This Plant Produced Far More Mulch Than I Expected.

Today's a challenge. I want to see how effective is willow at being a productive, regenerative mulch resource for the garden. I want to exactly work out how much volume of ramial chip wood, which is wood chip that is higher in nitrogen, partly because I'm actually going to be chipping it still with the leaves. How much volume can I get per willow tree that is either coppice or pollarded? And how does that equate to how many square meters of mulch can I do? So by the end of the video, the idea is I am going to know exactly how many plants, what kind of space that needs, and how then that equates to mulch material for a kitchen garden. So let's find out. So this here is my hybrid willow patch. You can kind of see the height. It's been quite a dry year this year but on average we get well over four meters of growth. per year so they're all then kind of cut back and the kind of the whole purpose of planting this willow here is that it is really quite wet this is where all of the moisture from the top of the hill comes down and collects and then we've got a pond underneath and let me just show you what's actually in that little wooden structure so this here is our future pump which is we're just actually about to take this away as well as the solar panels because this is what we use to make room possible. For those of you that don't know we are completely off grid on this site so we have this pond behind me an additional pond and this is where we source pretty much all of our water with exception from water where we collect from roofs and here is one example of where we do some rainwater collection into this IBC tank which is a system that we want to extend plus we have some additional structures Where we collect water, but we kind of just see this as like supplemental, particularly to help on a, I was about to say on a rainy day, but that's exactly when I don't need it, particularly to help on dry days. But this future pump has been an absolute game changer for us. It's made everything possible. We've got two pipes that are buried underneath that go to two different outlets further up the hill. that we can then either irrigate off or pump into other tanks that then we can use the Gardena rainwater pump to then pump out and water. So it's not ideal but this makes everything possible. Often people ask me where did I get this willow from and what kind of variety is it? All I know is that this is a hybrid willow. I got this from a guy about 20 minutes down the road And they were 30 centimeter cuttings. They were just stuck in about four years ago and they pretty much all just grew. So the whole point here is that this land here isn't suitable for growing a huge amount of productive crops. And what I mean by productive crops is crops that can produce food. Of course, there are some things that like the wet, but really it is very wet here. So I just thought it made a far more sense to plant willow, which loves these kinds of conditions. And produce all of this incredible biomass, a very simple kind of like way of thinking about it, particularly from like a UK perspective, is like willow is our version of bamboo. Because it grows so quickly in the right conditions, and it is this growth that I think we can capture, and that's what we've been doing, capturing this growth to then use on our gardens. And it's a regenerative resource because every year, and I'll just kind of come in here and show you, We cut back just very simply, just don't even worry about it too much, just cut it back. And at some point in winter or around this time, chip it up and then next year, it's gonna send all of this growth up. So all of this growth came from spring when these stumps were completely bare. So a term I mentioned just earlier was ramial chip wood, and it is a French word. A French word, not a French wood, a French word and ramial Chip wood comes from wood that is under seven centimetres in diameter or about like just under three inches in diameter and this is where you find the greatest concentration of nutrients, minerals, those kind of things and a far more favourable nitrogen to carbon ratio. So some, particularly the ends of the youngest growth, you can sometimes get like a 30 to 1 carbon to nitrogen ratio which for those of you that compost know that that is kind of the ideal ratio So there are some great companies out there like EcoCrops that are looking at and are producing ramial chip wood on a massive scale for gardeners. But for me, I want to work out, even if someone has a smaller garden, if they have a wet patch, beyond the wildlife benefits of growing willow, is it worth growing for mulch? So we will find out. And in case you're wondering, well, what do you do with ramial chip wood? Here's some that we've made ourselves. That we are using as a mulch, just to help build up a bit of soil. Now, there's a lot of discussion about wood chip and nitrogen robbery and nitrogen tie up. There is less of that with ramial chip wood, but I wouldn't recommend it as a mulch if you're trying to grow like loads of annual vegetables. It is much better as a mulch, either as long-term soil building to then grow vegetables like the year after next. Or for mulching all of your perennials or even just to put in a pile to break down for a year or two to then mulch. on your garden beds in autumn to then plant the following spring. And just so you know we have a lot of willow on this site. This is willow that is originally here that I used as just an indicator instantly to know that willow naturally loves it. So this is the natural willow and this is the hybrid willow behind a different section of our site. And just here, it's almost finished now. But this is where we store all of the ramial chip from coppicing both the original willow and the hybrid willow to then use as a mulch as and when we need it. And you can see in this