Green manure: These plants are good - and here's how you go about it

Green manuring is an easy way to keep your garden soil fresh and supplied with nutrients.

But which plants are suitable?

Gardening doesn't always have to be strenuous and time-consuming.

Because if you plan cleverly and know which plants can support you in gardening, you will make life with the garden much easier.

For example with the so-called green manure.

Plants take over the loosening of the soil and charge it with important nutrients.

Green manure: How to improve the soil with the right plants

Gardeners who are passionate about planting their own vegetables or who love to look after blooming flowers for insects and their own eyes usually have to work through a to-do list in the garden all year round. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because gardening can also be relaxing. But gardening enthusiasts don't have to do more work than necessary. Because even if a fallow area in the garden, like the lawn, needs fertilizer on a regular basis, gardening enthusiasts are best able to use the so-called

green

manure, which is not very time-consuming

.

According to the German Nature Conservation Union (NABU), green manure is a

way of improving the soil

.

If an area has been harvested or withered, it will not help gardening fans or the soil if it remains unplanted for a long period of time.

Because then, among other things, the following can happen:

• the soil can harden and no longer absorb water

• Weeds can spread

• the soil remains depleted and no new nutrients are added

If gardening fans leave the earth to its own devices in autumn and winter and only plant it again in spring, the harvest yield will be significantly lower and the flowers may not even appear.

With a green manure, however, you counteract this and bring the soil back to its old strength.

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Green manure: These plants are particularly suitable

However, not just any plant should green the empty bed, but selected specimens.

It must be clear: the plants that are placed in the bed for green manure are not intended for consumption.

This means that gardeners do not harvest them, but work them into the soil at the end of the fertilization process.

In addition, garden fans need to know the nature of their garden soil before green manuring.

Only then can they choose the right plants so that they are tailored to the needs of the earth.

According to the Chamber of Agriculture of North Rhine-Westphalia, winter rye is particularly suitable as green manure over the winter months.

Gardeners sow this until the end of October.

This creates a protective cover of plants for the frosty season.

Winter rye needs nitrogen to grow, which it binds in the soil in such a way that heavy rains do not wash it out of the earth in autumn and winter.

According to the Chamber of Agriculture, incorporation later turns out to be a little more difficult because the winter rye forms strong roots.

However, these strong roots are no reason to be annoyed, because they noticeably loosen the soil and prepare it for the next vegetable sowing.

Otherwise, the following plants are well suited for green manure:

• Soil loosening

  : oil radish, alfalfa, lupins,

  Winter rape, broad beans

• Erosion protection

  : clover, spelled, Chinese cabbage, ryegrass

• Supply of nitrogen and nitrate

  : chickweed, yellow mustard, lupine, vetch, peas, clover, beans

• Weed control

  : clover, ryegrass, ryegrass

• Bee pasture

  : sweet peas, sunflowers, marigolds, marigolds, borage, phacelia

In addition to the demands of the soil, the order of the plants is also important.

Because not every plant mentioned above is always suitable for green manuring, it always depends on the mixed culture and crop rotation within a permaculture.

+

Phacelia is a popular plant for green manure.

© Imago

Green manure: You must observe this planting sequence

Anyone who

operates

a well-planned

mixed

crop and

pays attention to

crop rotation

must also do this with green manure.

Basically, no plants from the same plant family may grow in the same place one after the other.

For example, mustard, rapeseed and cress are suitable as green manures in the garden, but not in the vegetable patch.

They are related to radishes and radishes and, as green manure in the vegetable patch, would only promote the clubbed.

Marigolds must also not be used as green manure before or after salads.

Green manure: how to proceed step by step

Garden lovers still have time until the end of October

to sow

the

appropriate plant seeds

.

In preparation for sowing, gardeners remove weeds that have already grown and loosen the soil with a cultivator, then work in the seeds.

Just before the plants develop seeds, gardening fans have to mow them down.

This happens after about five to eight weeks.

They simply leave the cut on the surface and rot.

As a final step, gardeners work in the green manure around three to four weeks before the new planting, thus supplying the soil with important nutrients.

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