| We've just brought a 4 acre block on the coast & it's totally ungardened right now. The back 3 or so acres is bush & pines. The front acre is grass, pine needles in vast quantities, docks, clovers, thistles etc. I'm gonna rotary hoe a few blocks of in around about next month so I can plant my fruit trees. I plan to use subterranean clover underneath them for now. It apparently grows well in colder areas, does a good ground cover to stop weeds germinating over winter & then dies down in spring. It's an annual so it self seeds for next year. Well this is the plan anyways but we shall see what actually happens in practice over the winter. I am gonna do the obvious stuff like plant lots of comfrey, tansy & yarrow too but they are more permanent than green crops I s'pose. For the winter veges I'm doing no dig beds so I'm not sure as I will be green cropping right now. I did order some green manure seed mix off koanga to try which I think is buckwheat, phacelia, mustard ??? can't remember. It's being a bit slow getting here. My good old standby is broad beans which we eat & use the stalks as carbon material for the compost heap so I will be planting some of them as well. My only gripe with them is they take up a lot of space & can take a while to have mature beans so you sometimes end up keeping them longer than you would a usual green manure crop & missing your window of opportunity to plant other veges. Either that or lose your broad bean crop. |
