Cover Crops/Green Manure

Tucking Your Yard in for Winter – Part 2 The Garden

October 4, 2011 By Annie

During the Spring and Summer months, we were busy with planting seeds, transplanting seedlings, weeding, irrigating, weeding again, thinning, more weeding and finally harvesting vegetables and fruits.

Our Vegetable and Berry Gardens have given us a fantastic harvest, even though the weather this year was mostly cool and quite rainy. Sure we had two or three weeks of Summer, but gorgeous hot sunny days would be followed quickly by cooling temperatures and even more rain. We were on the other side of the pressure system that brought so much heat and drought to other areas of Canada and the USA.

With our native soil being clay (and I mean heavy clay, clods of clay) we need to continually be amending the Gardens with things like compost, manure, leaves etc. Most Gardeners have a compost pile, but we don’t have one.

Usually these pigs take the place of a compost pile. Where other Gardeners throw all the lawn trimmings, kitchen waste, vegetable plant trimmings, etc onto their Compost, we normally just toss it in for our pigs. They love almost everything we bring them and we will get the goodness returned to us by adding the pig manure to our large manure pile.

We have access to Horse Manure and lots of it – friends here in the Valley have several horses and they are always willing to have us take away manure from their pile.

As the Garden year progresses and vegetables are harvested, sometimes we will plant another vegetable in its place. Peas, for instance, usually don’t carry on setting pods throughout the whole Summer here. So when they are finished, we pull them and plant some more Broccoli or even Radishes in place of the Peas.

At some point, we stop with planting new rows and instead start putting a nice thick layer of manure on the row. If we do this is mid-Summer, we use only well composted manure (it has been sitting in our pile for at least 3 months).

At the end of the Gardening season, once the vegetables have been harvested, we really start loading the horse biscuits onto the Garden. As we get an area done, I grab container of Fall Rye and liberally seed it on top of the Manure. Then, I rake it in, it doesn’t have to be a perfect job but raking it in will ensure that the seed has made contact with the “soil”. A tip: You can buy Fall Rye at your local feed store for much cheaper than you can get it at the Garden Centre. I buy Fall Rye in a 60 pound bag for less than $20.oo

As Autumn progresses and the leaves start to fall from the trees, we rake them up and add them to the Garden as well.

Buckwheat is also used in our Gardens – we love to use Buckwheat as a mid season soil amendment because it grows and matures so quickly. However, because Buckwheat does not tolerate frost well, we cannot use it to its full potential in the Fall.

There is really no possibility of “too much of a good thing” here – the more amendments you can add, the more your soil will improve. Unfortuately, this is not a one time thing (wouldn’t that be great!) but it is a part of the yearly process of trying to improve the Garden soil. Feeding your soil needs to be part of the ongoing process of Gardening. During the growing season, use well composted manure to side dress and top dress your vegetables.

And feeding your soil pays off - amend your soil this year and you will see the improvement next year. Then, repeat next year and reap the benefits the year after that.

If you have Perennial Vegetables and Fruits growing, give these areas a thorough weeding in early Fall. Then, add a nice thick layer of well composted manure all around these plants. They will benefit greatly for the added attention and your Harvest should be better the following year.

If you have Raspberry Canes growing, be sure to get in that patch now and cut this years fruiting wood down to the ground. This will clean up your patch, get rid of any dead wood and you will get many new suckers come Spring. This year’s new suckers will bear net years fruit - a good thing to keep in mind!

If you use Row Covers or netting in the Garden, now is the time to remove them. Clean them first before putting them away. I use clothespin to attach the Row Covers to the perimeter Garden fence and then hose them down really well. Leave them for half hour or so to dry, then I fold them and bring them in the house for the Winter. Taking care of items like these will ensure they will last years longer!

So get started on getting your Gardens ready for their Winter rest. Just as we rest from Gardening during the Winter, our Gardens deserve to rest as well. Enrich the soil by adding compost, leaves and whatever else you can find and then let the snow cover insulate the area. Your Garden will be happier next year because of the work you put in this Fall.

www.countrylivinginacariboovalley.com

Filed Under: Cover Crops/Green Manure, Fall Cleanup Tagged With: buckwheat, Soil

Garden Preparation and Tilling

May 16, 2011 By Annie

Our Main Garden is tilled! Over the last several days, the Gman has manhandled our awful (but free!) rototiller thru all four sections of the Main Garden.

