Kitchen Garden Forum

Hi Allan,
You most decidedly are not making sense and if you lived in this area at certain times of the year you'd wish that the Farmers did sell off all their manure to gardeners. As for killing all the weeds off with chemicals and leaving the soil bare this is absolute nonesense.
If you were to live in this area you would note masses of manure in the corners of the fields rotting away ready for spreading and not for selling off to gardeners.
The strange thing is that farming follows the a very similar pattern through out and I cannot imagine that we live in the same county and view it so differently.

Who said anything about killing off weeds with chemicals. The whole point of my message is that weeds and grasses have a place rather than bare soil particularly in the winter and should be utilised to the full.I suggest you read what I actually said rather than what you or Jenny think I said.
Re selling off manure Bob Flowerdew reckons that Organic farmers are not allowed to sell it off as it would be depriving their land of essentials. This is the right thing to do, how else would their soil be fed. Therefore anybody who takes that manure is depriving the farmland of essential minerals and organic matter, only to be replaced by the detested chemicals.
Allan

Hi Allan,
Your Quote!!
We seem to be hooked on a regime where the weeds are killed off and the soil lays bare all winter with losses of essentials and then bring in material from elsewhere to replace it, with a good chance that the farmer supplying it has used chemicals to grow it having sold off his valuable manure to the gardener.
_______

As Jenny says you are not making sense and I wholeheartedly back her up!
Well Allan that is about as far from the truth as you could ever get. It's total nonsense!!

Allan wrote:The point I am getting round to is that Compo may have something in using the almost inevitable buildup of weeds and grass in the winter to do your green manuring for you. We seem to be hooked on a regime where the weeds are killed off and the soil lays bare all winter with losses of essentials and then bring in material from elsewhere to replace it, with a good chance that the farmer supplying it has used chemicals to grow it having sold off his valuable manure to the gardener. Time was when with mixed farming this didn't happen.
Organic it may be but not good for the environment.
Allan

Who said anything about killing off weeds with chemicals. The whole point of my message is that weeds and grasses have a place rather than bare soil particularly in the winter and should be utilised to the full.I suggest you read what I actually said rather than what you or Jenny think I said.
Re selling off manure Bob Flowerdew reckons that Organic farmers are not allowed to sell it off as it would be depriving their land of essentials. This is the right thing to do, how else would their soil be fed. Therefore anybody who takes that manure is depriving the farmland of essential minerals and organic matter, only to be replaced by the detested chemicals.
Allan

Is it me? Am I going mad? Does Allan not refer to the practice of killing off weeds and selling off manure as organic in the first post then completely contradict himself in the next one?
It's too early in the morning for this kind of thing!

Jenny, if you're mad then so am I. I've read this lot three times now and am losing the will to live.

Glad to hear I'm not the only lunatic.

Hi Jenny and Chantal,
You will no doubt be relieved to know that I have decided to not have any more to do with this thread.
Quite frankly this is just another typical example of Allan ruining a thread by his gross stupidity.
Sincerely, JB.

Well well, I don''see the problem. If there is a problem let's deal with it sensibly and in a grown-up way rather than back to the usual practice of slanging one another.I don't know what Johnboy has about anything I say that makes him hellbent to destroy my reputation but as he has dropped out of this one perhaps now we can talk some sense.
Basically I see no difference in principal betweeen green manuring by letting the weeds grow in the winter as they will do naturally anyway, and stopping the process to cultivate the soil in order to sow your green manure which will include species akin to those already in the ground. Either way it is all plant material that can be worked into the soil once winter is past to the benefit of the soil in organic matter. A fact that has been pointed out to me by a biologist is that you are bound to get the weeds in your green manure crop anyway, so why go to all that trouble to copy nature. What is the difference between clover as green manure and clover as a weed, what are cereal crops like grazing rye but variations of the grasses that we sometimes treat as weeds, my watercress that I grow as a crop is nothing if not a managed natural crop of UK.If you study your weeds you will find that many are seasonal and letting them grow over winter will not automatically mean that you will have trouble in the sunmer. For instance hary bittercress comes up very early and drops its seeds before you can do much about it with a hoe, then dandelions come along and before you know what you have a carper of yellow flowers, cut those off, too late they mature and set seeds off the plant.And so on. Nature will always fight back and we must go along with it. It isn't natural to clear off the land and leave it empty all winter so let things take their own course and put away the big black plastic sheet, go and sharpen your hoe for when it is meaningful to hoe round your crops in the drier summer months.When the warmer drier weather begins that is the time to turn in all that lovely carpet of plant materia ang get ready fir mankind's alternative crops for the summer.
Now tell me that's a load of rubbish!

