Wednesday, November 27, 2019

Controlling aggressive weeds with aggressive cover crop - Pureria Javanica

Weeds protect soil from erosion and also makes land fertile. Weeds can be effectively used
to make your land fertile and we can go grow crops along with it. But if the control is not
proper then they will outgrow your crops and the harvest will be very poor. Nature does not
distinguish between crops and weeds, whoever grows best finally wins. Since weeds are adapted to environment well, most of the time, weeds win.

To make a decent harvest, controlling weeds is a must.Weeds enriches soil, but it may take long time to do that since that is the nature's way. But farmer want harvest in a reasonable time frame. So farmers use leguminous cover crops to make land fertile and that can be used to control weeds also. This is an intelligent way of intruding into nature's methods. Fukuoka san used white clover which is leguminous and it grows aggressively and also for many years that reseed and grow without any care.He used it in rice/barley field and also in orchards.It grows along with rice/barley and it provides nutrients to rice/barley rather competes with them.

I am using Pureria Javanica as a leguminous cover crop which is quite agressive once 
established.It completely grows over grasses and only this crop will be there after some time. Since it fixes nitrogen, the land becomes fertile too. Cutting this plant is relatively easy
using Scythe since it comes off nicely after this land is a clean of weeds, there may be a few
roots and runners which has to be removed. We can start cultivation of crop directly in this
space and if there is pureria growing on sides it will grow back to this area which has to be
occassionally cleaned, may be once in 10 days.

I have tried birds eye chilli, tapioca and sweet potato using this method and it looks quite
good.

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