willow I've got a runaway spaghetti squash that is using the willow as a support for growing. And also willow is not just used as a mulch, it is great for creating living structures. We've got a willow Willow fence here that desperately needs a prune, but that's great. A fence that produces biomass for us so it's serving multiple functions rather than just putting in a typical wooden fence. So this is a great idea and there's all sorts of different things that you can do such as living tunnels and archways and just you can get so creative with it. And of course you don't just have to grow like normal willow or hybrid willow. This This here is basket willow. We've got a fair few rows of basket willow, which isn't, Actually what I'd recommend growing for biomass but if you love doing creative projects and crafts if you're growing some hybrid willow why not grow a bed of basket willow which you can use over winter to create what you want. So it is time to now experiment. You've got a bit of context, bit of understanding. I have got a pair of loppers and a saw and I am going to go ahead and harvest. All of the shoots from kind of pretty much five random bits of willow. I'm going to look at a couple that are less productive, a couple that are more productive, just to get a very basic beginning average. And then we're going to bring the wood chipper in and we're going to chip it. We're going to see how much volume of wood chip that produces. I also need to get a pair of sharp secateurs because the way that the willow is, I forgot, it's a good reminder. But it's quite fibrous on the outside. So sometimes just a pair of loppers can kind of struggle. So for the smaller ones, it's fine for the bigger ones, but for the smaller branches, because there's just so much more of that like kind of fibrous outer layer, it's just much easier and more nimble using a pair of secateurs. Okay, there we go. That is one plant down and four more to go. Hello Will, are you taking it for walkies? What, so you can lever it? So then I can lever it and I don't trip over it. That is so clever. I have never seen such wizardry before in my life. Wicked. Thank you. I need that for later. But anyway, Will is taking over now with filming so I can actually crack on with some work. I've done the first one, just like that. You don't need to worry about like how kind of tidy it is. Now I'm just gonna get... This next one which looks like it has a decent amount of growth as well and it's going to be fascinating just to see what this kind of translates to in terms of volume and of course you've got the leaves as well and I'm going to be adding the leaves in, they count as volume and I don't mind if it's kind of quite a light airy mulch because that just helps insulate things anyway and helps the soil to breathe. So I'm just going to crack on with this Oh, that'll be fun. I got the camera earlier, actually. That could be like the opening shot. Bang. Actually, these are a bit bigger, so there we go, that's not going to hit you. A lot of these are looking quite productive, but there's a couple of ones that just aren't going to be as productive. So I think it's fair to include those. So I've got this here, which only has three stems. Although this is actually, this is a younger plant because I can tell This would have just been one that was filling a gap because that is a much smaller width than these. So I'm going to go for a slightly older plant like this that still doesn't seem quite as productive. That's a nice big bit here though. Keep this somewhat tidy because I want all of the ends to be on one end because it's these ends that I'll then feed through this little Forest Master wood chipper which I've had for many years and And... It would look in better nick if I stopped leaving things outside but this thing is a little beast. I'm curious to see whether like would this even fill this bucket. We'll see. So my plan here is this is just a bit wider to collect all the chippings but I know that this here is a a 30 litre potato tub so I can then fill and see how much of this or how many of these It fills and then be able to work out average litre. per willow and then I will use this because typically we like compost and the reason there's a reason why I chose this where if you want to add about three centimetres Mulch of compost on over a square meter, you want about 30 liters of compost that translates to the three centimeters. So that is kind of roughly my thinking is that this should hopefully do about a square meter of mulch at just over an inch or three centimeters of the wood chip. So I'm going to fire this up and start chipping and we will see what happens. So What was interesting about that was, I think I just used too many small bits, which are too fine. So I've, cause usually when we chip it's actually without the leaves, but I do want the leaves. So what I'm doing is I'm collecting all the leaves into there that I can just chop up if I want. Look how much has been done. This here has got some good weight to it and I've still got this material to go. So I'm going to get another couple of containers and then we can decant them. Into this, once I've sorted out everything else and already it's feeling a little bit more, I don't know, more productive than I was expecting. I think because I know how easily these little bits can get chopped up. I was like, oh, it'll be nice if we just got one bucket, but it looks like we might be getting more. Now, as with all good experiments, they kind of make more sense the further along I go. So what I'm thinking is actually filling these buckets directly. which just makes it easier. So I'm just going to fill this up first and some of this got absolutely pulverized more than it should have when I was just testing out the best technique to cut this because yeah you can see there you can see that that is much finer than how it usually is so that's