Chop and Drop some of your Crops!

Building soil fertility may be difficult to do without spending quite a bit of money on all kinds of amendments. However, there are several easy ways to build soil without purchasing amendments. If you look at nature, forests, prairies and the like have been slowly building soil for millennia. With a little insight from how soil is built naturally we can speed up the process. If you go to any forest or prairie you can see that the debris that is created by the ecosystem is deposited on the ground and is eventually broken down in to soil by fungi, microorganisms, herbivores, and others. If we take this design strategy into our own system we can design the system to have several different soil building species mixed in with our edible (or useful) perennials. If you have animals in your system you can utilize the fodder from your crops for making nutrient rich manure from your animals. But with or without animals in your system you can speed up soil building processes quite rapidly.
One thing I enjoy doing is chopping and dropping certain plants to mulch and build the soil locally. You can chop and drop plants of all different growing patterns and sizes. The basic concept comes from planting plants that you intend for this purpose and depositing clippings nearby where they were planted. This mimics the natural processes of growth, dieback and deposition of debris on the ground. However we can increase the amount of debris that can turn into soil by choosing species that either dynamically accumulate nutrients or fix nitrogen from the atmosphere. One of the great workhorses is comfrey. It is an herbaceous perennial that grows about 3 feet high and about the same in width. Once it gets this big it is ready to be chopped and dropped. I like to leave a few of the smaller shoots so they grow back quicker. You can do this at least 3 times in a summer. When you mulch the ground with materials like comfrey leaves you can protect the soil from drying out, create more habitats for microorganisms, fungi and other soil creatures, such as earthworms. It can also act as a weed barrier. If your not wanting to mulch a certain area or it’s already mulched well enough, you can utilize your chop and drop materials to make a nutrient rich tea to feed your garden with. Simply add your comfrey to a bucket and cover it with water. Wait about a week, stir it up and dilute this mixture about 1 to 10 and use this homemade fertilizer to boost plant growth.
There are plenty of annuals and perennials that can be utilized similarly to comfrey. At Love Creek Permaculture we harvest the greens from lambsquarters in spring and early summer, but when they bolt (flower) we like to cut the plant at the base and use the tops for mulching. Leaving the roots in the soil will add to the organic matter in the soil, and increase soil fertility. We even utilize the chop and drop method with several different tree species. Deer brush is a common medium to tall shrub that fixes nitrogen from the atmosphere. Cutting branches from these trees can give us materials to chip up or we can just leave them to decompose on the ground nearby. It is important to note that when you cut a branch from a tree, there are corresponding roots in the ground that die back. These dead roots also add organic matter to the soil and increase the soil fertility. Alder trees are also quick growing nitrogen fixers that can be coppiced and a continual supply of branches can be utilized for making woodchips, BBQs, and hugelkultur beds.
The ultimate food forest is designed to have several chop and drop species mixed in with crops that you utilize for food, fuel, medicine, and fodder. Some quick growing tree species can be planted to build soil as your slower maturing fruit and nut trees develop. Over time the quick growing species are chopped and dropped about once a year and eventually can be removed entirely to make room for your maturing trees. But all the while you are also using other dynamic accumulators such as comfrey to add chop and drop materials to the soil within your food forest.
This type of soil stewardship can be fun and is rather quite easy once you get the hang of it. Choosing the species can be more difficult because there isn’t much information on this subject outside of the permaculture community. However comfrey is a great species to start with and is easily found at your local nurseries. From your own observations of how plants grow you can find some chop and drop species that are already in existence on your land. Try it out and see what happens.