Living Mulch

[chiefbeaz]

Has anyone fooled with some type of a living mulch between your tomato plants rows. On my big garden I use a small tractor with a tiller between the rows. On smaller ones I either till between them with a small walk behind tiller or put straw down between them. Its a lot of work keeping the weeds out. It would be nice to have some type of grass growing between rows and just run a mower through it when the grass got high. I usually put straw down under my plants and that keeps them moist and also control the weeds fairly well.

Anyone out there have any thoughts or suggestions on this?

[Doug9345]

I find the grass IS my biggest weed problem. It's very difficult to pull, it clogs tillers and it seems that it can send runners a long distance sideways. I have another kind that I call burr grass or nut grass. It has a bulb and grows burr like seeds. It pulls very easily but any particular tomato can get surrounded by a couple of hundred plants.

[Worth1]

Anything you have growing around your plants like grass will suck needed water and nutrients from the soil.

You would be better off with bare dirt and cultivate the soil down about an inch every now and then.

I didn't have nut grass when I moved here but I do now.
I have no idea where it came from.

Worth

[Redbaron]

Originally Posted by Worth1

Anything you have growing around your plants like grass will suck needed water and nutrients from the soil.

You would be better off with bare dirt and cultivate the soil down about an inch every now and then.

I didn't have nut grass when I moved here but I do now.
I have no idea where it came from.

Worth

I got to disagree with you there Worth. Having a living root always in the ground, and all the nutrients provided by the biology it supports will yield a net gain long term.

The trick is simply to make sure the ground is always covered. If not with living plants then with decomposing mulch.

Originally Posted by chiefbeaz

Has anyone fooled with some type of a living mulch between your tomato plants rows. On my big garden I use a small tractor with a tiller between the rows. On smaller ones I either till between them with a small walk behind tiller or put straw down between them. Its a lot of work keeping the weeds out. It would be nice to have some type of grass growing between rows and just run a mower through it when the grass got high. I usually put straw down under my plants and that keeps them moist and also control the weeds fairly well.

Anyone out there have any thoughts or suggestions on this?

Yes indeed I have done it. With excellent results. I even have a thread dedicated to developing the technique called "The Red Baron Project"

[Worth1]

I should have never posted.

Worth

[Barbee]

I use a combo of mulch and bare ground. Inside my cages I use newspaper with straw over top of it and outside the cages I have bare ground so I can run the tiller between the rows to knock the weeds back a few times during the season. I tried living mulch one year and found it was fine while the plants were small to mow between rows but once the tomato plants got bigger, I was mowing them too. And I agree with Worth and felt I was pulling nutrients and water away from the plants. For my garden, the best solution is mulching the area inside the cages and leaving bare ground between the rows. I like to side dress my plants midseason and this seems to work best for my situation.

Just my experience. Your mileage may vary.

[chiefbeaz]

Knew that I had seen something along the line as to what Redbaron is doing. Worth, I also was thinking along your line about the posibility of growing some type of grass would rob nutrients from the tomatoes. The Redbaron project has good information that I will try to use
this season.

[Redbaron]

Originally Posted by Worth1

I should have never posted.

Worth

No need to feel bad Worth, living mulches is a fairly new research area. And it is possible to do it wrong too. But one of things they are finding is that a diversity of species actually makes plants less likely to suffer from drought stress. And previously it was always thought exactly as you posted. (grass will suck needed water) Turns out somehow the diversity of plants help each other in this respect. I know it is counter-intuitive, but it is true.

As far as the nutrients go, what you said (plants like grass will suck needed ... nutrients from the soil) is possible in rare cases, but usually only the nitrogen is an issue. So simply planting a mowable legume with the grass between rows will solve that. Most cases though, grass is an effective scavenger of nutrients and actually won't reduce the nutrients in the soil at all. The deep roots will catch an pull up from deep beyond the crops root zone and bring nutrients that have leached away to the upper zones where they can be recycled. Every time you mow, a % of these are released by self pruning roots. Not to mention as much as 20% of the sugars produced by photosynthesis are secreted directly into the soil to feed the symbiotic micro-organisms. That feeding of the soil food web usually results in a net gain in nitrogen as many are free living diazotrophs as well as the well known Rhizobia found on legume roots. I know this also seems counter-intuitive, but it is also true.

Bottom line is, don't feel bad if people have differing opinions. I may disagree with you, but 10 years ago I would have agreed with you 100%. 10 years from now? Maybe we will both have new views? There is a whole lot of ways to garden and farm. I simply wanted to let the OP know, his idea wasn't as crazy as it sounds. There are other crazies like me that are already successfully using the idea.