just going to take up a lot of the surface area, compact it quite a bit. So I'm just going to carry on and then at the end just out of the pure of science also include this and this chopped up and then we can start to work out some real numbers. Okay so what is interesting I'm just going to carry on chopping this up. I had to find a bit of a technique because the leafy stuff is what can kind of like block it so feeding in with the thicker stuff. With the leafy stuff as well and then kind of bringing it out ever so slightly meant that we could chop it up and I'm just going to go for like a more conservative estimate once this is all chopped up because a lot of it is the wood and I've still got the leaves which should compensate is pretty much I'd say we have three of these that are going to be full just because the leaf takes up a bit of extra volume. They're around about 90 litres for five trees. Which means if I divide 90 by five, we can work out an average amount per tree. So 90 divided by five, around 18 liters per tree. Or we could again be kind of conservative and say, Two trees produce 30 litres, which if I spread it over as a mulch, hopefully should do about a metre square. Now I need to work out the kind of the rough density planting of the willows as well, so then you can know if you have 20 metres square of willows, whether that translates to like 10 metres of mulch. So I need to go do some more measurements. So even though this is very Dense inside I'm gonna try and bring you in if I can. I just want you to know that even though it's dense The growth is still fantastic because the growth still appears Like you've got to remember that this shade has only happened because they have grown So when they all start off, they all have pretty much equal sun. So just measuring the density, it doesn't matter. It's like not biased towards the outside as well as growth because some of these, oh, ramble, some of these are really very productive. So that's about 80 centimetres. Now there's a metre. I've got some more here. Some are kind of like, kind of more dense. That again is 80 centimeters, 80. 50, there. So if we say an average spacing of 80 centimetres, I'm gonna work out, I'm not very good at maths, but I'm gonna work out what the density is in terms of how many trees in 10 square metres, and then use that at 15 litres per tree at a more conservative estimate to then work out how many litres of mulch we produce. Maths. So, worked it out. If each tree... It's spaced at 80 centimetres. Roughly each tree occupies 0.64 metres square. So if you're planting density, so the planting density is about 15 to 16 trees per 10 metres square or roughly 1.56 trees per metre square. That numbers don't make sense to me really, but for planning purposes call it about 15 trees. So if you plant 15 trees times 15 litres, that is 225 litres, divided by 30, in theory, that should provide 7.5 square metres of mulch. Which means, density-wise, for the amount of space that these trees occupy, say you've got... You know 10 square meters of trees that in theory, and I just need to test it out that's what we're going to do next, should be able to mulch the equivalent land mass of 75% that it's taking up. So those 10 square meters of trees should hopefully be able to mulch 7.5 square meters of growing space, which is a much better ratio than I realized. That's a very good ratio. I thought it was going to be like 0.2. But that ratio is is very good, very good. So I'm just gonna, this bed is kind of mulch, I've got some poppies coming up, and I'm gonna just spread this over just to use to as a roughly kind of square meter just to see visually because I do everything by visuals if it equates. Oh wow okay okay there we go look at that and that to be honest with the yeah there may be a few more leaves but that is actually a beautiful covering. So then Really, if I wanted double the mulch thickness, then I can just calculate it all. I'll leave the calculations down below. But I'm actually just going to kind of pace out and work out how many square metres of growing space I could mulch with just over an inch of this a year off the willow that I have. Now, this behind me is my self-sufficiency garden, which has about 80 square metres of growing space. Which means I have more than enough willow if I wanted to, you know, mulch this with ramial chipwood. Yes, I won't. I'd much rather turn it into compost and things like that, particularly with the kind of like intensive vegetable growing. But that kind of puts it into perspective that as a mulch material, willow per square meter, one square meter of willow gives you like 0.75 square Five square metres of growing space, worth of mulch, particularly for your perennial systems. I'm surprised in a good way. So roughly we have got 150 square meters of trees. So at the same like kind of density if I divided by 10 that's 15 lots of 10 square meters times 15 trees for that. That is 225 trees. Times 15, which is the key number here, 15 liters, 3,375 liters divided by 30 is over 100, so 112.5 square meters of growing space that I could mulch with these trees, which is incredible. The whole point of this video, basically bear in mind that these are now kind of in their fourth year and it's roughly the same as they produced last year. They need a couple of years to get going but after that, that is a kind of mulch quantities you could be working with. So if you have 20 square meters, working that out you've got about 30 trees, 15 liters per tree, that's a decent amount of mulch or compost material or anything that you're producing regeneratively. every single year so that is worth it not even including the biomass from things like living fences and things like that so i think that was well interesting i don't usually say it that way but that was very interesting and yeah use a description to plug in the numbers for your own land Thank you.