Here’s the Main Vegetable Garden. Can you tell that it is separated into four different garden areas? Two upper, two lower. We use a four year garden rotation (which I will post soon).

In the Fall, we add a good supply of composted horse manure and chicken manure to the whole garden. Then we throw Fall Rye onto the beds and rake it in. Fall Rye is fantastic to use as Green Manure. So is Buckwheat, which I wrote about here.

Come Spring time, we like to let the Fall Rye grow about a foot or so before tilling. You could use a weed eater on it, rake it up and feed it to your livestock. We just till it all under and let it improve our garden soil.

Ideally, we would wait a week or two after tilling to start planting and seeding. This would allow the Fall Rye enough time to start decomposing. We find that we are either too impatient or time is getting away on us, and we plant sooner. That’s all right to do – the majority of the Rye will decompose and if any start to grow again we just pull them out. Rye is Very Easy to pull out of the soil.

Here’s the last section getting tilled. Look how nice and tall that Fall Rye is!

The Gman has been busy this year putting a border of milled boards around the outside of the Garden area. We are hoping that this will help to keep down the grass that keeps coming in from the yard. It’s been a lot of extra work and we hope it will prove beneficial.

The tiller – this is an old front tine tiller we got for free from friends (who were MORE than happy to see it go). Do you know why? It’s because front tine tillers Suck! If you are going to buy one, make sure you get a rear tine tiller. It is much easier on your back.

Now that the Garden is all tilled, it is time to start planting! How is your planting coming along? Have you put anything in the ground yet?

Filed Under: Cover Crops/Green Manure, Grow Your Own Vegetables Tagged With: Grow Vegetables, tilling

Buckwheat

April 21, 2011 By Annie

Buckwheat is a fast growing, soil building grain. It has many different uses – you can harvest the grain, thresh it and then mill it to make some delicious buckwheat pancakes. You can feed it off to your livestock, poultry especially love Buckwheat. You can use it as a green manure in your garden beds. Buckwheat is great for aerating your soil.

Buckwheat has a turnaround time of about 5 weeks from seeding to flowering. That’s pretty quick and with our growing season, we should be able to get 2 successive sowings of Buckwheat in the same area during the warmer months. If you live in a warmer climate than Zone 3 in BC, you should be able to get 3 harvests a year.

I first planted Buckwheat in part of our Berry Bed, which had become overun with weeds. In the early Spring, after pulling as many of the weeds that I could, we had a trailer load of horse manure spread over the bed. Then I put my hens in there on a daily basis to start working through the manure with their powerful feet. Within a week they had it all broken down and it was nice and fluffy.

On June 10 I broadcasted the buckwheat seed and raked it in. It was watered every day as that whole berry bed is on a timer system.

By June 12 it looked like this

By July 16 it looked like this

And by July 31 it looked like this. Beautiful white nodding flowers covered the whole Buckwheat patch. This is when Buckwheat should be harvested.

I just used my large garden shears.

Here is the stubble I left behind which I will dig into the soil. This will help improve the soil. If I was using the Buckwheat solely as a green manure, I would cut it down and dug it all into the garden bed.

I had wanted to feed the Buckwheat off to the laying hen and they loved it.

We hung the Buckwheat in our Greenhouse until it was dried. Every day however, we would grab a bundle and throw it in for the laying hens.

If you plant early Peas and don’t have anything in mind for that space after the Peas are done, consider planting some Buckwheat. Five weeks from start to finish and it smothers all the weeds due to the nice big canopy that the leaves of the Buckwheat provides.

Now we regularly grow Buckwheat any place we can. What began as a garden experiment has turned out to be an ongoing part of our plan to continually be building up our soil.

Filed Under: Cover Crops/Green Manure Tagged With: buckwheat, cover crop, green manure, soil improvement