I had xarrots growing in heavily seeded clover this summer. Got my best carrot crop yet. I planted the clover a week after the carrots. I had carrots busting above the clover all summer.

We are doing it for our fruit trees and it works so well that we started using it for our garden last year. We have both white and red clover in both areas. Quite attractive and no weeding! 👏

Plaese take attention with using round up . I don't expect that from someone like you . Greetings from a fan from Belgium

I use this Clover in my backyard and frontyard lawn areas. It works really well. I don't want a regular lawn and I have tons of clover flowers and bees and the grass is always green and healthy. I also planted clover in my raised bed and interplanted with other veggies and it it works beautifully. I just let the clover do its thing and I plant and dig where I need to.

Nice video Diego! The ONLY real long term limited resource on a piece of land is solar irradiance (sunlight over area over time, something like 5-6 KWH/m-2/day where I live). Look at any forest, every single plant species is competing for sunlight. Some varieties get into a race to the top, others specialize to grow with whatever light manages to penetrate the canopy. Specialist plants grow in every nook and cranny, even on other plants and trees, without ever touching the soil. Water, fertilizers, minerals, even CO2 can be added or amended. But light is limited even if/when you use artificial lights. The best way to utilize and optimize sunlight is to prevent any of it from ever reaching bare ground. Grow anything to capture sunlight on every square inch of ground, grow narrow-canopy trees to capture sunlight up high without shading everything below. Crops don't really compete for multiple nutrients within the soil. Theoretically they can, but it is always ONE limiting resource at a time. It could be nitrogen, or calcium, or iron, or just water (in non-irrigated systems). A monoculture is the fastest way to find this limit and get stuck there, both in terms of soil quality and financially. Then everything slows down. Say you have an abundance of almost all other nutrients, but nitrogen is deficient. Adding nitrogen then creates other problems. Growing crops that suit the soil instead of adding nutrients according to the crop is one way to side-step this issue. If you multi-crop all year round, the complexity actually reduces. It is no longer a zero-sum game. Each of your crops will be cycling through a different nutrient at different times. In fact, you can cover-crop for a natural synergistic system (something like permaculture) all year round. Win-Win scenario, if you can design a system around this concept. There are no rules in agriculture. You are free to borrow from any method that works for your land. My cover crop seed mix usually contains upwards of seventeen crops! Nitrogen fixers like Cowpeas and Mung beans, C4 varieties like amaranthus for biomass, Moringa for deep cycling nutrients & capturing sunlight up high, Okra for its taproot that digs deep into soil, Pigeonwings for N + aphid control, Marigolds for pollination + aphid control, Pigeon Peas for biomass + N, and many others depending on the starting soil quality. I also include plants for their flowers and for their smell. Lots of herbs and spices too. Over time, we plant other seeds as some of the initial plants die out. Then we add varieties of mycorrhizae plus other fungus to allow mushroom cultivation outdoors during the wet months. Fungal rich soil also emits CO2 which rise up through your crop canopy, absorbed mostly by the stomata on the underside of leaves. Microbe rich soil is also an order of magnitude richer in nutrients compared to sterile scorched soil since these microbes are reproducing, dying and cycling nutrients all the time. Worms and other beneficial insects add a lot to soil fertility too. Every group of crops reaches a different height above ground, different spread on the surface, and different depths below ground. They all work to pull nutrients from whatever depth they can reach. When the leaves drop, all of this goodness is available for your actual cash-crop or food-crop. Remember to grow frost tolerant varieties higher up north. You can build several inches of top soil within a year, and more every year after that. Hot tip: Don't bother starting with raised beds, your grow beds will rise on their own :) What's the best way to control weeds? Grow an abundance of beneficial crops that will out-weed the weed. You can walk bare-foot all the time, the soil feels like a cushion. Soil temperature never goes out of hand, rain water is naturally harvested, even dew seeps back into the soil. Moisture is available in the soil all year round. Even the walkways/pathways usually have some kind of cover, I just mow them down and add them to the growing beds once every month or so. Experimenting with a diverse variety of crops is far more fruitful, quite literally. This system borrowed heavily from Masanobu Fukuoka when I started in agriculture some 5 years ago. I did, however, add a lot of little tricks that I learnt from my mentor Mr. Narayana Reddy (you can look up his videos on youtube).

I could see this in being used in permanent beds where the main crop annuals are rotated for sure. I wonder if it would work well in a perennial bed for asparagus. Either way I think it’s a great compliment to using more complex cover crop mixes in other bed to generate fertility.

Charles Dowding does not use any fertiliser only home made compost, I totally believe it. Feed and support the soil and its organisms and you’ve fertility

I grow most of my annual crops in a perennial cover crop that has been established for five years now. It consists of a multitude of plants from grasses , clover , dandelions , you name it , all plants welcome.Biodiversity is the goal. To plant I mow short and dig 6 inch diameter holes or 4 inch wide rows depending on crop . I manage competition with periodic chop and drop .Works great ,no fertilizer , low water use.

