Bernadette in what was the garlic field, and now filled with a multi-species cover crop
This week's offering: New this week are the purple potatoes, spaghetti squash, poblano peppers (a mildly hot pepper), and Chinese cabbage.
Coming next week: carrots, scallions, assorted greens, leeks, daikon radishes?, sweet potatoes, butternut squash, peppers, small potatoes, arugula, onions, green cabbage?
Growing our own fertility: When not growing a 'cash' crop, we seed down a field where possible with a 'cover' crop, designed to be turned under instead of harvested. In this picture the cover crop includes: sunflowers, sun hemp, hairy vetch, oats, sorghum sudan grass, crimson clover, daikon radish, buckwheat, phacelia, and field peas! Quite a mix! If we had cattle, we would let them graze the field, and they would add their own manure to the field. In our case, without cattle, we rely on the millions of living organisms in the soil (like earthworms, bacteria, fungi, etc.) to chew on and digest the remains of the cover crop, both the tops (which will die with the first hard frost, and the roots in the soil. In this field, the garlic was harvested in July, so we had plenty of time to get a cover crop established before the end of the season (coming soon!).
