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RE: The Amazing Buckwheat "Green Manure" for Home Gardens!
What I'd like to know is exactly how it breaks down. I saw frost kills it but you said it had a dense mat 10" down. How do you plant into that w/o tilling?
That video was pretty good, until they got to the part about using herbicides to kill the cover crop. Round-up?? That's what many use for drydown...
yeah, I just ignore all of the pesticide/herbicide/chemicals bits. IO meant to mention that and forgot. :(
It seems like all the farming websites and videos still toss that in there with a side bit on organic practices. They'll learn eventually I think...hope.
It breaks down really well for us. It was not a thick mat at all by the time spring arrived. In the raised bed I just chop it up with shears. It's fantastic. I'll share photos of the whole process this year so you can better see the full picture of what we do. We just hand spread the seed today because we are expecting lots of rain this week. Hopefully a good start to the season.
I've seen examples of organic growers planting in the living mulch - it's really interesting and I'd like to try that as well but probably not this year ...already started too many new projects and I still have questions about how to make that work! :)
I did try the broadcast method into living mulch and none germinated. Lotta money down the tubes. Not sure what we did wrong...
That's why I'm curious about how you do it. If I use cover crops, it goes on bare, or almost bare ground.
it's so hard to speculate on what happened so I won't try because I know how frustrating that can be! :)
Maybe try it in a very small area as a test bed?
This has some interesting info as well: http://www.hort.cornell.edu/bjorkman/lab/covercrops/pdf/bwbrochure.pdf
Maybe it's just me, but I have a really hard time reading something that starts off listing herbicide use....
Reality is a lot of farmers use chemicals so this is not surprising that they need to provide warning that some chemicals will prevent buckwheat from growing.
I've always read a lot of material from a wide range of sources to put together my plans. Its easy enough to take and leave the parts that are irrelevant to our practices while still gleaning some good insights from solid research.