It's still August but I have got the fall gardening fever.
Now I've got my
pole beans planted and I've got my fall cucumbers planted and they are just
starting to come up and I got really good germination on those so I'm really
happy about that but now it's time to get some of these
other plots ready for some cool weather crops in the next few weeks we'll be
starting some transplants in the greenhouse so we need to get these plots
ready for when those transplants get ready we can stick them in the ground
we've got several plots here in the dream garden that have some nice-looking
cover crops on them but it's time to start extinguishing or starting to get
rid of those cover crops so we can get these areas ready for fall planting and
today I want to show you how we start to do that behind me here I've got a really
thick and dense crop of Sorghum Sudangrass looks really good it's about
almost shoulder tall in some spots but as you can see here it's starting to go
to seed so we need to do something with it.
Now this Sorghum Sudangrass is so thick and so tall that I don't really have a
mower that can get in there and mow this kind of vegetation right here now I
could use dad's flail mower but I don't have that with me at the moment so we're
going to try something a little different we're gonna try to crimp this
stuff we're going to basically try to lay it down and I'm gonna try to take my
riding lawnmower and lay the deck all the way down as low as it'll go and run
over this stuff and the goal here is to kind of break it or fold it down so it
lays down on the ground once we've got it laying down we can then come lay our
tarp on top of it and the tarp will help kill all that vegetation there so we're
gonna take our riding lawnmower and see if we can just lay this stuff down so we
can get in here and get the tarp on top of it.
Well that actually worked pretty dang good that's the first time I've ever
tried doing that just putting the mower deck all the way down not turning the
blades on just to kind of bend it over now it didn't lay it down quite as much
as if we would have had an actual roller or crimper but laid it down good enough
where we can get in here and put our tarp over this stuff and start to kill
this stuff back so let's go get our tarp and we'll put it on this plot so this
here is our 6 mil silage tarp that we can use to extinguish a cover crop
like we're doing today or we can use it to create a whole new garden plot on
somewhere in the yard you might have just grass growing. We need to kill this
vegetation here before we can come in here and lightly cultivate the soil and
prepare it for planting obviously we don't want to use a herbicide to do that
we can't till it right now because it would just choke down our tiller with
all this green vegetation here so we can lay this tarp on it it's a really easy
way to go ahead and kill all this stuff so then we can get in there and work the
soil as far as the silage tarp goes we actually have a new size available on
the website we started out with a 40 by 50 which is good for a larger garden but
now we also have a 40 by 30 version for some of you with the smaller gardens and
that's going to work almost perfect for these plots in my dream garden which are
30 by 35 I'll have to fold it over a little bit on the ends but it should
work pretty well so let's get this thing spread out over this area right here and
let's put the bricks on it if you'll notice I laid the Sorghum Sudangrass
down all in one direction so it would be easier for me to lay this tarp over the
area so let's get to it.
Alright so we got our silage tarp put on top of that Sorghum sudangrass that
we crimp down with the lawn mower now my plan here is to let that die off
and then I want to come in here and we're going to compost and I'm gonna
lightly till it now it should only take about two weeks for this stuff to
actually die as hot as it's been being from my experiences it won't take very
long so in two weeks what I'll do is I'll fold that tarp over and I'm going
to come in here and put about an inch or two of compost over the entire plot this
plot here needs some work so we're gonna compost the whole thing and then I'm
gonna come in here with my tiller and I'm just gonna lightly till the first couple
inches of soil there just to kind of cultivate it so I can plant in it when I
get ready to now the tilling process is also gonna probably bring up a few weed
seeds so we want to put the tarp back on it for another couple weeks to kill any
of those weed seeds that get brought to the surface and then when we pull this
tarp off and say four to five weeks when we're ready to put our transplants in
this soil should be nice and pretty and we shouldn't have to do anything to it
but just pull the tarp off maybe lay our drip tape and plant so now that we've
got our Sorghum Sudangrass taken care of let's walk on over to our brown top
millet plot and see what our plan of action is going to be over there this
plot here is where we planted our brown top millet cover crop and this stuff
started going to seed a few days ago and so it's time to do something with this
plot here we're still going to tarp this plot but we've got a little different
game plan before we tarp it now this millet can get tall like the Sorghum
Sudangrass if it's planted thin enough I planted this really thick on purpose
because I wanted to suppress weeds I had a little
weed issue in here with my winter squash so I wanted to have a dense mat of vegetation
so I didn't didn't have any new weed growth so this stuff only got probably
about knee-high so since it wasn't as tall I was able to get in here with my
push mower and already mow it one time I'm gonna mow it one more time before we
put the tarp on it and I'm gonna lower the mower deck down a little bit when I
do that so this here's my little push mower that I used to mow my walkways in
my dream garden and this thing has a mulching deck kit on it which means when
it cuts the grass it's going to leave it right there it's not gonna blow it all
over the place and I like that for my pathways so I'm not blowing grass into my
garden plots but it also works really good from mowing down these cover crops
when we're mowing those cover crops we want to leave all that biomass there so
it feeds the soil in that plot we don't want to spray it out everywhere into the
yard so the first time I cut this millet here I had the deck all the way up just
so I could get through it was a little thick now I'm going to lower this deck
down and kind of really cut it close and that's going to help speed up the
breakdown of this vegetation so we can get in this plot sooner and plant some
fall crops sooner.
Alright so we got that mowed pretty close there and you can see even though that
millet didn't get that tall we got some nice good green material there to help
feed that soil will tarp that in there and let that
decompose really nicely. Alright so I'm gonna go grab a 30 by 40 tarp and put it
on this plot just like I did with the Sorghum Sudangrass plot as you can see
here it doesn't take a lot of fancy equipment to do this cover cropping
technique to build your soils all it really took us today was a lawnmower and
then the tarp so we used a lawn mower to either crimp it or mow it and then we
use the tarp to break it down and help to get it ready for planting so just
about anybody can do it doesn't take a big flail mower or a big tractor at all
you can do it on a very small scale just like we're doing here so get your
gardens ready for fall. Fall planting is right around the corner if it isn't
already here. I'll put some links below to our cover crops and our silage tarp
so you can check those out. I hope you enjoyed this video. We'll see you next time.