Sowing more green manure

I dug over the pea and bean bed.  It had become very overgrown with weeds and the second sowing of peas was not a success.  I had harvested the Bortolloti and the Cannellini beans but they are not drying out very well.

The climbing French beans that were left on the plants were taken off and dried for next years seed.  I don't know if they will be any good but if they aren't then I can always buy some more.

All the bean plants were dug into the soil with the weeds and peas.  I took down the chicken wire pea supports, rolled them up and put then into one of the empty compost bins.  The canes were tied into bundles and put in the empty compost bin as well.

I have not dug over the area occupied by the squashes because they are still producing.  They did get mildew over their leaves and these have died but they have produced new leaves and these look healthy.  There are several small squashes still on the plants.

I have put grazing rye green manure over this bed.  I have sown the seed in drills about 2ft apart.  I might need to put something in between but I will see just how much green manure will be used up on the other beds.  Grazing rye forms a really good canopy even when this far apart.  I like to keep the green manure free of weeds so I wanted room to hoe until they had grown big enough to suppress weed germination.

After the pea and bean plants decompose, they will release this newly fixed nitrogen into the soil.  The grazing rye should take up the nitrogen fixed by the bacteria on the pea and bean roots and locked into the roots and shoots.  The grazing rye will also prevent the nitrogen being washed away by winter rain because of its thick canopy and mass of fibrous roots.

I put a fleece over the bay tree to prevent it being damaged by the frosts.  The fleece can stay on the bay until next spring.

I planted four rows of leeks and put three of them under some enviromesh.  I am still worried about the Phytomyza gymnostoma because it has attacked the leeks I put in during the summer.  The summer leeks were fine until the middle of September around my birthday - September 16th. and then they started looking very fly eaten.  They are reported to be laying eggs around October to the end of November but this year they were much earlier than this.

I gave the leeks some pigeon manure - very sparingly and watered them in with comfrey.  I debated whether to use some of the charcoal and mychorrhiza but decided not to.  I put charcoal together with mychorrhiza into this bed for the garlic earlier in the year.

I have washed some of the 3 inch pots that the leeks were in but by no means all of them.  It cleaned my hands so I decided to go to the shop for some milk and flapjacks.  I had a relax sitting in my chair and having a cup of tea.

While I was waiting for the tea to boil, I took the garlic apart and divided them into individual cloves.  After tea, I put them into the new onion bed next to the radish. I didn't use any charcoal or comfrey liquid because this bed had a lot of organic matter added when I triple dug it.

 I doubt if the radish will come to anything but I put it in as a green manure.

The new broad beans, rocket and American land cress are doing very well probably due to the very warm weather we had at the end of September.  I put the tulips in between the broad beans and will have to be careful hoeing along these lines because they will not show until next spring.

I cut the whole row of sweet cicely and put it in the big green comfrey bin.  It will rot down and give me a good liquid fertilizer.  If it wasn't done now then I would have lost all of this foliage when the frost came.  I am going to cut down the nettles too and add them to the comfrey bins.  Although I cut the comfrey hard back last week, it has grown back really quickly.  I doubt whether I will cut it again before the frosts though.

The next big job is to take down all the sweet pea canes.  I have done the runner bean canes already but they had fallen down in the wind.  I am not taking the beans or peas out of the ground.  They will be dug into the soil where they grew.  I am bundling the canes into tens and then tying them up to store.  I will use the tares as a green manure on this bed.  I know that it is a legume following a legume but I don't think that will cause any problems.  Apart from that it is the only green manure I have at the moment and I am not going to waste it.  I will need a little more for where the pumpkin, tomatoes and celeriac are but after that I will be struggling to find anywhere else that needs it.  I am going to cover the new potato bed with horse manure when I eventually get round to getting some.

I have harvested all the sweet corn now and taken out the plants to put onto the compost heap.  I got a fair few but they are very small.

It is funny to think that a few years ago I was really delighted that I could grow sweet corn at all let alone have a good crop.  Now I am disappointed if  they don't do well.

I picked yet more tomatoes.  They have done particularly well this year.

Green manures

Grazing rye green manure 

I have tried many different green manures. Several of the allotmenteers around my allotment first decided to go for grazing rye. It was expensive but it did the job very well. If I have the choice I will use grazing rye more than anything else. It produces a lot of leaves and a great mass of fibrous roots. The one drawback, if you can call it that, is that it does not fix nitrogen from the air (or I should say doesn't have Rhizobium bacteria). 

The legumes have these bacteria and fix nitrogen from the air producing nutrients, if the whole plant is dug in. 30% of the fixed nitrogen is in the root and 60% is in the stem and leaves. Where the other 10% goes I don't know. So in the legumes, I have used tares, lupins and am now using field beans.

I use ordinary lawn grass seed as a green manure and, although this is not quite as good as grazing rye, it is a fairly good second choice.

Caliente Mustard Green Manure

I have also used ordinary mustard and Caliente mustard. Caliente mustard is supposed to have pesticidal properties if you cut it up when digging it in. Mustard is great for covering a large area with weed suppressing green manure. It can be grown in the summer after things like potatoes and onions have been cropped. I have not tried any other of the normal green manures but sometimes, if I have any seed left over, I will just sow this to be dug in in the spring.

 The season for planting green manures is well past, although I was thinking of putting broad beans in the brassicae bed and hoping that they would produce something before I put the cabbage out in May/June time but I doubt very much if that would be successful.

Green manures will go in on any ground where crops have been harvested.

Is rotation of crops necessary?

I have been religiously rotating crops for about 30 years now without really questioning it properly.

