A warm welcome to our fresh sweaty members from the cool and fresh far north.If you are ever moved to try and tame a piece of pasture, you'll need to know your weeds. There was a time when persistent perennials like horsetail, bindweed, redshank and couch grass were the enemy. I get none of them here and spend my time fighting frighteningly fast-growing annuals like chickweed, fat hen, corn camomile, deadnettle, thistle and some strange radishy/mustardy thing (might be oil seed rape).
So on my expanse of newly exposed ground, I've been trialling some weed suppressing green manures. The winner, excluding potatoes, is fenugreek ahead of clover and buckwheat while the slow-growing lupins are a dead loss against chickweed. Fenugreek is also the cheapest as you can get massive packets at 80% discount from your local Asian grocer. (According to the gardening establishment, you cannot be sure grocery seed is viable and you should buy from a reputable seed supplier. That's bollocks.) However, I should perhaps have factored into that cost comparison the travel costs to our local Asian grocer in Glasgow.
Sometimes though, you just have to admit that the weeds are better at growing than you are. In such circumstances, the alternative to the horticulturally highbrow solution is to buy yourself loads of expensive windows and mulch them into submission.
After 15 months of blogging, I've finally worked out how to position the picture properly! Cut and paste. So simple.
ReplyDeleteAfternoon DSb,
ReplyDeleteCant beat a bit of 30 degree heat - if only for a day, the sunflowers grew about six inches over the weekend so cant be bad. I did 5 hours yesterday but unfortunately it was on the bike not in the garden, however its all looking great at moment so i am eating my strawberrys and standing back to await my bumper harvest.
ps is your house one storey with high ceilings or two? looks good anyway suprised you havent gone for the old fenugreek roof ?
pps does fenugreek stay green through winter or does it all die back again?
It reached 20deg here on Sunday, just nice I'd say! The house is what they call 1.5 storey. Very common round here. Two bedrooms bathroom and a landing study built into the roof. Fenugreek wont survive. I think it's an annual. It will be cut in a couple of weeks, dug in and planted up with autumn onions probably.
ReplyDeleteDear Mr Baron. Excuse my ignorance here - as a novice mulcher - other than the potential benefit of free nitrate from legumes with nitrogen fixing bacteria in their root nodules (hence presumably the point of the lupins) - what is the point of a green manure? It covers bare ground but you have to cut it back and dig it in - why not do the same with whatever weeds grow? Seems like unnecesary work / cost. Or is it a ploy to stop soil errosion / run off? Or just the thrill of growing something else?
ReplyDeleteCant wait for the reply from the Baron but in the meantime you want to check out "Fenugreek: the genus Trigonella" Volume 11 of Medicinal and aromatic plants Author Georgios A. Petropoulos Publisher Taylor & Francis, 2002. sounds a good read but of course its all "greek hay" to me.
ReplyDeleteThat's a pertinent philosophical question Mr Toms, the sort that's always welcome if scarce in this forum. I think it was Socrates who said he who knows not chickweed knows not hard labour. Any "weed" can treated like a green manure, enhancing organic matter and soil structure as well covering the soil. But you need one of your esteemed colleagues to do a Life Cycle Analysis. Chickweed sets seed in 4-6 weeks, produces 25,000 seeds per plant and crops at least three times a growing season. You would need to dig in on a monthly basis. How's that for unnecessary work? With fenugreek you get 3-4 months and it is not invasive. Chickweed won't of course conveniently confine itself to your green manure bed. To further measure the limits of your ignorance, you should ask yourself whether clover and fenugreek also fix nitrogen. Buckwheat does not but, in common with weeds such as dock, is deep rooted breaking up the subsoil and retrieving nutrients from deep in the soil. Alright, so apart from covering bare soil, fixing nitrogen, recycling nutrients, maintaining soil organic matter, enhancing soil structure, breaking up subsoil, preventing soil erosion, attracting beneficial insects, sanitation, roads, looking good and saving unnecessary work, what have the fenugreeks ever done for us?
ReplyDelete