Chop & Drop for Soil Fertility: A Paradigm Shift

Garden care seems easy enough with this team: comfortable gloves, knee pad, garden scissors and pruners, a trowel and a trusty shovel for dividing and transplanting.

Doing garden cleanup in Spring rather than Fall benefits the plants, soil community, the garden and humans. Retaining the foliage of perennials, biennials and annuals in the fall and leaving a good portion of the fallen leaves from trees and shrubs, in addition to any existing mulch layer, builds a garden detritus that is an important resource throughout the year, creating over-wintering habitat for birds and beneficial insects.

Consider planting Colorado native plants to benefit local wildlife. They’re beautiful, low maintenance, use minimal water after establishment, and are better adapted to the local climate. They also have numerous resource benefits for beneficial insects, pollinators and other wildlife with which they have co-evolved.

The seedheads of sunflowers, coneflowers and grasses supply nutritious forage for birds in late fall and they endow the garden with a beautiful aesthetic creating winter interest, especially when they’re snowcapped.

Nature has wonderfully regenerative systems. By observing these natural processes and utilizing sustainable garden and land management practices, we can improve the health of our soil and the vigor and productivity of our plants. Let’s look at a practice that mimics plants’ ability to be a never-ending supply of nutritional resources for the soil, where it all begins.

Chop & Drop

The practice of chop and drop is a permaculture and regenerative agriculture practice which imitates nature’s natural processes of growth and decay, and promotes ecologically harmonious, efficient and productive systems.

To utilize chop and drop take your live or spent non-diseased plant material and use sharpened hand pruners to cut it up into 1 inch or less pieces (or whatever your desired preference) to the ground below. You can also cut and drop small woody stems this way. For finer foliage, I find garden scissors work best for cutting limp, spent foliage. This system works in harmony with nature and recycles nature’s nutrients from last year’s foliage that are mineral and carbon rich.

You can up your habitat game by developing and nurturing large or small habitat havens anytime. Leaving some natural detritus is a year-round practice. You’re building habitat for “the little things that run the world”, as Edward O. Wilson, biologist, naturalist, and entomologist has said in his 1987 book, The Little Things That Run the World (The Importance and Conservation of Invertebrates).

As spring dawns and enlivens our hearts, and the soil awakens, fresh plant material coming from the spring garden cleanup can be chopped and dropped as a nutritional mulch on top of the ground layer.

During the spring garden clean up or any time of year, preserving and not hauling off the healthy plant material to the garbage bin is a boon for enhancing soil fertility and thus plant vitality.

Nature has a wise and gentle intelligence that many humans do not observe in their gardens and landscapes. Many people feel compelled to tidy up their garden in the fall, but this leaves birds, invertebrates and other small organisms and their habitats vulnerable to harsh winter conditions.

In the fall, as the plants begin dormancy, allow the spent foliage to cover the crown of the plant, (the place where the stem meets the root ball). This protects it during the long winter dormancy period. This practice also insulates the living soil networks below.

The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation encourages gardeners to leave the fallen leaves and other organic debris as habitat resources for butterflies, dragonflies, beetles, worms, bees, and all invertebrates, to cover and insulate them from the elements.

This small but mighty ecological practice of chop and drop builds healthy soil systems that benefit plants and the myriad animals that call our gardens and landscapes home.

We are part of one big, interconnected web! Working in harmony with nature by using attentive, regenerative and innovative practices to foster healthy plants, people and planet.

Sources & Resources

Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation: https://www.xerces.org/learn-about-invertebrates

Xerces Society https://xerces.org/publications/plant-lists/native-plants-for-pollinators-and-beneficial-insects-rocky-mountains

https://gardenforwildlife.com/

Birds and Blooms.com: www.birdsandblooms.com/birding/attracting-birds/plants-and-trees-that-attract-birds/growing-ornamental-grass/

Beter Homes and Gardens: https://www.bhg.com/what-is-a-permaculture-garden-7775333