Rotating Grain

[vancheese]

Hi people

As I survey my garden of weeds, grain and veg, I realise that i much better/enjoy more/is more useful to grow more grains in the forthcoming seasons in my medium sized veg patch. My vegetable books wisely instruct me in the art of crop rotation to avoid soil depletion and to discourage nasty bugs, but I've not found much in the way of suggesting grain rotation pattens. At the moment, I have oats growing and want to be thinking about when and what i should be planting next and what the 3 year cycle should look like

My main purpose for this is to produce animal food but harvest related yields may tempt me into new food-related fields

Thanks

Andy

[The Riff-Raff Element]

Oats can be under sown with clover once the plants are away, but you'd be too late for that now. If you have access to plentiful manure , you could follow oats with winter wheat, then sow a green manure with a view to sowing maize or sunflowers in the third year. Maize and sunflowers can be interplanted with pigeon peas or cow peas to fix nitrogen and provide a useful protein source for the beasts. Then back to oats. Could you make three plots out of your patch? This would give you a very nice mix of seeds for your feed.

[vancheese]

When in the cycle could i grow alfalfa (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfalfa)? Hungary is hot enough to do this!

[The Riff-Raff Element]

You could grow it as green manure, but I think it would be more use grown for a whole season. There's no reason a fourth course couldn't follow the maize.

Around here, some of the more forward thinking farmers divide their land into two halves, plant one half with alfalfa for three or four years and do a 3 or 4 year rotation on the other half of cereals and oil crops. The alfalfa (lucerne we call it) deep roots and hauls up minerals from the subsoil as well as fixing nitrogen. It gets cut (usually twice per year) for fodder, which feeds the cattle who provide the manure for the cereals. After the 3 or 4 years up, the halves are swapped over, the alfalfa half by now considerably enriched.

It's a very tidy system of mixed farming that minimises inputs (fertilisers are getting ever more expensive) and lends itself well to organic practice.

[vancheese]

That sounds sweet :) I'll let you know how is goes - Thats for the top advice

[doofaloofa]

What sized patch are you growing grains on Vancheese

[vancheese]

Small, about 50m by 30m

[doofaloofa]

Big enough

How big is your veg patch?

[vancheese]

about the same

i'm planning on ripping up some of the grassland and planting more grains for animal/human feed

[doofaloofa]

cool