Green manure
19 November 2009 | 4 Comments
A clever gardeny thing to do is to sow a crop of something such as mustard or rye, so that lovely things such as nitrogen and, oh, I don’t know, tiny tiny unicorns maybe, are held in the soil ready to help out during your next growing season. You sow the seeds, the plants grow and you dig ‘em back into the ground before they have a chance to seed down and become your new least favourite weed.
After a lot reading and umming and aahing I ordered a bag of forage rye seed from www.sowgreenmanure.co.uk as I wanted to avoid sowing a legume that would mean I couldn’t grow any legumes of my own the next year.
The seeds turned up in a gorgeous little paper bag with the instructions printed on the outside. “Excellent on clay” and “broadcast seed” are both things I like to read with regard to my garden. “Rake soil to a fine tilth” on the other hand is not and so, as it’s winter, wet, cold and raking is hard work, I raked to a rough, bobbly tilth. Good enough.
I threw the seed down on the two thirds of my patch that is clear – two rows of carrots still remain -, surveyed it a while and then threw out barely another handful of seed, as if that was going to make all the difference.
Now we wait. It’s going to rain tomorrow. So I guess we’re just waiting for the seed to rot. But maybe, just maybe, we’re waiting for the rye grass to grow and at the end of February I’ll cut it down, cover it in black plastic for a few weeks to give it something to think about and then bitch and swear about what a stupid idea this was as I try to dig it in.
We’ll see.
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20th November 2009 @ 5:43 pm
I hope you grow tiny tiny unicorns. If anyone can, it’s you.
20th November 2009 @ 6:01 pm
Is it going to make me look like an ignorant hick to say I don’t have any idea what the eff a ’tilth’ is? Or does it just make me look like I don’t garden? (Cause I don’t, and the plants are mightily thankful.)
20th November 2009 @ 7:35 pm
It’s the condition of prepared soil – so in this case they were saying to rake it until it was nice and fine and crumbly. But I had sticky wet clay to play with, so I just raked it until the big lumps were medium lumps.
23rd November 2009 @ 12:07 am
I love a good tilth!