Part 1/3 - Sheet Mulching and Soil Preparation: UMass Permaculture Documentary Series
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 ก.พ. 2025
- UMass Amherst transformed a 1/4 grass lawn on campus into a thriving, abundant, permaculture garden during the 2010-2011 academic year. Learn how this student-led project can be easily replicated and spread to other campuses, institutions... any piece of land for that matter. UMass Amherst is one of the first university's undertaking a project like this, directly on campus, and supplying the food to its dining commons.
This video Produced by www.adaptiveNOW...
Way to go Ryan and all! Change the World every day!
Watching this 10 years later! Great video.
Wood chips is a "no-go." It also has to be organic. The bugs will thrive in this new environment. I'm surprised that nobody from UMass understands how to garden. Just a bit of advice coming from somebody that grew up on a small family farm with a one acre community garden in Southern Missouri from 1953 through 2001. We canned over 3,000 quarts of food per year just for our family, not counting all the other families and had to give good away.
HELL YEAH!!! This is so great to see- I'm friends with Will Szal, who went to UMass for a while and is connected to this scene. I want to see this stuff happening on EVERY college campus in America (every high school campus too)!
This is amazing, and the movie is really well done. I think the ultimate test of the success of the garden will be to look at it again when the students of UMass weren't involved in making it (4 years from now). I would love to see what would happen then, to see if they take it for granted, or if they continue to work on it and for it.
Hats off to UMass Amherst!
The National Gardening Association: This is a great video! I love how clearly and easily the video demonstrates the permaculture process. Thanks For sharing it with our Fans. We hope you reach your target of 10,000 views soon! Paul Simon
Surely creating a gardenwith so many external inputs is transferring fertility from one area to another. Wood chips come from a forest area which impoverished by taking away all this carbon, cardboard comes from other forest, and food waste compost comes from impoverished soils in intensive agriculture. Far more difficult is building soil and fertility from your own plot through green manuring and recycled compost. That is true 'sustainability'.
Thanks for the video! It's really cool to see HOW you guys went about creating the Franklin permaculture garden on campus.
@madeofyucca They are doing a sheet mulching technique rather then tilling the ground to get the soil ready for planting. By applying the cardboard, which is practically free and readily available, it provides a barrier to prevent weeds from sprouting. No Light. Also its biodegradable and provides plenty of nitrogen to the soil. After 5 months of degrading the soil is weed free and rich in minerals from the compost, microbes, and beneficial fungi.
Love it. There's lots of Sustainable farming going on in Durango, Colorado. I once visited a Permaculture farm there.
Great work y'all. Let's plant this everywhere!
@jetle25 I understand the concept of sheet mulching. What I was curious about was the order in which they put the material down, which is opposite to what is normally done in sheet mulching. Usually the cardboard is placed on the ground first, blocking weed growth, and the other material is placed on top to form the soil in which to plant. I was wondering if there was an advantage in their situation to place the cardboard on top.
Nine years later I am commenting. I feel like the order is wrong also. I came to the comments to see if anyone commented about that.
@EAFolta i agree. namely producing trees and shrubs, these are missed to often, especially shrubs in smaller gardens.
Great work, and great start. Make sure to water that cardboard, though; adds moisture, helps it breakdown (someday) and prevents all your students from slipping... fewer cracked permie skulls
Ever heard of "terra preta". I'm sure this can be nicely combined with permaculture.
@messina98 1 of those questions i can answer - permaculture designed for max yield can annually feed about 10 people per acre, so that bit of land they have will probably produce some lunch for the students who got involved. definitely won't supply all their food. in any case, the yield in permaculture is far greater than industrial agriculture, & much less labour intensive. on average, according to mike crawford its eventually 1 work day per week (harvest) and 10 days per year for maintenance.
wow! this is really heartening. would love to cover it in Green Life - India's first mainstream green lifestyle magazine. And hope it inspires many more such efforts.
SO COOL. You're doing great work. Thank you so much for sharing your process on video. So many of us are excited to watch you grow & get our grow on too :)
Sending you gratitude & supportive energy!
