Grow Green Manure
Finding room in the garden, or time in your rotations, for cover crops can be difficult — don’t we know it! On our farm, The Sow’s Ear, we grow most of the food — and feed — for all of our people and animals. To avoid erosion and loss of soil nutrients, we try to minimize the land kept in cultivation, and sometimes devote a full crop to smothering weeds, or building fertility and soil organic content. Excellent as those goals are, they can seem like obstacles to productivity. So we’re always glad to find new ways of leveraging our covers and green manures to perform as many functions as possible. Who wouldn’t like a green manure that also acts as a nitrogen sponge, mulch, and chicken food and bedding? Or what about a weed-suppressing crop that provides winter food for pigs? Or a nitrogenfixer that smothers weeds, and then doubles as food?
Benefits of Buckwheat
Take buckwheat. This fast-growing, broad-leaved, warm-weather crop is a quick way to crowd out weeds, and its brittle stems are easy to till into the soil for added organic matter. The normal procedure with buckwheat is to till it when it starts to flower but hasn’t yet set seed.
Buckwheat flowers over a long period of time: Seeds begin to mature from the early flowers while the plant is only
