• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Growing Organic Food in Your Backyard

Grow Better Food!
  • Home
  • Start Here
  • Seed Starting
  • Hoop House
    • Grow Tomatoes in a Hoop House
    • Grow Cucumbers in a Hoop House
    • How to Grow Carrots in Winter
    • Winter Sowing Made Better
  • Sponsor
  • Search
  • Subscribe

Chop and Drop Soil Improvement

by Bill Brikiatis

Updated: October 14, 2020

This is a guest post by Nancy Lowe from Oak House Permaculture.

I’ve been experimenting with a technique called ‘chop and drop’ as a way to improve my very poor soil quality. This technique, which I learned from Australian permaculture expert Geoff Lawton, acts to fast track the natural processes that help to build deep, humus-rich soils.

Geoff Lawton is sometimes called the father of permaculture.

Over here at Oak House, despite living out in the lovely green English Shropshire Hills, I often feel like I might as well be working an old city centre brownfield site.

Most of my land is covered in concrete or gravel. This is quite a challenge as a starting point for growing fruit and vegetables!

Related: How to Use Chicken Manure Pellets.

Unsurprisingly, my food growing involves lots of soil improvement. My latest soil improvement technique is chop and drop.

What is chop and drop? The name says it all.

You grow fast growing, nutrient gathering plants. Once they’ve grown to a decent size, you chop them down and drop them to the ground. 

Then the plants continue growing, and you chop them back down. And so on.

Chop and drop mimics fallen leaves

The fallen plant material makes up a deep litter layer, mimicking the layer of fallen leaves you get under woodland trees.

Just like in a woodland, this fallen material becomes food for all your soil-making bugs and beasties, who convert it into lovely, rich soil.

I’m also using comfrey, which has very deep roots and is great at bringing up trace minerals from deep in the soil.

— Oak House Permaculture

Next time you’re in some woods, dig around under the fallen leaves and you’ll see what I mean – a fantastic, dark, moist, crumbly soil.

This soil is the foundation of the most productive type of natural system on the surface of the planet: woodland. It’s the best kind of soil to aim for if you’re after a productive garden.

It’s what I’m working to build up here, using my chop and drop technique.

Chop and Drop
Oak House Permaculture started with some of the worst soil possible.

But I’m tweaking nature’s way slightly. By this I mean I’m being selective about the plants we’re chopping and dropping.

Let’s take a sec to get the legal words out of the way. This article may contain affiliate links. That means if you click and buy from my partners, I will make a tiny amount of money at no cost to you. This in no way affects my recommendations.

My goal is to maximize soil nutrients, especially nitrogen, potassium and phosphorous. This is important when you’re growing food and, if like me, building soil from scratch.

Because clover fixes nitrogen in the soil, it’s great for chop and drop.

Best plants for chop and drop

We’re using clover and vetch, both of which ‘fix’ nitrogen, a nutrient essential for leaf growth. 

Nitrogen is extracted from the air and stored in nodules in the plants’ roots. I regularly chop the plant tops off, which causes the roots to die back and release stores of nitrogen into our very poor soil.

Gardening Tips

How to Improve Soil

All the ways I know to improve your soil.

I drop the plant tops on top so they can break down, adding organic matter to the soil.

I’m also using comfrey, which has very deep roots and is great at bringing up trace minerals from deep in the soil. This is important because the roots of some garden plants don’t grow very deep in the soil.

Related: Three Important Soil Building Techniques

Comfrey also gathers up nitrogen and phosphorous, but is particularly good at accumulating potassium – good for fruiting crops.

I’ve just planted young comfrey plants out by some of my fruit trees. Next year, when these plants have got big and strong, I’ll start chopping and dropping them to help maintain the soil fertility around my fruit trees.

Nancy Lowe lives in Shropshire, UK. She writes about her experiments with soil reclamation, organic gardening and permaculture design on her blog Oak House Permaculture.

Related articles you might enjoy:

  1. Why Grow Cover Crop in the Vegetable Garden
  2. How to Grow Blueberries
  3. Comfrey Mulch for Strawberries

Suburban Hobby Farmer is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com.

Pin
Share
Tweet

Filed Under: 3. Expert -- Somewhat Difficult to Complete, Compost Tagged With: soil

Primary Sidebar

Meet the Blogger

Bill Brikiatis

Hello! I’m Bill Brikiatis. I started this website in 2010 to help you get better at growing organic food in your backyard.

I’ve been growing fruits and vegetables for nearly all my life. And I'm over 60.

That’s not to say that I don’t make mistakes. I make plenty, then I write about them so both you and I get better at growing great things to eat.

You can read more about me and Suburban Hobby Farmer on my about page.

Most Popular on SHF

  1. How to Get Free Seeds from the U.S. Government. It's Easy If You Know How
  2. How to Use Chicken Manure Pellets in the Vegetable Garden
  3. Which Seed Starting Mix is Best? I Tested Them
  4. What Are the Benefits of Pruning Tomato Plants?
  5. I've Used a Rain Barrel Downspout Diverter for 10 years. Here's What I Know.
  6. Grow Millions of Cucumbers in a Hoop House
  7. I Shopped for Hoop House Kits. A Review of the One I Bought.
  8. Do Tumbling Compost Bins Work?
  9. Can you plant potatoes in the fall? Absolutely!
  10. What are the Best Potting Benches for Vegetable Growers?

Search This Site for Articles

Growing Tomatoes

Growing Tomatoes

Learn Everything I Know About Growing Tomatoes

Extending the Growing Season

  1. A Hoop House is a Tomato Growing Machine
  2. Coldframe Kits Make It Easy to Extend the Growing Season
  3. Grow a Million Cucumbers in a Hoop House
  4. I Shopped for Hoop House Kits. A Review of the Three I Considered
  5. Growing Salad Greens in Winter. Here's How to Do It
  6. Better Tomatoes with Walls O Water
  7. How to Grow Carrots in Winter
  8. Winter Sowing Made Better

Improving Soil

  1. How to Use Chicken Manure Pellets
  2. Three Important Soil Building Techniques
  3. Grasscycling and Composting Grass Clippings
  4. What is "Deep Litter" in a Chicken Coop?
  5. Why Grow Cover Crop and Which Ones?
  6. Mulching Raised Garden Beds
  7. Five Gardening Ideas from Building Soils Naturally
  8. Should You Use Neptune's Harvest Liquid Fertilizer?
  9. How to Use Aquarium Fish Water to Fertilize Plants
  10. Using Chop & Drop to Improve Your Soil
  11. How to Improve Your Soil
  12. What is OMRI? Why Should Organic Gardners Care?
  13. Winter Ground Covers for Vegetable Gardens

Collecting Water with Rain Barrels & Downspout Diverters

  1. My Automatic Downspout Diverter
  2. Rain Barrel Downspout Diverters
  3. Fixing an Overflowing Rain Barrel
  4. Oatey Mystic Rainwater Collection System / Downspout Diverter

Composting Articles

  1. Do Tumbling Compost Bins Work?
  2. How to Compost Faster
  3. Worm Composting Not So Easy
  4. Worm Composting Not So Easy, Part II
  5. Worm Composting Not So Easy, Part II
  6. Free, 77-page Worm Composting Guide
  7. Grasscycling and Composting Grass Clippings
  8. The Best Worm Food
  9. Making Compost in a Chicken Coop

Footer

My Recommendations

  • Start Here
  • Subscribe
  • Things I Like

SHF Info

  • Advertising Info
  • Affiliate Policy
  • Article Sponsorship
  • Privacy

Blogger

  • About
  • Contact

© Suburban Hobby Farmer 2020