Regular readers of my blog will know that I love money and time saving, gardening concepts. Sowing green manure is a double whammy! It’s a cheap (price of a packet of seeds) garden manure, enriches your soil which results in strong healthy plants. Winter weeds are suppressed in your vegetable or cut flowers beds, it just needs digging in a couple of weeks before you’re ready to sow seed or plant up come spring.
This is the first time I’ve grown green manure so it’s a bit of an experiment. First of all I cleared the vegetable beds, quickly hoed them and removed any weeds. Then I thinly sprinkled the seed over the beds.
The first vegetable bed prepared for the green manure seed
I have selected two green manure seed mixes; mustard from Nuts n’cones, which is a quick grower, I noticed this morning that it’s germinated in the four days since sowing. The other is a winter seed mix of rye and vetch, from Suttons seeds.
Come spring when you’re ready to dig in the manure, get the strimmer out and chop the green manure to a fine mulch, this will help it rot down in the soil quickly.
I am a little late sowing the manure, they say September/October is the optimum time for winter green manure, but, my vegetable and cutting garden beds have been in full swing up until now so fingers crossed it will have sufficient autumnal time to develop. I will report back on the results come spring.