How to make kitchen garden ready for the winter

How to make kitchen garden ready for the winter

Housekeeping Hits: 137

How do you think why some gardeners have harvests from year to year less, and at others granaries are full every fall? And these owners live not in the North and the South, and on adjoining properties? No, not because the successful neighbor knows ""cock word"" but because he follows the basic rule of the farmer: ""How many from the earth has taken, it is so much to it and enclose back"". Whether you follow this rule? If is not present, begin already tomorrow, and in a couple of years you do not learn the earth and by the right will be proud of the received harvests. However, I do not claim that it is simple way, but having begun to move in the direction of ""organic agriculture"", you will understand that it is correct.

Instruction

1. First of all it is necessary to understand that soil should not leave at winter opened and plowed (dug up) at all. Why? The first rain (and in the fall this phenomenon not rarity), having through drenched carefully loosened earth, will turn it into liquid dirt, and then into monolith, having hammered all time and small openings. Spring flood waters, without finding opportunity to filter deep into through this ""asphalt"" and without meeting obstacles on the way, stream will descend from your site, carrying away with themselves the top fertile layer, washing away even small slopes.

2. How to protect the soil in the fall and to receive it in the spring friable and soft? One of effective ways is mulching of the soil. What is ""mulching""? The mulch is any substrate with which we cover the soil. It can consist of organic matters: straw, bark and shavings from trees, sawdust, nutshell, peel of sunflower seeds, mowed lawn grass, weeds, small branches, newspapers, cardboard, peat, compost. And also the mulch can have the inorganic nature: fine gravel, marble and granite elimination, crushed brick, ukryvny synthetic materials (agrospan, lutrasit, spunbond, geotextiles). If you have opportunity, cover beds in October-November with straw, sawdust, weeds (only without seeds), peat. If these materials are absent, then just close the earth multilayered newspaper sheets, magazines, cardboard. For interest you can compare in the spring two beds which have left from under winter. On that that has been covered, the earth soft, porous, friable, without hint on washout with spring waters. Soil on the second, barefaced bed, will be dense, ""concreted"", with strong indications of the descended rough water.

3. The second way to keep the porous earth on spring - to seed in the fall of siderata. Siderata are the plants sowed to increase fertility of the soil, to save it from weeds, to save from diseases and wreckers. How do siderata work in the fall? Some of them gather good green material by November (mustard, colza, oats, peas) and, freezing in the winter, act as mulch, i.e. cover the earth with soft carpet, rotting through in the spring and bringing additional organic chemistry, mineral substances which siderata have taken out from depth of arable layer in the earth. Others, long-term (rye, lucerne, cock's head, lupine), also act as protective carpet, but on spring they continue to develop, pierce with roots the earth, creating the system of capillaries, the courses allowing to get freely in the soil to air, moisture. At the expense of it soil microorganisms, worms, bacteria, mushrooms violently breed. All of them also create the humus increasing fertility of the soil. Spring waters freely flow down deep into. There is no erosion also in mention. Dense green material of siderat gives in the spring abundance of organic mulch with which cover beds. The substances emitted by some siderata frighten off wreckers, do not allow to develop to diseases.

Author: «MirrorInfo» Dream Team

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