You have probably heard of the term “Regenrative Soil” but what does that mean? This means reducing outside inputs to your soil and creating a closed cycle of inputs and outputs to grow crops on. There are several ways to do this. Composting is one, but it is hard to compost enough to grow in all of our beds as we don’t have trees that produce leaves, or lawns with grass clippings. So we turn to another regenerative practice called cover crops, and the queen of cover crops in the desert is Sudangrass.
Cover crops are grown specifically for fixing nitrogen back into the soil, for creating biomass, or both. Biomass provides natural fuels that break down into nutrients for plants and fungus to create a healthy biome to grow plants in, and worms to thrive in. It rejuvinates the soil so that when your next crop, your cash crop, grows, it has the nutrients it needs to produce vigrous healthy plants.
We have been growing Sudangrass as a cover crop in two of our raised beds. The plan is to plant garlic next month into this bed, so I wanted to add natural biomass as a fertilizer, plus break up the soil for the roots so the garlic would grow large. Sudan Grass can grow roots 3 – 6 FEET deep! Today, I finally decided it was the day to cut it all down. The grass is starting to develop seed stalks, and I didn’t want it to drop seeds.
The stalks varied from 1/2″ to 2″ thick and I cut them with a 6″ produce knife about an 1″ from the soil line. I was then going to run them through our chipper, but they are currently too green and kept clogging it up. You can see how it mulched it on to the soil in the picture below before we gave up having to clear the cloggs every few minutes.
Greg and I spread the grass out and after a few days when they are drier, we will chip it all into mulch directly into the beds that are going to be in our hoop house building the soil with “green manure”.
Sudangrass is amazing for building up the soil! Next year I will grow it on a few more beds so that every summer some are growing a cover crop to continue to build the soil. The goal is to reduce how much organic mulch and fertilizers we need to buy. We currently use an organic fertilizer from Neptune’s Harvest and an organic Humic Acid that helps our soil uptake the organic fertilizer. Our soils are so alkaline and high in calcium and salts, it binds most of the nutrients and doesn’t allow the plants draw up the nutrients. Humic acid unbinds the nutrients and allows it to get to the plants where it is needed.
Finally, we covered the garden bed with a billboard vinyl to kill off the sudan grass. The black plastic absorbes heat and kills the grass and any weed seeds. We will leave that on until the beginning of October when we want to plant the garlic in the bed.
Note, the above links will take you to the products we use. They are not affiliate links, I haven’t signed up for any affiliate programs, but I wanted to provide the links in case someone wanted to purchase the produces for their own use. 🙂