User Bp wrote:
songbird wrote:

in order to get it going in an established
field or grassy area you'll need to disturb
the soil enough that it can get going, it is
not a fast grower at first, i often plant it
as a mix with other cover plants (golden flax
is pretty, buckwheat is a great cover crop and
the bees love both of them when they are left to
bloom). i'd avoid red clover in the mix.

Agreed on the red clover, it didn't do well.

it did too well here and took over any
place it could. i suspect we get a fair
amount more of rain than you do.


I've taken to putting alfalfa seed down each time
a weed is dug up. The issue of how well the alfalfa
is doing got a little confusing lately. Trefoil plants
that looked like alfalfa but had yellow flowers began
to appear in numbers in the yard, and I declared success.

i was wondering about what you were calling
yellow flowers alfalfa as i'd never heard of
that before. glad that confusion is figured
out.

the alfalfa here blooms a week or two later
than the trefoil (our alfalfa just started
blooming this past week).


Then, some pot-grown alfalfa (whose identity is much more
certain) revealed purple flowers. No purple flowers yet
in the lawn. I'm not sure what the story is at present.

it may take more time to get established or
just be too arid for it to get going without
irrigation (or both). i didn't see any blooms
on the alfalfa i seeded in one summer until the
following year.


Maybe it'll bloom later, maybe it all got eaten.
Snails, slugs and sowbugs seem to be major problems. I'm
trying to avoid chemical warfare, mostly for sake of the
earthworms. Principles of sustainable horticulture might
have to be sacrificed on the alter of expediency.

8-)

if you have snails, slugs then you have a lot
more moisture than i was figuring... hmm, but
believe me they are not usually a problem with a
field as the other creatures will eat them (snakes,
frogs, toads, lizards, etc.).

i would consider it a good sign that you have
all this life going on. no need to use chemicals,
if you want to cut down on snail and slug populations
then you need to get less moisture, which would mean
more frequent and lower trimming. which to me is
rather defeating the purpose of having a field of
such plants. i want them to grow, put down the deep
tap root, and then once in a while they get clipped
to simulate grazing and that pulse of roots dying
back and then regrowing, along with the nitrogen
from the decaying leaves and stems, well it all goes
to feed the worms and soil creatures and that is
visible after several years.

the patch i'm growing did not have any organic
matter on top of the soil as it was sloped and very
compacted, it mostly grew queen-annes-lace and a
mix of other weeds, some of them i didn't want
spreading into other gardens (sow thistle, globe
thistle,...), it was also starting to form an
erosion gully. after i did a bit of tilling to
break up the surface so that i could have enough
soil to move to level it then it was planted with
alfalfa and trefoil. i kept it weeded the rest
of the season and forgot about it for the winter.
what i did not know was that mouse-eared chickweed
and a small blue flower were going to take over
growing underneath the snow. by the next spring
all the initial seedlings were being smothered
by the undesired weeds. so i spent some time the
next spring weeding around the edges and gradually
getting inwards and through the whole patch to
get rid of most of them. so the alfalfa and trefoil
could get well established before the heat of the
summer came along.

a year later i made the mistake of scattering
garlic scapes/bulbules throughout the patch. since
then i've harvested a lot of garlic from there and
decided to take it all out when i come across it.
between digging most of what i could get out last
year and going through it again this spring i've
reduced the garlic population by quite a bit, but
it will probably take a few more years to remove
all of it.

when i'm removing garlic i'm also opening up
small patches to be planted and so i seed them in
with daikon radishes, turnips and whatever else
veggies that may be interesting to grow. this is
unfenced area so can be raided by plenty of wild-
life, i'm trying to grow things outside the fenced
gardens to keep some of the critters from being
so interested in the fenced area. so far it is
helping, but always more to keep doing to continue
the experiments and increasing diversity.

oh, and i forget to mention before that if you
let the alfalfa and trefoil grow longer so that i
they get a fairly woody stem before trimming them
back then you get those stems as a longer lasting
organic mulch on top of the soil. trim sooner and
they get eaten to nothing by the worms/etc fairly
soon, but it also depends a lot upon your soil
moisture, rains, etc.

also, i'm not sure what the problem with pill
bugs might be, they tend to eat only decaying
organic matter or very ripe fruits that hit the
ground. not much else that i've noticed. i
don't consider them pests, they tell me that i've
not picked the strawberries often enough. i just
knock them off the berry if it is otherwise sound
and then trim off the chewed part when prepping
the berries.


Thanks for reading,



it's a fun topic for me as i keep trying
different things and enjoy watching how the
soil improves. before in that same area there
wasn't much worm activity or organic material
on the surface, now it has a fair amount of
stems slowly decaying and much more worm and
other life going on.

i keep telling myself that i should get a
series of pictures i've taken over the years
of the patch posted to my website, but as of
yet... it's a winter or rainy day project...

still you can see some pictures of the patch
in question at the website www.anthive.com in
a few places (look for NE corner shots).


songbird