2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38
By harvesting tops in a compost heap in autumn or burning them over a fire, we do a disservice to the soil, depleting it with components useful for plants, and create ourselves additional work and unnecessary costs for fertilizing the soil, pest control, wishing to get a decent harvest
Where do fertilizers disappear?
Having collected the harvest of vegetables in the fall, many gardeners remove all the tops, which are either burned at the stake, smoking the whole area, or dragged into the compost heap. By such actions, they only increase the expenditure of their time and labor on not just useless, but even very harmful work.
Where do you think the fertilizers that you so carefully and with love for the fertility of the earth have applied to the soil go to? Most will unanimously answer that, thanks to the fertilizers applied, they have crumbly potatoes on the table today, cucumbers crunch appetizingly, tomatoes turn red with poured sides. And they will be partly right. Of course, some of the fertilizer has gone into a decent harvest. But part of the fertilizer remained in the tops, which can serve the next crops, if you do not give it to the hot embrace of the fire flame, but, chopping it with the tip of a shovel, dig it up together with the autumn preparation of the soil.
Compost heap
Others will say that they do not treat the foliage so cruelly to give it to the fire for devouring, but drag the valuable components into the compost heap in order to obtain vitamin compost for future plantings.
At the same time, they do not cease to wonder how their exemplary clean area is more and more filled with various pests, from which you do not have time to fight back. As soon as he finished the war with the wireworm, the slow, but dodgy, slugs immediately creep in. He repulsed the attack of slippery aliens, from nowhere, it spreads in spots on the leaves of phytophthora.
And they did not realize that the pests did not fall from the moon and did not even come from the neighboring area. That they shook this "living creature" in their garden with their own hands, when they were dragging the tops into the compost heap. The pests that once settled on the leaves of the tops, instead of staying in the place of housewarming, successfully dispersed throughout the garden.
Digging up the tops at the place of growth
In order not to let valuable substances downwind, burning the tops at the stake, and not to sow pests in our garden, we dig up the green tops after harvesting on the spot, in the company with all the pests. You can pour the tops with urea. Then crush it a little with a bayonet shovel and dig up the ground so that the tops are hidden in the soil. It is better if digging the earth does not create a flat bed, but with a ridge in the middle. It is easier to bring such a bed to full readiness in the spring.
What does such an event give us:
• The phosphorus-potassium fertilizers remaining in the tops are returned to the soil without any dragging it into the compost heap, from which then the lower back hurts, the arms and legs become numb, and even the joy of the harvested crop is extinguished.
• Harvesting should be a holiday for earthworms, which will chew with great pleasure the still green tops along with pests on it until the very cold. So, the worms will be full, and the soil will remain with fertilizers, and your back will be flexible and healthy. This means that in the spring there will be much less work, and the guarantee of a good harvest already rests in the fertilized soil.
• In the soil dug up in the fall, even with a half-bayonet of a shovel, the surviving pests of a thin layer of earth lose their ability to appear in the world in spring. Thus, you will not scatter them around the garden so that you can swear and sigh with them all next summer, but you will forever part with them. Or there won't be enough of them to threaten the harvest.
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