My green manure got to a point where I believed it was ready to dig in. It grew tall, and was very lush and some of the pea were a metre long. They also started to grab at eachother with clingy tendrals and formed a netting over the vetch and oat.
It was all still really young, and tender and sappy, but I started to get concerned it would flower or harden the stems and really there was so much there it was ready to be slashed and dug in.
So the first part was relatively easy, with a fairly blunt shovel, I pressed it all flat and then started to cut in into pieces making sure to sever them at the base. It took a little while to complete the whole bed, and I really tried to make sure all the pieces were 10cm long at most.
And here it is, all slashed. This photo was taken immediately after.
The next step was to pour a bag of organic compost over the top. I did start to try to dig it in at that point, however it was a bit too much effort and power needed and my arms just weren’t up for it. So I left it for a week and a bit and got the hubs to do the hard work of digging it in.
And I must say he did it fantastic job. You can see a little here that it had dried out, but that isn’t really an issue.
Here is the whole bed dug in. And then it was left to rot and compost and build up. The soil level in the bed is now higher than the others, so I wil just do this as a rotation every autumn, maybe even two beds a year. What a great thing to do for your soil.
