GREEN MANURE CROPS
This method can transform soil fertility in a short time, including compost it, four old standbys, specialty and double-duty crops.
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After only two years of green manure cropping, Ecology Action's gardens were transformed from barren ground to the verdancy shown here.
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Garden magic from John Jeavons and Bill Bruneau.
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Green manuring — growing crops especially for their
organic matter and ability to improve the soil — can
dramatically build up poor and exhausted soils and maintain
the fertility of better ones. Let me give you two examples
from our own experience. When we first started Ecology
Action of the Mid-peninsula in 1974, we were minifarming a
site in the Stanford Industrial Park that had no
topsoil or subsoil: It had all been scraped off in
anticipation of future construction. Eight years later, we
had improved the soil to a depth of over two feet!
Then in 1982, we moved to our current steep hillside
location in northern California. Its thin rocky topsoil had
few available nutrients. Indeed, some feel the site
approximated marginal Third World growing conditions. But
now, four years later, it is becoming a beautiful and
productive garden/minifarm.
In both cases, we were able to dramatically improve the
soil through deep cultivation, intensive plant spacing, the
addition of composts and aged manures . . . and a
continuous program of growing green manure crops.
Green manuring will help your soil in many ways. Perhaps
most important, it boosts your plot's organic matter (O.M.)
level. And a high O.M. level (2.5 to 4%)
— keeps nutrients from leaching down beyond reach of
crops,
— provides food for microbial soil life,
— helps legumes fix nitrogen in their root nodules,
— and helps the soil produce good structure and
maintain the air-pore spaces essential to good crop health.
In addition, your green manure crops will till the
soil for you. Alfalfa, for instance, can send down
roots as deep as 60 feet, pulling up nutrients for next
year's crops. A single rye plant grown in good soil can
produce an average of three miles of roots per day —
387 miles of roots and 6,603 miles of root hairs in a
season! Such root and roothair growth will
fiberize the soil, helping loose soils bind
together and clay ones open up.
Green manures also provide a living mulch that
will protect soil from erosion and other weathering
effects. Indeed, right now, during the late summer and
early fall, is an excellent time to put in a green manure
crop. The plants will protect your garden from winter
damage and will produce organic matter during the
off-season, when much of. your plot would otherwise lie
fallow. Then next spring, your soil will have good tilth
instead of being hard and compacted.
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