Re: Till/noTill (was Composted cow manure/rice nutrientcycles)

From: Elaine Ingham (Soilfoodweb@AOL.COM)
Date: Sat Apr 12 2003 - 11:39:13 EDT


Hi Mike -

Where are you located? There may be a Soil Foodweb Advisor near you, and
that would be a good person to talk with and get direct information from,
with hands-on experience with tea and soil organisms. Check the SFI webpage
for someone near you.

Would you consider mowing and then strip-till? You till out the bed where
you put your crop to be planted, giving it a big enough strip so the crop
gets up before the cover crop does. Typically if you add the compost (has to
be mature) or compost tea into the planting row, the seeds of the crop pop-up
a great deal faster, helping them get taller than the cover crop. The crop
then shades the cover, so the cover doesn't cause problems. I'm not sure
this will work with vetch as the cover crop, so other folks will probably
need to add their expertise here.

Elaine Ingham
President, Soil Foodweb Inc.
www.soilfoodweb.com
SFI Oregon, USA
SFI Australia
SFI New York
SFI Europe
SFI New Zealand

"Hope is not a feeling. It is not the belief that things will turn out well,
but the conviction that what we are doing makes sense, no matter how things
turn out." -- Vaclav Havel, former President of the Czech Republic






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