Planting oats too early
What happens if you
plant oats
for a cover crop too early (before August 1 in our zone 6
garden)? They go to seed rather than winter-killing in the
vegetative stage.
If you catch the oats
just as they begin to bloom, though, I'm thinking you can scatter
rye seeds over the bed, cut the oats down, and get a second round
of biomass-building in the same season. Time will tell
whether that experiment works.
Why did I plant oats
so early? I've been trying to grow biomass in the back
garden for most of the last year, but it's been so wet (and that
area is always so soggy) that buckwheat wouldn't grow. Oats
and rye are the two cover crops that have proven their ability to
deal with waterlogged clay soil, so I went ahead and planted the
former on July 22. Due to weeds that crept into the poor
stand of buckwheat early in the season, I'll be kill mulching the
whole garden area anyway, so a few oat seeds shouldn't make much
difference.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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