There is some indication that crop rotation does in fact improve your harvest of most vegetable crops, particularly if it includes a legume element.  
If you are rotating with a green manure as one of the crops it will improve fertility by adding nitrogen and making other nutrients available for plants to use. I like to use a mixture of grazing rye grass and tares. Rotating using peas and beans as one of the crops also helps to add nitrogen to the soil if these plants are dug into the soil after the peas and beans have been cropped. 

I use a six year rotation with 6 fairly similarly sized beds.  This might seem to be a little excessive because most examples in books suggest a three year rotation.  I have one year when very few vegetables are grown on one of the beds and this bed is devoted mainly to sweet peas.  I get a good crop of cut flowers during the year and then can dig in the plants as green manure in the autumn.  

Crop rotation helps to improve and maintain the friability of the soil and in improving and maintaining the organic content of the soil. When  potatoes are grown some people put mulches of comfrey leaves or manure along the rows. When the potatoes are lifted this gets incorporated into the soil improving it for the following crop. 
 
Rotation improves the use of nutrients through the soil by varying the length of plant crop roots. Some plants like beetroot have relatively shallow roots while parsnips can have very long roots. They can get nutrients from different depths of soil. 
 
It enables you to use manure and fertilizers more efficiently, targeting crops that need high nutrients. If these are followed by crops that need fewer nutrients then no manure needs to be added the following year. Lime need only be added to the brassicae bed (It is a source of calcium for plants but also prevents club root Plasmodiophora brassicae ) as they rotate around the allotment. You do not have to add excessive amounts of lime to the soil because calcium stays in the soil for a relatively long time as does phosphorus. 
 
It does help you control some weeds, insect pests and plant diseases. I think that I have reduced the level of club root on the allotment significantly by a very strict rotation especially for brassicas. 
 
It is said to improve the diversity of micro organisms in soil. A monoculture of the same plant growing in the same area of soil must reduce the number of different organisms that can live in that area. I think that it maintains the health of the soil and this is what all the plant crops depend on. So I would suggest that rotation is the best method of managing the allotment. 

Some things that I would not rotate are:
All the soft fruit - blackcurrent, blackberry,raspberry, gooseberry, etc.  However, I would not plant them in the same place if I were replacing them because they could be affected by soil sickness.  Raspberries Rubus idaeus is particularly prone to soil sickness.  In order to avoid this I  completely change the soil but if you cannot do this it would probably be best to replant in a different area of the garden completely.
Any of the perennial herbs like thyme,mint,bay and sage.
Rhubarb

2012's  rotation is:
Bed 1: Roots (carrots, parsnips, scorzonera, salsify, Hamburg parsley and beetroot)  and leaves (salad burnet Sanguisorba minor, chamomile, spinach, lettuce, chard, celery, parcel, celeriac and maybe some of the other herbs.)

Bed 2: Peas (Douce Provence, Early Onward and Hurst Green Shaft); climbing French Bean (Trail of Tears and Cobra); broad bean (my own saved seeds); asparagus beans; mange tout  and the strawberries.  I may have some dwarf French beans as well but they did not do very well last year so I may leave them out.  

Bed 3 Brassicas (purple sprouting broccoli,   Brussel sprout, red cabbage, cabbage, cauliflower, calabrese, kohlrabi, swede, turnip, American land cress and rocket.)

Bed 4 Sweet peas, runner beans and this year some climbing French beans.

Bed 5 Alliums (onions, garlic, shallots, leeks) and cucurbits? (pumpkin, courgettes, squashes, cucumbers, maize, tomatoes).

Bed 6 Potatoes.

This is my final crop rotation plan.  I doubt if I will change it again because everything fits in well.

I have kept the runner beans in the same place for many years but now it is part of the rotation. I have some tree posts that are fairly easy to move and use these to make a climbing frame for the beans.

If your ground has been left fallow for some time, I think that it would be fine not to rotate for a couple of years. However,  why wait until you have disease and nutrient depletion before you begin to rotate?


There are many ways to rotate and this is just one of them:
http://www.thegardenersalmanac.co.uk/Data/Crop%20rotation/Crop%20rotation.htm
This is the way that I do it.  

Green manures

I have been using grazing rye as a green manure for several years now. My soil is mostly a sandy clay and obviously fairly easy to work once it has been knocked into shape. Grazing rye comes up in thick soft leaves that easily shade out most weeds.  It also has a very thick mat of fibrous roots.  The advantage of this grass is that it rots down very quickly in the soil.  

Green manures, whichever you use, are useful for a number of different reasons.

• They cover the ground in winter so that nutrients are not washed away by the winter rains.
• They shade out weeds that might germinate during the autumn and winter.
• They add organic matter to the soil which eventually rots down to form humus.  Humus is a black oily sticky liquid that forms films around soil particles. 
• They help to recycle nutrients in the soil.  
• If you use one of the plants from the legume family like tares, clover, field bean or lupin then they will add nitrogen to the soil when you dig them in.  Remember that root nodules formed by the rhizobium bacteria help to fix nitrogen and pass it to green plants.  The nitrogen is therefore in the leaves,  stems and roots of the plants.  If you do not dig in all the plant then you will loose some of the fixed nitrogen unless you put the tops onto the compost heap.  If you burn the tops then you are loosing the nitrogen to the air. 

I dig it into the soil in the spring before planting or sowing seeds.  

You don't need to worry about introducing a weed onto your allotment because the only way that rye grass spreads is by seed and whether you dig in or strim you will not get seeds.  It does not have stolons like couch grass.   I sometimes mix it with tares or clover when I am sowing, although grazing rye does tend to shade these plants out as well.