Video | Wood Chips: The Secret Ingredient to Healthy Trees

Hi, I’m Basil, and today we are talking about wood chips. So these are wood chips. One of the best benefits about wood chips is that they rot, which feeds your soil, which feeds your trees. So wood chips are nutrition for your trees.

Another amazing benefit of wood chips is that they form this protective barrier around the tree. This barrier holds water in place, it keeps soil from eroding, and it keeps weeds from growing.

Wood chips are the perfect addition for any tree. You just have to make sure you install them properly. Let me show you two things to avoid. Number 1, don’t pile wood chips on the base of the tree trunk. You need to see a little flair at the base of the trunk. Which we are not able to see here. Number 2, don’t pile the wood chips too high. This whole thing right here, we call this a mulch volcano, and its something that will hurt your tree. We have a whole video on this topic linked below.

So how should you install wood chips? I recommend, start off with a base layer of cardboard. So we all get tons of packages these days, this is an awesome way to reuse waste. The only thing you gotta do is, make sure you take off the tape. Because tape is not biodegradable. Then you lay your cardboard down, cut it up into whatever sizes you want it will rot and it will kill off all the weeds and grass underneath.

Then you take your wood chips, which I have already done the wood chips here, and you will put down 2 to 6 inches is what I would advise. The one thing to watch out for is you want to make sure you keep your wood chips away from the base of the tree. We don’t want to bury this trunk. It’s very important. If there are any weeds in here you can pull them out by hand.

And then the end result is something that looks really nice, and it’s very functional.

Wood chips feed our trees and protect them too. This means we need less fertilizers, less irrigation, and less herbicides. All of that means we save money and we cause less harm to our planet. Now imagine if we could scale that across millions of trees in our urban landscape. This is a big triple win for trees, for our budget, and our planet.