including those who have otherwise been growing and fertilising their trees for years without issue.

A mistake that’s all about chopping and dropping the wrong KINDS of plants.

Oily plants whose oils can be allelopathic and reduce germination rates…

Plants that, when you drop them sprout roots and grow thicker… and then you end up propagating bushes that outcompete your young fruit trees, and choke out their sun and space (especially if you live in a wet climate)...

Plants that you’d think are beneficial to chop & drop but are actually quite detrimental…

Mistakes, as it happens, I talk about in my Permaculture Implementation Programme. Anyway, if you are a student you can find the expanded protocol in the Vault section under Food Forest.

In there, you’ll find (a) the workflow, (b) the yearly calendar that tells you the ideal time to execute each project for your specific climate, and (c) extra resources you can explore if you want to dig in further into the subject. And of course the key mistakes to guard against.

If you are not a student yet I strongly suggest enrolling so that you can start implementing these kinds of workflows/solutions that cut the amount of time and work you need to put in all of this to be able to produce food.

Here is the link to enroll: https://permacultureconversion.com/pip-enrolment/​

Avoid putting money and effort into things and then need to change them because you made a mistake. Learn how to implement permaculture projects right the first time around.

Talk soon,

-William

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