Howdy y'all. Today I will be discussing the cover cropping of the West Side of my house. This area is a sun blasted mess. It's degraded and like most of the soil around here it's pretty damn dead . . . and hard . . . and ugly . . . and I can't mention 'DEAD' enough times so it's DEAD multiplied by Infinity! There, now I've said it.
This area is divided by my back fence into two sections: The alley and the backyard proper. Since I cover-cropped the alley first I'll talk about it first. This picture is looking South down the alley.
One thing to note here is that I raised this whole strip of land up about 4-6 inches with soil removed from my leveling work in the backyard a couple of years ago. So I planted buckwheat, oilseed radish and fall cover crop mix (winter rye, field peas, ryegrass, crimson clover and hairy vetch) all from Johnny's Seeds. Of course that was only after I
- Wet down the entire area.
- Let it sit for a day.
- Run over the entire area with a Hound Dog aerator to break up the soil.
- Run over the entire area with a Garden Weasel to un-crust the broken soil.
- Water the crap out of it.
The other section of the "Devil strip" is behind me in the above picture and I got to it a couple of weeks later. Here is a picture of that:
On to the backyard proper!
So this is on my side of the fence and is the area I used to grow tomatoes and peppers on. Now it's freakin' DEAD! So did the same thing I did elsewhere:
- Wet down the entire area.
- Let it sit for a day.
- Run over the entire area with a Hound Dog aerator to break up the soil.
- Run over the entire area with a Garden Weasel to un-crust the broken soil.
- Broadcast the seed.
- Run back over the same area with the Garden Weasel again to get the seed in good contact with the soil.
- Water the crap out of the area.
- Wait.
except for one small adjustment due to the soil being damn near unworkable even after soaking it. I had to weight down the Garden Weasel with a cinder block to get it to really bite into the soil.
It worked damn well too . . . until one of the tines snapped off. I don't blame it either as that block weighs 21 lbs. I went and got another Garden Weasel and then bought 4 - 2.5 lb barbell weights so I can adjust the weighting. I'll make a post about that project later. Anywho, this is how the tearing up of the soil looked after it was done:
This was halfway done. The right side of the picture is done and the left side is waiting to get that way. The modified GW tool is right at the transition line. Here is a close up of what the soil treatment did:
The left side is done and the right side is not. I can stick my finger 1/2 down into the prepped soil and all I had to do was drag the GW around and let gravity to all the work . . . well, most of the work. I will post pictures here of the growth when it gets good and thick.
Adios y'all!
UPDATE: just some more pictures here of the growth.
Tons of growth here but I think I've run into my first mistake: seeding density is way too high! And another mistake may be the use of radish and buckwheat with the fall mix: I can't see much hairy vetch and I have no Crimson clover. Cow pea is doing really good ant the rye is there but no clover at all.