Why Perennial Groundcover is Better Compost in the Garden | Dr. Elaine Ingham

thanks for watching this clip from my new podcast in search of soil for more great clips and full episodes check out the links in the description below thinking about this perennial ground cover in a vegetable type system what types of plants come to mind i've thought a lot about this you need something low-lying you probably want it to provide several functions maybe it fixes nitrogen or it's a pollinator or something like that what are crops that you've heard of or that you can think of that come to mind when you think about a perennial ground cover in a vegetable based system we have a whole list of those different plants on the website just because i can't remember them all sure um you know i go out my backyard and i've got like 10 different kinds of cover plants for where i'm growing tomatoes and potatoes or celery or lettuce really good match for those kinds of plants if you really want to grow the brassica and most a lot of people do brassica cold kale crops um you want to be pushing actinobacteria in that soil so in your compost you want to always develop that actinobacteria community that's what prevents the mycorrhizal fungi from attacking those root systems of the brassicas so um if you want to have perennial understory plants you want to go towards the creeping time the creeping lavender that's there's a whole slew of of short low growing things that have very woody stems and that's usually a good giveaway so go to your seed catalogs and start paying attention to how tall do these plants actually grow and dutch white clover works really great when we're dealing with the tomatoes potatoes celery those sorts of things but the other clovers have driven me crazy um you know i bought the mini clover that wasn't supposed to grow more than two inches well in my garden under my conditions those clovers grow to a foot and a half right so if you've got a good healthy soil look out for the claims about yes this is a mini clover it only grows this tall um we tried micro clover we've tried all the different kinds of clovers they're fine under big tall trees and shrubs but you grow anything that's going to be shorter no it's not a good match i remember where we grew um a row of beets and we had clover as the understory plant so we dug out a big space around each one of those beet plants that we put in so it must have been you know eight inches across and we figured okay we've got the clover beat back it shouldn't there should be no problem we'll be back on monday to see how things are going so we left and we could see every single clover we got back on monday we couldn't find the beets just swallowed the beef swallowed up just covered by a layer of clover and so now you have to dig in there and try not to rip up the beets while you're trying to rip out the clover and just not worth the time and effort dichondra is another really good one for most vegetable crops dichondra typically doesn't get much taller than a couple of inches and the root systems go nice and deep down into the soil pretty aggressive they don't usually allow anything to grow and take over them grasses are about the only thing that yeah on occasion you have to gonna going to come in and want to pull out a couple of the grass plants that are starting to grow real tall but otherwise dicondor works really well so this is kind of headline material i think it's an eye catcher it's click baity and it's a mind blower for some people but do you think that if you got your soil in balance microbially biologically that you could dramatically decrease weed pressure and potentially never or rarely see weeds in that soil again unless the soil was damaged it would be a very rare thing and then those weeds would be the things that would be sick and unhappy and unhealthy and they often won't flower they often aren't going to go through a reproductive stage if you do see them reproducing it's certainly easy enough to pull off the flowers um so on rare occasions we'll we'll find there was a bear patch or something a mouse came in and had to dig up something it buried something a squirrel came and buried an acorn or okay so we get the occasional weeds but it's certainly not like something that you're gonna have to come in and deal with or walk down the road with your weed eater and just cut off the tops of the weeds that are growing above your cover crop i love the idea of the perennial ground cover and if you had to choose between keeping a perennial ground cover in place and adding compost to supplement the soil from the top which one would you choose obviously the perennial ground cover has some advantages like it's less work you plant it once and it keeps working forever underneath the ground but there's also some types of plants and commercial crops that a perennial ground cover would be cumbersome with so could you mimic the perennial ground cover with something like compost teas if you couldn't have a perennial ground cover at the same time as a cash crop just given how these crops grow yeah and it's got to be a decision on the part of the person who owns the garden who owns that soil that land which one do you feel more comfortable doing and i of course being a lazy gardener i want to do as little work as possible i'd much rather go swimming for the whole entire summer than be you know pulling weeds out so i'm always gonna pick the permanent cover so that there's not a lot of work there for me to do but if that's not somebody's choice that you know they oh it's too difficult trying to figure out all the combinations well then putting down the compost as a mulch that's a really good way to suppress all of those weeds just make sure it's a thick enough layer and then you've got to monitor it because a lot of times the weather conditions are such that that thick nice thick layer of mulch is going to almost disappear within you know two or three weeks and it's gone and you've lost your disease suppressive layer so you know get back out there and put the mulch on again put out the compost teas the compost extracts teas typically go on the foliage where is you might certainly if in the past you've had a problem with a disease or a pest of some kind protect the above ground part of your plant um so that there's no surface that that disease or pest organism can attack so they'll go someplace else they won't even recognize that your favorite crop is down there they're going to go elsewhere because those insects home in on the compounds that are released by sick and an unhealthy plant insects are looking for something that's not doing well and so i've always thought of those insects as being or those disease causing fungi as being messages from mother nature about there's something wrong with the plant there's something wrong with the soil it's not getting the nutrition it's not getting the protective compounds so pay attention and if you don't pay attention mother nature's going to take a bigger amount of your plants next year and the year after it's going to be the whole acre and the year after that well you can grow something else for the next period of time because you're not paying attention to what nature is trying to tell you hi everybody thanks for watching subscribe here to get the latest from the show also be sure to check out some of the great clips and watch the full interviews right here on in search of soil

Channel: Diego Footer

Views: 58,976

Keywords: permaculture, homesteading, gardening, tomatoes, compost, no-till, no-dig, composting, biointensive gardening, no-dig gardening, charles dowding

Id: 7EY_uva91aM

Length: 9min 0sec (540 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 16 2020