50 pounds of rye
50 pounds of rye seed in the ground! (Actually, I gave Kayla about four pounds, so I guess I can only take credit for 46.)
Where did I fit all that rye? Since my oats went in early this year, most started to bloom in late September, so I scattered rye seed amid the oats and had Mark weed-eat the latter down.
(You can see the result, several weeks later, in the photo at the top
of this post.) Meanwhile, I planted rye in the beds where crops
like tomatoes and squash died after our first frost, and in empty soil left after digging the fall carrots.
Of course, I still had rye seeds left after all that, so I started moving dirt around. I posted here about my gully terraforming experiment, and you'll need to visit my chicken blog
this week if you want to read about the swales Kayla and I dug in the
newest pasture to create tree alleys (and about the cute box turtle we
found in the process). All of that digging created bare soil, so I
topped it off with rye and finally hit the bottom of the bag!
Of all our cover crops, I feel like rye handles wet soil the best and
produces the most biomass, so planting a full bag of rye feels a bit
like investing in an internet startup company --- a little bit of effort
for (hopefully) a lot of return. I'll report in the spring about
whether the rye I planted latest (November 1) covered the ground
adequately, and about whether I have any problem mow-killing it before our summer crops go in.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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