Cardboard and Woodchip

 I'm very lucky to live in the corner of three acres of previously unused farmland that we call Thistle Doo.

The plan is, over the years, to turn this into an amazing food forest where children and real people can come and learn about growing their own food in a sustainable and permacultury kind of way whilst stuffing their faces with berries and fruit and weird green things that they're not supposed... don't eat that!

It is currently the middle of winter so most of our jobs around the place are structural.  I am mainly making paths.  My method is to lay flattened cardboard boxes on the ground and then cover them with woodchip.

The cardboard I collect from outside people's houses the night before recycling day and around the back of petrol stations and supermarkets.  So it's free.

The woodchip comes from strange, elvish tree surgeons who frequent the area.  I registered a corner of our field on a website called www.arbtalk.co.uk which is where tree surgeons hang out to find love and chainsaw oil.  If you see tree surgeons working they usually have a big machine on the back of a trailer called a chipper.  The branches and trees they chop down are thrown into these chippers and out the other end comes woodchip.  To them, this is a waste product that they would have to pay to take to a rubbish dump.  But the local tree surgeons around Thistle Doo know they can happily dump it here for us to use to make paths etc.

It takes a lot of work filling a wheel barrow with woodchip and then taking it to wherever I'm building a path but it's simple work that I enjoy.  Most of my work involves doing complicated things with words or making sure that a couple of hundred people do not stop laughing for more than ten seconds at a time.  So I love it when my work for an hour is simply to get those woodchips from over here and put them over there.  I'll take a picture of one of my paths for you:

You'll see that the woodchip comes in different flavours depending on how old it is and what type of tree it used to be.  Generally, I only use plain brown cardboard as some of the inks used in a lot of packaging might be poisonous and I don't want any of that in our food.  But here you can see a bit of pink has sneaked in like a sneaky sneaker.

The paths I made last spring have now settled nicely and as you walk around it gives you the feeling of treading on a forest path.  Slightly bouncy and full of life.  In theory, the cardboard creates a barrier which will stop thistles and nettles regrowing.  Over time of course it will rot down into compost and feed plants and trees either side of the path.

Food forests feature in my next book which is called The Funny Life of Saving the Planet.  I think it'll come out in January 2024, publishing by Bloomsbury.  At the moment we are in the edit stage and the marvellous Rob Jones is drawing the cover.