Green Manuring

We have started with green manuring of our farm. The farm is wide and varied, so it was not possible for us to do the green manuring all at once. However, green manuring is very important to us since we are not going to use any chemicals in our farm either as pesticides or fertilisers.

What is green manuring?

Green manuring is the practice of cultivating certain crops that fix nitrogen. These crops are cultivated at higher density and are cut when they just start flowering. After cutting, the crop is integrated back in the field. This is different from chop and drop mulch and manuring where the crop is just cut and left on ground. Here we mix the cut down crop with the soil with the help of farm machines.

What does any crop essentially need to grow? It takes nutrients from the soil, water and elements like carbon and nitrogen from the soil and the air.

The green manuring crops like sesbania (Dhaincha) and Sunn Hemp are nitrogen fixing, they extract nitrogen from the air and make it available in the soil and in the plant. When the plant is cut and integrated in the soil, then what the plant has taken from the soil goes back to the soil. Further, the new nitrogen that has been fixed by the plant is also added to the soil.

Green Manuring at our Farm

We have started with the southern part of our land. We broadcasted a 1:1 mixture of Sunn Hemp and Dhaincha in the southern portion. We sowed on 30th June by broadcasting. As we write on 17th August it is just mature to be cut and integrated in the soil. In a few days we will be doing that.

Next we will be doing green manuring on the plain area south of trench, in the centre portion of our farm, with Sunn Hemp in coming few days. Also we will green manure the remaining portion of South End with Dhaincha. In some portion in the East End we are also planning to sow some Sunn Hemp for Seeds so that we become self reliant in Sunn Hemp seeds and we do not have to purchase any more seeds from now on for green manuring.

For green manuring we have used around 20Kgs of seeds per Acre and for Seeds we plan to use around 8-10 Kgs of seeds per acre.

We told you earlier that some portion of south end was flattened by seller by moving earth. So the green manure has not come up uniformly there. While in some portion the crops has come up well while is some potion it is very scarce and in major portion it is moderate growth.

We are planning to integrate the green manure into land as of now. We will demarcate the area where we got good crop and plan ahead. While in areas of moderate and bad growth, we will leave if for 10-15 days for decomposition of whatever green manure crop has come and we plan to do green manuring once again. Currently our focus is to improve the quality of soil naturally.

We will write another post where will share other efforts we are taking to naturally make the land fertile.

We will keep you updated as we progress.

Thanks for reading and Good Day.