Mature manure

Six weeks after sowing, the green manure crop was up to my knees and ready to be dug in.  It was my first go at green manure so I'm hoping I got it right and that it makes a difference to the fertility of the soil.  For the seed mix I used some chook feed, a jar of sunflower seed saved in previous years, excess snake bean seed, amaranth seed (pretty sure I'm never going to need to save any again) and lettuce (ditto).

If I were angry at something the process of cutting down the crop would have been rather cathartic.  As I'm in the middle of a long holiday and have successfully avoided the zombie Christmas and Boxing Day shopping, car-park poaching hordes, I instead felt a little regretful about destroying the lush growth. After swinging back and forth with my hoe, chopping and thrashing about, the crop finally lay flat on the bed.  Being the middle of summer it was far too hot to even think about digging it in. That and I've broken all the tines off two garden forks trying to dig the clay in other parts of the garden, so for now spade, hoe or mattock are my only tilling options. 

The compost heap was also ready and had been sitting there waiting to be used, although I was a little disappointed to see how much the pile had deflated from its initial monolithic mound.  I needn't have felt that way because there were three full wheelbarrows to spread out over the bed.  Beautiful, dark, humus rich compost.

Finally, I topped the whole lot off with sugar cane mulch to protect it from the blazing sun. 

And yes, the edge of that bed does need some weeding.

Let me know if a certain mix of seeds works better for you or if you have any tips for my future green manure crops.

Crop rotation

After a delayed start to getting the garden going after winter and an eight week stint living away from home, I've finally made the time to organise the vegie garden into a six bed crop rotation system.  Now that I've divided the beds up and have a written plan I'll have more idea of where I've planted things instead of the usual I think I put that there last year, and mayyybe over there the year before.  

Aside from organisation the other main reason for establishing the crop rotation was to help control pests and diseases.  Last year I had to lie two beds fallow for a few seasons due to nematode problems.  This really put a dent in my garden's productivity and left me with little space to use for vegies.  The rotation should see new insusceptible crops move into a bed that potentially has a build up of a disease or pest such as nematodes.  Another bonus of rotating crops is that the soil doesn't become depleted of a particular set of nutrients that the crop requires.  Heavy feeders can be rotated with light feeders and different nutrients are used by each crop successively.  The addition of a green manure crop in the rotation will ensure I have a bed resting and recharging its nutrients before a heavy feeding crop.  

The one downside I see to crop rotation is that it doesn't leave much room for companion planting, which is something I've been attempting previously.  To get around this I plan to find the companion plants that don't fit neatly into the rotation system and plant them at the end of rows and between plants where I've left too much spacing.

Here's a sketch of the rotation that I've planned based on the outline provided in Annette McFarlane's book Organic Vegetable Gardening:

The rotation beds aren't all the exactly the same size but they measure roughly 3x2m each.  Each large bed has been divided to accommodate two rotations (of 3x2 each) and the long garden bed down the side fence will have dimensions of 12m x1m which has again been divided into two sections 6m long.

The final bed sizes aren't complete as yet and most will need extending to some degree.  The corn and cucurbit bed will be the most work as it's an extension of the bed along the fence.  Although I've had a few compost piles on that spot over the years, I'm thinking of trying a no-dig bed for this one as we have hard clay soil which is very dry at the moment due the lack of rain and will be too hard to dig.

The beds have mostly already been used for a while so I've started planting them out with their respective crops and will extend the beds as needed.