Green Manures

[zazen999]

Phacelia are indeed a fave of bees. I took some photos of it a few weeks ago - it's beautiful!

[gojiberry]

I have bought some green manure seed this year and if I ever get some spare ground intend to plant it. The one thing I had not thought about was that a couple are of the brassica family and I have bad club root which would have compounded my problem.

Ian

[Tuffwood]

Green Manure - Recommendations Please!!

Hi, I looking to learn a bit more about the use of Green Manure, as I want to sow some on sections of my plot. Just wondered if anyone new of or could recommend any good books on the subject. Have looked in general gardening books but they only tend to touch on the subject. Would like to learn about them in more depth, so I can choose the right ones for my plot.

I have a clay soil that needs more vegetable matter adding to it, but would also like to grow something that I could chop and ad to my compost bin. I was originally going to get a load of horse muck and let it rot down over summer and add to the plot in the Autumn, but with all the problems of contamination with aminopyralid I knocked the idea on the head. Now just looking at alternatives and thought Green Manures might be the route to go down.

Any book recommendations or replies as how you have used Green Manure and the results would be appreciated.

Cheers

[zazen999]

I've merged your question with one that is ongoing....

[oldie]

Garden Organic do a booklet and have some factsheets. Joy Larkcom's "Grow Your Own Vegetables" has a chapter and a useful chart, Bob Flowerdew has info in his books but I don't know of any books solely on the subject.

[Topcat36]

I'm about to plant comfrey in front garden i have a piece of dead space so thought i would see what happened . Gardeners world at Birmingham had this drainpipe systen set up so did the organic association , Will be giving that a go . Looked easy enough to do and no space taken up by it so will let you know how it goes.

[Snadger]

I'm about to plant comfrey in front garden i have a piece of dead space so thought i would see what happened . Gardeners world at Birmingham had this drainpipe systen set up so did the organic association , Will be giving that a go . Looked easy enough to do and no space taken up by it so will let you know how it goes.

Comfrey isn't a green manure though in the true sense of the word.

Green manure entails digging the whole plant back into the soil before it flowers where as comfrey leaves are cropped to make manure but the plant is left in situ!

[Tuffwood]

What exactly is the drainpipe system that you are talking about, would like to know more.

Cheers

[Topcat36]

Comfrey isn't a green manure though in the true sense of the word.

Green manure entails digging the whole plant back into the soil before it flowers where as comfrey leaves are cropped to make manure but the plant is left in situ!

Plants green aint it . It's the nearest to green manure i'm going lol. Dont have the space to grow a proper green manure so decided this was the next best thing .

[Topcat36]

What exactly is the drainpipe system that you are talking about, would like to know more.

Cheers

There was a video of it on gardeners world but it has been removed , only allowed to be there a certain amount of time i think. I had a leaflet with it on somewhere from organic association ,cant find it now.

Will look for a link as i'm not good at describing things.

[StephenH]

Dont have the space to grow a proper green manure so decided this was the next best thing .

You don't need extra space if you use green manure the usual way: it goes in to any bed which otherwise would not have anything growing on it, and gets dug in a few weeks before you want to plant a proper crop there. Last year, I used chick-peas as a green manure, because I had a big bag of them, bought from an Asian supermarket, and had only used a few for cooking with, so I chucked the rest on a vacant bed. They all came up, and were later dug in, but, although chickpeqas are legumes, I don't think they fix nitrogen in this country - probably we don't have the right bacteria in our soil. I believe some non-native legumes don't fix nitrogen in this country for that reason. At any rate, I couldn't see any of the nodules that are supposed to form on the roots on a plant I pulled up to examine. However, it doesn't have to fix nitrogen to be doing good as a green manure.