Rye As A Siderat: Sowing Features

2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38

Sometimes, in order to restore the structure and fertility of the soil, the introduction of organic fertilizers is not enough, in addition, it often happens that there is no manure at all on the farm. And then many gardeners and gardeners try to use rye as a green manure - they sow it for this purpose in the fall! The benefits of rye as a green manure can be discussed in this article

When to start sowing?

Rye is one of the brightest representatives of the best green manure crops, because it is endowed with the ability to enrich the soil with a huge number of useful compounds! The fibrous root system of rye ensures such a rapid growth of its sprouts that they manage to absorb all the "usefulness" much earlier than the weeds get to them! And rye can also boast of a sufficiently high biological activity, which allows it to extract valuable elements even from those substances that are broken down with great difficulty!

Winter rye thrives on any soil: both heavy and light, both alkaline and acidic. Its delicate shoots are able to easily endure even the most severe frosts, and the snowless cold winters (with temperatures up to minus thirty degrees) do not frighten them either.

Before you start sowing rye, it is important to remember that it builds up biomass for about forty-five days, and only by the end of this period it becomes completely and completely suitable for wintering. Accordingly, rye should be sown as a siderat immediately after the end of the vegetable harvest: at the end of August (on the twenties), as well as at the very beginning of autumn or in the last decade of September. These dates are most optimal for central Russia, that is, in other regions they may shift somewhat (in the southern regions, rye is usually sown in October, etc.).

Growing features

Some summer residents are accustomed to sowing rye as the plot is vacated, while others are always waiting for the moment of the final harvest. The site is divided into beds, between which a step of fifteen centimeters is maintained, or the seeds are simply scattered around the site in a chaotic manner, in bulk.

As a rule, one to three kilograms of ripe seeds are harvested for each hundred square meters of a personal plot, while the depth of their embedding should be in the range of two to five centimeters (to be more precise, on clay soils, seeds are embedded in the soil by two centimeters, on sandy loam - by five centimeters, and on all others - by three centimeters). To make this task easier for themselves, many summer residents are happy to resort to the help of such a simple device as a rake.

Rye crops need to be watered from time to time. As you know, most of its rhizomes are concentrated in the upper soil layer, so plants should always receive a sufficient amount of moisture for their full development. And even at the stage of preparatory work, if September did not please with rains at all, the site is thoroughly irrigated with water.

Even though rye is able to survive on overly depleted soils, it never refuses to occasionally feed. It responds especially well to the introduction of nitrophoska (twenty grams of this substance are taken for each square meter).

It is best to purchase last year's seed for sowing - if the seeds are too young, they simply will not have time to fully ripen, and their germination rate will be very low. And one more important nuance - you should not plant rye in the immediate vicinity of fruit bushes or trees, otherwise it will quickly absorb all the moisture reserves on the site.

For which crops is rye used as green manure?

Most often, rye is planted as green manure for potatoes, pumpkin, cucumbers, beets, zucchini, tomatoes, eggplants, peppers with cabbage or strawberries. In addition, the rye planted after potatoes helps to inhibit the growth of such malicious weeds as wheatgrass, quinoa, bindweed, horse-thistle and thistle!

But for various cereals and for nightshade crops, rye as a green manure will not be the best predecessor.

In addition, some summer residents plant several different green manure crops at the same time - in order to saturate the site to the maximum with all the useful compounds necessary for plants, you can safely combine rye with rye grass, vetch, oats and phacelia!