I plant carrot seeds about a foot and a couple inches down my tomato rows and 10 inches between the carrot rows. Dug a fish pond and made a filter system where I can claim the emulsion and mix it in a 5 gallon buckets. In each bucket I add a gallon of urine. I'm on the north oregon coast and I have fully developed corn, 12feet outdoor early girl tomato plants and some killer nugs and watermelons! I don't have to bring in anything except straw for extra carbon, because there's a lot more evergreens than deciduous trees My barnyard buddies provide quite a bit of extra fertility and there's a lot of material for my compost hill for some decent amendment.

My idea is, not to use just clover, but also winter rye. If you keep the winter rye trimmed and nor allow it to go to seed, it won't die. Also the nitrogen from the clover can be shared with other plants with mycorrizal fungi. Keeping a.livong root in the ground at all times will promote the growth of mycorrizal fungi.

I am actually wanting to do the exact same experiment this year with a raised bed. I have been trying to decide between using White Dutch Clover and Crimson Clover seed. Theoretically, it should work, and since I am in Hawaii, I am also able to grow year round with no possibility of frost. I am leaning more towards using the Crimson Clover because it is good at attracting bees, which I am trying to attract now so they can take up residence in the new Bee Hotels that I installed near my raised beds this year.

I look forward to more follow ups on this. Thank you for doing this experiment. I think that there is not enough research being done out there on these "living mulch" type systems where annual crops are planted into living, perennial, ground covers. I have heard Dr. Elaine Ingham speak about systems like this and I have been intrigued ever since. I think this could be the ideal system that offers both production along with soil building and health all at the same time, all while being low cost. Great work Diego!

Something seems off about that chocolate milk but it I bet it was still delicious.

I use lawn clippings, mulched up hedges and trees. It builds the biomass and is rich in nitrogen. I build up to 30-40cm depth. I use small tarps for weed control which also traps in moisture which helps the compost breakdown. The plants love the moisture and warmth.

I think this is the natural conclusion one comes to with no-till and cover cropping overtime. I'm trying this too and feel optimistic about it.

Hey Diego, I love this idea. I usually inter plant my tomatoes and broccoli types of plants with the likes of leaf lettuce. Mostly to help control weeds but I do get some harvest.this year I have been playing with red and white clover for cover crops for my fall and winter greens crop. I experimented using my earth way seeder vs. Hand seeding. Both used 1/2 cup of seed per 50' row but saw the hand applied had by far way better coverage for the same amount of seed. Granted when the clover matured it filled in the bare spots. The hand applied had complete coverage right from the start thanks for the videos. Keep up the great work.

White clover=Lone Wolf McQuade. I learned something today. How about white clover in a squash/melon patch? The shading out could terminate the clover and free up the nitrogen.

Your philosophy is sound. Execution is an adventure that makes life worth living. I anxiously await updates. Remember: Even a setback instructs, makes you think about it. At 77 I am disabled and unable to copy you here in Las Vegas with very bad soil and at a rental. Someday maybe I can buy a house with a few fruit trees and start a food forest. Suggestion: Don't stop at 1 perennial or let the ground lie exposed, e.g., plan for a winter crop (rye?). You don't need a pathway. If your garden looks like a tangled mess (jungle) where veggies can barely be seen in the nitrogen fixers, then it will look like Fukuoka's. Once you get past your preconceived picture of how a natural state should look, you might transcend the master in the realm of annuals. Suggestion: Your "dry stack" wall is poorly done. It's very simple. Watch a video instruction for 10 minutes to get the fundamentals.

We bought this farmette in PA 11 years ago and the grassy lawns around the house were decent but weedy and we never did anything to it except for mowing. About 3 years ago we had a drought and grass took a big hit. Now the grass has been replaced by Dutch white clover. We didn’t plant it. I like it! What you are saying here makes sense to me because we are watching nature’s repair in big time.

Cant wait to see the updates on this!

I was just looking for this yesterday and here is a video today about it!

1:41 he censored himself from saying 'shit' 😂😂 That was reall smooth capn'

This is great, Diego. I think as small farms we have the responsibility to keep pushing the sustainability cars further. I’ve really been trying to close our farm’s loop and it’s been interesting so far.

Diego, I have started Dutch white clover in three of my beds as an experiment just like you have described. I seeded the entire bed very heavy with clover. I live in Northern Florida and we do see frost and freeze conditions mostly at night. As theses beds develop I will plant Tomato's and Peppers as in the fashion you described. It will be exciting to see how this works going forward. If it doesn't work nothing is lost as I have gained roots and nitrogen in my soil building efforts along with green manure.