Peace,
Lauren
@deviousmousey I'm in the same situation and still managed to grow 70% of my vegetables. container growing if done properly can produce a lot of food, you just need to be creative. you can copy such products as the EarthBox or make global buckets etc....
Cool!
Why did you folks chose to put the cardboard on top of the compost as opposed to vise versa?
Should also add oyster mushroom spores, more food, also it helps retain moisture.
Incredible... The best ideas are always the simplest... #retuntonature :)
Are you trying to feed lawn grass with compost? Why not layer cardboards first, then mulch then compost to start plants?
I also have this same question, any points on that?
Don't wood chips provide the carbon needed for the composting process to complete itself?
they are letting it all sit for 5 months before they plant into it so the wood chips will be well on the way to decomposing and forming beneficial fungi by then and not impact the vegetables. This is the best way to grow soil and do it by recycling other waste materials - fantastic example UMASS!!!! Try waternig in some diluted molasses to get that fungi really powering.
Awesome !!!! Keep at it y'all!!!!
This is a great start, but there's nothing here that talks about permaculture as opposed to simply local organic gardening. Permaculture involves guilds of plants, natural pest management, etc. I hope this is addressed later in the series.
Yay! Keep up the great work!
When are the other two parts coming out?
Excellent!!! Love love
love it,love it so much !! i'm actually starting with my garden then i can move to my college's garden ;)
Yes, there have been 2 more! at the end of the video there is a link for part 2. You can also do a youtube search for "UMass Permaculture Part 2 and UMass Permaculture Part 3"
We're going to expand our garden over the lawn area doing this method. I have a question for you...we have caragana bushes sprouting everywhere. Even constant goat pasturing hasn't been able to rid us of them. Would you think that this method(the cardboard layer) will prevent them growing in the new garden area?
@anadler0625 You can now donate to us via the link above (and at the end of the video)! All funds go directly toward creating more diverse, thriving, abundant, edible, educational, sustainable, and beautiful campus landscapes!
Great!
Has there been a follow up video of this project?
what should someone major in to work in premaculture? botony, argiculture?
Agroecology and a Certified Permaculture designer is the way I did it. Botany would be good too.
the kids are alright! way 2 go
wow, this is really progressive and epic! i wish i could grow my own food :( but that's kinda hard in an apartment :P
environmental sciences and agricultural science degrees are some big ones
great idea :) .. also on an another note get a load of the guy back here who had too much to drink at 2:15.... "this is too much for me.. yawn" 2:17 zonk hahahahaha
Backyard is where it starts.
what is that red tree at 0:15?
I often think the same thing, but it's hard to be a purist about it. I mean, technically you are growing more plants with it, so it's being recycled back into the environment. One step at a time I guess... I mean, we could stop growing useless lawns, which would cut down on the need for cardboard :)
that's pretty cool!
I guess very relevant in times of COVID 19
is there any money in permaculture?
Remember folks, true sustainability starts with growing food.
Holy $hit Towers at 2:48 !
fair play guys but wood chips aint your best shout bcoz it takes cutting a tree down unlike straw anyway good work and namaste
check out BACKTOEDENFILM Paul Gatshui uses wood chips in his garden
Coppice much?
I would like to see more doing and less talking.
1 man shoveling, 15 talking about it.
Children living in a dream world on campus with a Professor who is sustained by taxpayers. Utopian ideas are easy to come by in the young and coddled. By now most of them are entering the real world I wonder what they think when they look back at themselves in this presentation. The honest ones will feel slightly sheepish and have a good laugh at themselves for their naivete state of being.
+Veritas Rex It's weird that my comment vanished... But I think you're probably not good at receiving criticism, only at giving it.
Josh, I was typing to Veritas, not to you. I agree that his attitude is part of the problem, and I left a reply to his comment a while back telling him so. That comment is gone now, but I still received a notice when you replied to him. So I think he deleted my criticism of him, because some video maker accounts allow comment thread starters to delete / moderate replies.