GROW YOUR OWN NITROGEN
(Page 2 of 4)
March/April 1981
By Edward Null
Another legume that can be used to provide same-season nitrogen is the fava bean. (Better yet, that prolific plant is also supposed to help destroy tomato wilt in the soil!)
RELATED CONTENT
Nature Defeats GM0s
December/January 2001
Researchers reporting in the journal Science have ...
Collect deer droppings to use in your garden as organic fertilizer. From the August/September 2009 ...
Residue from milk and juice containers, combined with a little water, makes great house plant ferti...
Learn how to make homemade nutrients (fertilizer) for the plants in your hydroponic garden....
For a productive garden, the first thing you need is healthy soil. But keeping garden soil fertile ...
Any of the methods mentioned above will do a good job of improving short-term fertility in any garden plan. However, there are some other legumes that offer the potential of producing long-term supplies of nitrogen.
THE LONG RUN
The most exciting addition to any garden can be clover. Yes, the same beautiful, verdant carpets that cover many a farmer's fields do have a place in your vegetable patch, whether it be large or small.
Red clover (I mean primarily the types known as "medium" or "double-cut" red) is a familiar hay crop in the North, East, and Midwest. Often used in rotation with wheat and corn, the hard-working plants can enrich the earth with substantial amounts of pure nitrogen. In fact, planting an acre in clover can equal the benefits of adding as much as 1,300 pounds of blood meal to the same area!
One way to use red clover is to insert it into your garden's rotation plan. Simply divide the plot into about five sections, and grow fertilizer on one section each year. Sow the seed — early in the spring — on a firm, well-prepared seedbed at a rate of four heaping tablespoons per hundred square feet. Rake the soil very lightly to cover the little jewels. . . and wait.
(On farms, red clover is often sown with a nurse crop, which is a planting of small grain such as oats or wheat that "nurses" the tiny seedlings — by inhibiting weed growth and holding in moisture — until they can fend for themselves. If you already use rye or wheat as a food or cover crop, it makes sense to sow your clover right into the standing grain. The nurse will give you a return from a plot that would otherwise lie "idle" that year. But a nurse crop is not essential in a home garden, and the nitrogen fixed by your clover should, itself, be considered a rewarding yield.)
