🔗 Save $6,000 A Year with My Complete Amish Home-Saving Method I teach: https://eliasyoder.com You hoed that bed clean on Saturday and by Wednesday it was green again. Not the same weeds. New ones.

Here is the thing nobody tells you. Ground will not stay bare. Go and stand at the edge of a woods and try to find one square foot of bare soil.

You cannot do it. Walk a fence row nobody has touched in forty years and it is the same. Bare ground is not a natural condition anywhere on this earth except a desert and a road, and the moment you make some, the world sets about covering it.

That is all a weed is. Not an invader. It is what arrives to cover ground that nothing else is covering.

Which means every time you hoe a bed clean, you have not finished a job. You have placed an order. My grandmother showed me this when I was small, on a morning I had been hoeing and complaining.

She put the hoe against the fence, walked me out to where the woods start, knelt down and pulled the leaves back with her hand. Black crumbling earth underneath, cool and damp, worms in it, and not one weed in the whole patch. She let the leaves fall back and said nobody has hoed this ground in a hundred years.

Then she asked me what the woods has that her garden has not got. Our kitchen garden has been in the same ground since before the Civil War. I water it perhaps three times in a dry summer and weed it about an hour a season.

What we go through: The seven things a covering does for you, and why weeding is only the first of them Why chopped leaves are the best thing for a bed and whole leaves are the worst mistake I ever made Leaf mould, what it is and how a pile makes it for you while you do nothing Grass clippings, and why a thick green layer becomes a lid instead of a cover Why wood chips belong on paths and around trees but never on a seedling bed Mulch volcanoes, and how kindness kills good trees Hay against straw, which carries more feed, which carries more seed, and why garlic wants straw Cardboard under a new path, and why it works because it rots Cover crops and living clover, the oldest covering there is When to put it down, and why bare soil over winter loses itself Why slugs like it, why cold spring soil does not, and why too deep is worse than too thin The warning I would have you take away above everything else: some hay, some manure and some grass clippings will kill your garden.

There is a class of pasture weed killer that does not break down. It passes through the animal still working, passes through a compost heap still working, and twists and stunts your tomatoes and beans for two or three years. You cannot see it or smell it.

So here is the test, and it costs nothing. Fill a pot half with your garden soil and half with the material mixed through, and a second pot with plain garden soil. Sow three or four beans in each on a windowsill.

If the mixed pot comes up with cupped, curled, fern-like leaves and the plain pot comes up normal, keep that material off your ground. There is no scheme in any of this. Leaves are free, clippings are free, and the tree man will bring you chips and be glad of it.

Nobody has an advertising budget for a pile of leaves behind the shed. This week, find the most neglected corner you have. A fence line, the back of a shed, the edge of a woodlot.

Pull the litter back with your hand and look at what is underneath. Then go and look at your garden bed. Tell me in the comments what county you are in and what your soil is.

And tell me this: what have you got on your own place, right now, for nothing, that you have been raking up and hauling away every autumn? Next time we go back to the very start of it, because the finest way to have a garden next year costs nothing and it is sitting inside what you are harvesting right now. I gathered the whole of it into a book at eliasyoder dot com.

The people who built this country with their hands knew that, and we are only just starting to remember it. #EliasYoder #Mulch...