Using Green Manure

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While the young squash plants are getting established, the oat/pea green manure keeps right on growing.
While the young squash plants are getting established, the oat/pea green manure keeps right on growing.
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The oats and peas do not threaten the productivity of the squash until they are at full maturity.
The oats and peas do not threaten the productivity of the squash until they are at full maturity.
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These oats, at full height, are about to be flattened before the squash sprawls.
These oats, at full height, are about to be flattened before the squash sprawls.
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Squash vines overspread the mulch that once grew here, now totally weed-free.
Squash vines overspread the mulch that once grew here, now totally weed-free.
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Post-harvest view: Except for the quack grass invading from the edges, this mulch could be left in place for next year's crop, perhaps cabbage.
Post-harvest view: Except for the quack grass invading from the edges, this mulch could be left in place for next year's crop, perhaps cabbage.
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"Will Bonsall’s Essential Guide to Radical, Self-Reliant Gardening," offers innovative techniques for growing vegetables, grains, and perennial food crops by drawing upon the fertility of on-farm plant materials such as compost, green manures, perennial grasses, and forest products like leaves and ramial wood chips.

With more than forty years of experience redefining gardening’s boundaries, author Will Bonsall shows how readers can eliminate the use of off-farm inputs like fertilizers, minerals, and animal manures by practicing a purely veganic, or plant-based, agriculture-not for strictly moral or philosophical reasons, but because it is more ecologically efficient and makes good business sense.

In Will Bonsall’s Essential Guide to Radical, Self-Reliant Gardening, (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2015) he offers readers in-depth information on growing, harvesting, and processing an incredibly diverse variety of food crops. The following excerpt is from Chapter 2, “Green Manures.”

You can purchase this book from the MOTHER EARTH NEWS STORE: Will Bonsall’s Essential Guide to Radical Self-Reliant Gardening

Creative Combinations

I want to share an exciting idea with you, as it combines features of both green manuring and companion cropping; moreover it builds up the soil at the same time that a food crop is growing there. Start by considering squash or pumpkin: a sprawling heavy feeder that cannot be planted much before Memorial Day in my area. When the soil is warm and frost is but a memory. Between snow-go and squash planting time, we have seven or eight weeks during which the ground is bare and doing little or nothing, except maybe sprouting some early weeds. Why not put it to better use? say I. Here’s how I do it. As soon as I see some snow-rid ground, albeit half-frozen mud, I seed it down thickly to oats and field peas (you know, the sort you use as pea soup, only not split). Then I rake or tread the seed in as conditions allow. Seed depth is not important; I merely need to hide the seed from newly arriving birds until it sprouts. As April slides into May the growth rate accelerates to form an ankle-deep carpet. A week or so before planting squash, I need to chop in the vegetation, but only where the actual squash will be planted; that’s because too much decaying matter can actually cause a nitrogen deficiency, as the decay process pulls nitrogen from the soil. Once the decomposition has commenced apace, it will of course release lots of usable nitrogen for the squash plants.

  • Published on Jan 28, 2016
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