Living Mulch

Pasture cropping

Blue Heron Farm, Lodi, NY

[PaulF]

Really cool videos. If my gardens were large and made for large production, that would be the way to go. But how about the small home garden? If I were to have grasses in between my rows all I would have is a lot of undesirable weeds taking over the entire space. Then during the rotation process from year to year there would be an explosion of weeds. All I would be doing is encouraging what I have been working hard to get rid of. I have tried cover crops and green manures like rye but didn't notice much benefit.

I mulch rows with newspaper and straw and till it all in in the fall. Would a growing season living mulch suppress weeds enough? I am thinking a low grower like clover. Any opinions on that or just keep my current mulching system.

[Redbaron]

Originally Posted by PaulF

Really cool videos. If my gardens were large and made for large production, that would be the way to go. But how about the small home garden? If I were to have grasses in between my rows all I would have is a lot of undesirable weeds taking over the entire space. Then during the rotation process from year to year there would be an explosion of weeds. All I would be doing is encouraging what I have been working hard to get rid of. I have tried cover crops and green manures like rye but didn't notice much benefit.

I mulch rows with newspaper and straw and till it all in in the fall. Would a growing season living mulch suppress weeds enough? I am thinking a low grower like clover. Any opinions on that or just keep my current mulching system.

Whatever works for you. But I will say that having done this on a very small scale on my garden for many years before I started my project to try and scale it up to commercial scale, I found that maneuver room for my mower was my main issue.

If I didn't have room between rows for my lawnmower (and often I didn't), it was better to paper and mulch the whole area. But where I did have room, growing a mowable living mulch was beneficial for sure. As far as weeds go, I don't call any of them weeds anymore, strange as that may be. I have yet to have a weed so strong it couldn't be mowed! In the spring before I paper and mulch I mow right to the soil line (scalping it so to speak) and lay the newspaper and mulch right over that. Seems to work great. Between the rows where I don't paper and mulch, I encourage any plant. No such a thing as a weed there, just a diversity of species. The one exception is along the back fence row is poison ivy from hades. I can't kill it. It is immune to everything. But I can slow it down by digging the roots and all.

[Doug9345]

Originally Posted by Redbaron

As far as weeds go, I don't call any of them weeds anymore, strange as that may be. I have yet to have a weed so strong it couldn't be mowed!

I tell you I have clumps of grass that you aren't going to mow with a push mower and if you hit them square I'm had them stop the blades on a riding mower. I think I'm going to resort to putting cut open wood pellet bags down and covering with rock and dirt early in the season to see if I can knock down the hoard of weed that I have that spread by underground stems.

I'm all for having a living mulch but first I have to win this battle. It's by far the limitation on how much of anything I can grow. I don't want to spray it and I'm happy with the amount of worms and things I have growing this bunch of weeds are just overwhelming.

[Doug9345]

I've thought about seeding with clover to see if I can gain some ground.

[Worth1]

Get yourself a dual rotating tine tiller like I have.

The tiller is a rear tine machine that has tines that can rotate in both directions.

You can till or cultivate with the same machine.
With the tines rotating forward you have to put the spike down and set the depth gauge.
This way it wont take off like a wild deer.

Once everything is planted and compost piled around the critters I go out and buy good hay or straw and pile it up about a foot high everywhere after I have laid down soaker hoses.

I dont have a weed problem all year long.
At the end of the season I lightly turn the hay into the soil.
Then around September I plant red clover and annual rye grass in the garden spot.
This keeps winter weeds from sprouting and it in turn with compost gets lightly turned into the soil next spring ready for a new garden.

I dont worry about a hard pan as this area was built by me and nature in an otherwise crappy area with little or no soil, just red clay.
I diverted rain runoff to spread out in the area and stopped the flow with dikes.
This allowed the silt and soil to settle out there.

It is now one of the most productive places I have.
The first year I had tomato plants that were upwards of 8 feet tall by the first part of June.

It has been fallow for 2 years now.

I have 2 more places I am doing the same thing in gullies.
I am putting in brush piles and leaves and slowing the runoff down so soil will collect there
So far I have gained from 1 to 3 feet of good soil in gullies on parts of my property that would have otherwise just kept on going.

I'm not losing soil I'm gaining it from other people.

Putting annual rye grass down really thick will do wonders in keeping unwanted weeds at bay.

Well thats the way I do it here wrong or right at Cactus Flats Texas.

Worth

[reefjarod]

I use straw or sea grass to mulch my beds but use white clover in the paths. It's worked good for me attracts lots of bees and when it gets long I mow it into my beds to help mulch.

[David Dooley]

Hairy Vetch makes great cover crop for tomatoes. You can mow the vetch and plant tomatoes in the roots.