I sat in on a seminar only yesterday on green manures (of which I know very little)

One thing that was mentioned was the fact that many of our weeds can be treated as a green manure.

On our allotement site we have two farmers who regularly can be contracted to deliver manure.... I have to admit to wondering why this by product is not recycled within the farm environment...maybe its the balance between arable and livestock farming

Weed,

The cost (fuel, machinary, time) to the farmer of spreading it on his land, may not justify (profit wise) his doing so, especially if he can get paid to deliver it to you He may not calculate in the benefit of spreading it on his own land, it's easier to see cash in the hand from selling it compared to the long term benefit to his crops.

Even if he spread it on his own land he would still apply man made fertilisers as well.

years ago if you were a tenat farmer your tenancy agreement would prevent you from selling manure,straw and hay off the farm.
Pete

Allan wrote:Well well, I don''see the problem. If there is a problem let's deal with it sensibly and in a grown-up way rather than back to the usual practice of slanging one another.I don't know what Johnboy has about anything I say that makes him hellbent to destroy my reputation but as he has dropped out of this one perhaps now we can talk some sense.

I wasn't 'slanging' you Allan. I pointed out the blindingly obvious contradiction in what you were saying. Why don't you try being sensible and grown up and admit that were contradicting yourself. We all make mistakes, you know, especially when we've forgotten to take our medication.

Regarding the rest of your latest post, you seem to be saying that there isn't much difference between leaving the land fallow and sowing a green manure. In the sense of preventing nutrients being washed out of the soil there probably isn't but green manures are selected for their ability to a) grow quickly, b) achieve enough bulk to add significant amounts of humus to the soil when they decompose and c) fix nitrogen from the atmosphere. Thus they have the edge over other plants or weeds that may grown in their place.
Killing weeds off for no good reason isn't an Organic practice. I'm sure any organic farmer would rather have weeds than bare soil all winter. The central tenet of the ethos is to preserve the soil's nutrients and structure.
An organic grower might sow a green manure, let it grow then cover the ground in black plastic to kill off the plants and protect the soil over the winter, but this is very little different from nature's practice of winter causing most things to die back. It just has the added advantage of bare soil ready for the spring.
I'm glad to see that you are now not trying to say that selling off manure is recommended by the Soil Association.

Jenny, I will go back and check for a contradiction but at the moment I think you are misreading what I wrote.
As for the wider issue of whether I can use green manures, in theory it seems possible, in practice I have 4 large bags of seeds for green manure of my land, they are now 9 years old and still sealed up and there has never been an opportunity to use them, this is partly because weather conditions did not allow the cultivation of the soil at an aprropriate time, also because time to work on the land is at a premium as the days grow short, also I grow winter crops mainly in the 7 polytunnels but at times there is some outside to harvest If there is any time to spare the summer crops have to be cleared, and the winter crops planted. Don't go away with the idea that I go out there with glyphosate at the outset of winter and slay all living matter just for the hell of it. there is spot treatment to be undertaken but that is about all, I'm sure that nobody would want to grow thistles nettles, dock for example among their crops.
It would be extremely foolish to kill off everything and leave bare soil for the whole winter when the weeds can do a lot of good in the absence of deliberate green manuring. I know traditionsalists often go on about digging your whole plot over in the autumn, I cannot and will not do that, there is far too much ground for hand digging so apart for special jobs hand digging is out.The time to clear the land is in preperation for sowing or planting crops.
Re this one
"I'm glad to see that you are now not trying to say that selling off manure is recommended by the Soil Association."
If you ever read that into what I put you have misread it. Anyway I wasn't referring to the Soil association or its members, just pointing out that some private gardeners who call themselves organic growers are in fact riding on the backs of the manure producers wo in turn have to make up the deficiencies by buying in chemical nutrients, better that the farmers should use the manure themselves. Is that any clearer.

I have had further thoughts. I should be able to do green manuring with my machinery. I shall cut and rake off all vegetation, sow the rye and leave over winter. In spring cut the green manure off and compost it elesewhere, then I can cultivate the soil, roots and all then add a similar amount of compost which saves me having to dig the rye in.
And I still don't know what my offending bit was, if any!
Allan

I don't know if you saw it, but part of the Country File programme came from Highgrove. I know that they have lots of land, but they sow clover and leave it for 3 years before ploughing it in. They recon that by then the nightrogen has set, so they do not need to use fertiliser, not that they would, anyway. Sorry to come in onn this, but I thought it was pertinent to the theme.