A while ago I bought 10lbs of Hairy Vetch seed, which is a type of legume, a bean plant. 10 lbs would be a little more than needed for my yard. The vetch, being a bean, can take nitrogen out of the soil, and turn it into a usable chemical form, thus over time adding nitrogen as a nutrient into the soil. That is why I purchased the vetch, I am hoping that it will grow over the yard, both on the lawn and in the gardening plots, and the bare batches, and supply nitrogen to the yard for the other plants to feed off of. This way I won't have to buy fertilizer every season. I don't want to buy fertilizer each season for three reasons. First, it is a cost (of course, if I end up re-seeding the vetch then thats a cost also). Second, a lot of the fertilizer added to lawns and gardens just gets washed away into the groundwater, and can screw with the nutrient balance of the island. Thirdly, I think that by adding fertilizer all the time, what you end up doing is promoting top grown of the lawn and plants, but not root growth; perhaps to the detriment of root growth. The yard around my house isn't as well drained as it should be, and I think that by doing this I will have deeper roots and better drainage. Finally fourthly, there's something attractive about managing the yard this way.
All of that sounds well enough, but, there is some chance, I think, that the vetch will grow out of control. Vetch is an annual, meaning it grows, flowers, and dies each year. So if it gets to be out of control, I will have to mow the lawn pretty close to the ground as the first flowers are appearing, to prevent seeds from forming and fertilizing.
Mowing will be important anyway. If I don't want to destroy the vetch, I'll have to mow before the flowers appear, and hold off when they are present, and then mow once the seeds have dropped, I believe. I'm planning to mow the vetch and grass into mulch and leave it in place. If there is a lot of it, too much to leave in place, then I will bag it and probably compost it. There is a large section of the yard that doesn't have good soil at all, its really just old exposed tree roots, gravel, and dandelions. So even if the vetch does start getting out of control, I think that I can make some good dirt for that area. It would be too much to buy dirt for it, and we might just extend out our deck to cover it all anyway.
Useful online Hairy Vetch Referances:
http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/AFCM/vetch.html
http://www.sarep.ucdavis.edu/cgi-bin/CCrop.exe/show_crop_21
http://www.rodaleinstitute.org/20090206/nf1
I've also been finding the Cornell Cooperative Extension very informative for yard duties.
http://www.cce.cornell.edu/
http://www.nysaes.cornell.edu/hort/faculty/bjorkman/covercrops/pdfs/hairyvetch.pdf
No comments:
Post a Comment