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| Weeds Gardens Green Manure and Soil Building July 18, 2008 12:45:15 I posted a piece yesterday about an area of my garden that had volunteer collards growing on it along with a lot of weeds. There was giant foxtail, smartweeds, lambsquarters, buttonweeds, and other grass, all mixed in the collards. The collards were too big to eat and a bunch of them had gone to seed. I gathered up a bunch of the dry seed heads and then went to work on it all yesterday evening after it had cooled off some. I intentionally plant buckwheat and let it grow up to be turned into the soil as a green manure crop. When I have a big growth of weeds I will do the same thing. Here is a pic of what the area with the collards and weeds looks like after I worked all that stuff into the soil. 
Before working all that green material in I went through and picked off all the foxtail seed heads. I also cut off some redroot pigweed that was starting to form seed heads. I collected them all in a bucket and will just burn them. 
I like working all that green material into the soil. It helps feed the bacterial action and also returns the nutrients to the soil to be reused by other plants. It is necessary to work something like this into the soil before any weeds go to seed though. That is why I went around an picked all the seed heads I could find. Comment on this article | |