How To Grow Vegetables On A Compost Heap

2024 Author: Sebastian Paterson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:47

Crop rotation on the compost heap

In the coming summer, lay a compost heap in the place of any vegetable patch or right on the virgin soil, especially if you have clay soil. It should be in the sun. The width of the pile is 80-100 cm, the height should also be 80-100 cm by the end of summer, but the length should be what the future bed should be or what there is enough material for the bookmark. It can be covered with decorative plantings so that it does not irritate the eyes.

You will start filling it from one edge, gradually increasing in length and height. The next year, you will start laying a new compost pile nearby, and in the first, plant pumpkins or zucchini. You can also use it for cucumbers. To prevent heat and moisture from leaving the heap, it should be covered with an old film - black or white, but spunbond or lutrasil are not suitable for this purpose. This must be done even before the snow has melted, otherwise the pile may dry out by the time of sowing.

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Before sowing, remove the film, make holes in a heap with a volume of about a three-liter jar. Then fill them halfway with fertile soil, add a teaspoon of AVA powder fraction to each, water well and sow the seeds. Then cover the pile with plastic again.

As soon as the seedlings reach the film, cut holes in it and release them outside. If there is a danger of frost, then the plants should be covered with lutrasil on top. This is where your work ends. No more watering or feeding the plants is required.

Under the foil and strong foliage of pumpkin crops, the compost will mature in one season. At the end of the summer, cut off the above-ground part that has matured and transfer it to the new compost heap you piled over the summer. Leave the rest of the root system in place. The worms will eat them. Next year, after making additional holes in the film and adding a dessert spoon of calcium nitrate and half a teaspoon of AVA fertilizer to each of them, plant seedlings of any cabbage, except for Peking cabbage and kohlrabi. It will be necessary to feed the cabbage in the second half of the summer only with microelements (unless you add AVA during planting).

It is best to do one or two top dressing on the leaves, using any of the preparations: "Florist" or "Uniflor-Bud" (4 teaspoons per 10 liters of water). You will have to water only if the weather is hot and dry. Water needs to be poured into the holes in the film under the root, and in very hot weather, early in the morning, you will have to pour cold water from a well over the cabbage directly over the leaves. In autumn, cabbage covering leaves and its roots (if there is no keel) should be left in the garden. The film will have to be removed, leaving it only on the sides of the garden.

Next year, pumpkin crops will move to a new compost heap, cabbage will move to their place, and instead of it, grown tubers of early potatoes or onions on a turnip can be planted on the garden bed. Then you can plant the beets, which will have to be watered once with a solution of table salt (1 glass per 1 liter of water) for feeding with sodium when it has 5-6 leaves. Beets can also be planted along with cabbage along the edge of the garden. She loves to grow on the edge and is friends with cabbage crops. It is good to plant celery at the ends of the cabbage bed. And the rows of onions can be alternated with rows of carrots. But you can also sow a bed of carrots after onions.

Once again, I draw your attention to the fact that as soon as you removed the film, only the crop is harvested from the garden, and all other parts of the plant are left in the garden and in the soil. Moreover, in the fall, leaves or weeds are also thrown on top. For another year, the garden bed can be used for salad, dill, parsley. These crops do not need feeding or watering.

Next year, in early spring, you can sow radish there, and after harvesting it in early summer, plant a strawberry mustache. The strawberries should be planted denser than usual, that is, the mustaches should be planted in the middle of the garden in one row at a distance of 15-20 m from each other. Add one third of a teaspoon of AVA granular fertilizer to each well when planting, then you will not need any more fertilizing for three years. To avoid weeding, roll a roll of paper glued from several layers of newspaper on both sides of the strawberries.

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When the strawberry has a whisker, punch holes in the newspaper to take root and let them winter. In spring there will be practically no newspapers left, but there will be no room for weeds to grow, since strawberries will take up all the free space. Don't do anything with the plantation. It does not need to be fed or watered except in very hot and dry weather in spring and early summer. Fertilizer will last for three years, and under a continuous canopy of its own leaves, it will retain moisture in the soil. I emphasize again, you do not need to do anything, let the strawberries grow by themselves.

After three to four years, the berry harvest will begin to decline. When you collect it, simply mow the plants themselves obliquely, or even better with a Fokin flat cutter, sinking 2-3 cm into the soil. Leave the leaves in the garden and start putting compost on this place. Then the whole cycle will repeat again.

This whole scheme should be applied on sands as well. Only under the compost on the sand it is necessary to lay roofing material or an old film in several layers so that nutrients do not go through the sand.

If you have a perfectly acceptable soil, then its fertility will gradually recover or improve over time if you sow the vacant bed with white mustard every year at the end of summer and leave all plant residues after harvesting on it, and not drag them into compost. Then, in the spring, just slightly dig up the soil to a depth of 5 cm and immediately sow the garden with seeds of cultivated plants.

The crop rotation can be left the same as on the compost heap, but before planting each crop, add a little "Bogorodskaya zemlyatsya" and a third of a teaspoon of the powdered fraction of the AVA fertilizer to the hole.

What kind of "Bogorodskaya land" is this? This is a soil rich in beneficial microorganisms. After all, soil fertility is due to the number of microorganisms living in it. Most of them die in the winter in the upper soil layer. Some part, of course, will remain and begin to multiply, but they will reach the required number only by the end of the season. If you take a bag of such soil in the fall before frost and put it in a cellar, then the microorganisms will perfectly survive and multiply over the winter. It is especially good to take such soil from rotted compost.

The soil must be inhabited with beneficial microorganisms, and to feed them, systematically introducing undoped organic matter into the surface layer, in particular, green mass of cut grass or weeds.