This topic contains 8 replies, has 2 voices, and was last updated by freckledbeck 14 years, 2 months ago.
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Your plan will work as long as there is a thick enough mulch for long enough to stifle any re-growth of whatever roots are in the pasture. Annual grasses are the quickest to die off whereas dandelions and couch grass can require up to six months of darkness to starve their roots of stored nutrients. You may need a second application of paper or cardboard in about three months time.
Once the pasture plants are mostly dead, your vegetable plants or seeds (plants are easiest in the first year when slugs – residual population from the pasture – are more numerous) will grow happily, first in the compost and then rooting into the soil below, which although undug will still have a lovely structure, left behind by the dead pasture-plant roots and lots of worm channels too. All that structure is broken by digging or rotovating, which imposes a temporary mechanical structure instead.
Mulching and not digging saves a lot of work and a lot of new weeds but does restrict the first year’s cropping a little – spring salads and carrots are almost impossible but leeks, potatoes, autumn beetroot and brassicas, courgettes and squashes are possible. Then you will reap lots of advantages in the second year because uncultivated soil grows so many less annual weeds. Good luck.
Horse manure is superb but is best applied when reasonably well rotted i.e. it is dark brown with not too many bits of yellow straw or wood shavings. Usually it reaches this point after at least six months in a heap. Wood shavings take longer to rot than straw but are helped to rot by all the nitrogen in hen droppings: unless you have a huge flock, I would add the chicken coop contents to your compost heaps, which should become bigger once your allotment plot is cropping.
Regarding weed seeds, some discipline is needed when making compost heaps, which rarely heat enough to kill all the seeds, or even half of them. So you need to put less in. My experience is of weeding when weeds are small, before they seed, so my compost is clean. Plants laden with viable seeds are better burnt, sorry not ecological, in my case that amounts to a few foxglove stems, mostly seeding flowers from the herbaceous beds. However I would still use your weedy compost, especially if it is initially under a covering mulch, then be prepared to hoe it later when any seeds have enough daylight to germinate – it may be less than you imagine, but you must keep on top of them.
Sorry to maybe sound pedantic but manure is a mixture of animal poo and the litter they have bedded on. Putting all that in a heap results in the litter being helped to rot by nutrients in the poo and as they meld together a well rotted manure is created. Fresh manure is poo and fresh litter: the problem with too much fresh litter is that it needs nutrients to help it break down, and will use some of your soil’s nutrients for this. The nutrients are not lost, just borrowed and out of use for a while. Using fresh poo without any litter, such as you describe above, is probably ok: I would put it at the bottom of a bed rather than on the surface, or small amounts can be added to compost heaps.
I have created a new forum topic under vegetables, with my answer: you may not agree and I am keen to hear other opinions because at the moment people seem to assume that heritage varieties are better. I assume the opposite because I feel they are heritage for a reason…. but that is not to say they don’t have other qualities.
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