I cannot wait to see how your Clover experiment works. I'm in Wales (UK). I have a patch of clover on our grass so I will plant a tomato plant in the middle in a bottomless pot. I will let you know how it goes. Thank you for all your amazing videos, they are very inspirational. 😊🦋🐝😊

What about mowing the clover with a bagger on the mower periodically? You’d encourage clover growth, keep the weeds from taking over and you’d get biomass to compost in the process. Oh set the mower on it’s very highest setting. It’d be like a farmer baling hay. If they plant clover and alfalfa for hay and don’t cut and bale it a few times a year the weeds take over fast. When you cut it it keeps the weeds at bay. The mower will not take all the clover when you cut and some of the clippings will be left as a light mulch. BUT if you mow it and don’t bag the clippings you’re gonna mulch your clover to death.

Absolutely works!!! Use it in no till Cannabis crops all the time ✌️🇨🇦

the farmer i work with is planning to add lots of white clover seed to the land. I keep honeybees on that land so it was exciting news for the honey crop. I didn't factor in just how much the nitrogen fixation will enrich the land over time. I compost a lot and watch a lot of your videos. I'm a produce guy and get a lot of veggie scraps most nights (seems better to compost them than to landfill them). I combine free arborist woodchips and veggie scraps in a simple heap. The bigger the heap and the more I turn it the faster it goes. Its a big steaming pile, you would be proud. Turning it is a lot of work and sometimes I wonder about what I could be breathing in. Your videos are inspiring me to consider passive aeration rather than turning so often.

a farm I worked at a few years back had some success doing this with kale and dutch white clover. I can't recall if they fertilized, but it drastically reduced irrigation needs by keeping more moisture in the soil. The kale was super healthy

I am really excited that you are trying this, and look forward to your progress. I was back and forth on this when I was thinking about doing companion planting in my annual square foot garden, but ended up interplanting with Marigolds and Nasturtiums because I do crop rotation every year. However, I just put in a bed for my asparagus and think DWC would be a good choice there, and I am starting to wonder if it wouldn't help fill out my patchy strawberry bed. There is a slightly larger clover variety called "Ladino" that I was considering based on its productivity but it apparently doesn't reseed well, so it may not perfectly fit this application. In the same vein I was watching one of your podcasts (probably Elaine but I have forgotten) and she mentioned doing the same thing for brassicas with a carpet of Thyme. Really got me considering the benefits of dropping crop rotations for fixed beds with an established perennial cover crop (or mix). You get year round soil coverage and can just drop in the associated annual at the start of the season. Either way you get a living mulch, and a whole suite of soil exudates to play with. In theory we should all be doing this; I'm glad you are actually trying it. Edit: how did I not see that this was posted months ago... from the comments it sounds like the clover didn't take. do you have any take-aways from your experience? or have you shelved the idea?

cant want to see how this turns out, I think that this is an awesome idea!

I think this should work out ok. Your cover crop & food crop are from ecosystems of the same succession (grassland) and both need similar biological help to make adequate nutrients available (bacterial dominant plants). Perhaps this might not work if you mixed plants rom different successional ecosystems. Say strawberry & clover. The berry requires woodland biology in the soil and not a grass land cover crop. I’ll be excited to see your results!

Cool project. I was thinking of doing the same thing. I was hoping that you would have the clover established and then cut out the holes for the tomatoes as you detailed at the beginning. With the established nitrogen-fixing going on, I would think that the tomato plants would benefit more from the clover if the clover was previously established The tomato primarily needs Nitrogen at the beginning of its life cycle when it is putting out leaves and growing fast. Just a thought. Looking forward to updates!

I think this is a great idea for fruit bearing crops where we many have a tendency to limit yield with too much nitrogen. I’ll try it because I’m looking to reduce inputs, and don’t need a market yield. THANKS👍

I've tried it. Didn't work. I couldn't maintain monocrop of clover. It was, in few weeks, overgrown by weeds. Also when I've tried to weed-out I was left with bare ground...So I decide to speak with neighbors and they provide me their grass clippings which are now only fertilizer for plants when I mulch. They get rid of the problem and I have extra organic matter source.

One cool thing I did was plant it in with my sweet potato slips. I had to manually pull some clover while they worked on getting established by eventually the sweet potatoes took control and smothered out all the clover. I imagine this provided nutrients to the plants. I had an amazing amount of sweet potatoes. If I do this again, I’ll wait for the potatoes to establish a little better and then seed the clover.

Seems like a solid idea. I was thinking in my own garden of doing something similar. I had planned to seed clover after most of the veg came out. I think I will try this approach. I am going to stack an extra step though. Once the clover grows enough to be cut back, I will use that cutting to feed my chickens, then use the chicken output in my compost.

Maybe the greens harvester ot hedge trimmer can allow for chop and drop especially when they start to flower, then you can plant shorter veg.

I love how you’re always thinking… how can this be done better!

You are keeping the mycorrhizae active!

interesting idea i will try it this week greetings from Poland

This is so cool. I had the same idea recently. Gonna have to search your videos to find out if it works because it's such a cool idea.

I have corn and pumkins with clover between rows did put 46-0-0 when leaves got a little light green. Some stalks are 7 to 8 foot tall with 3 and 4 ears. michigan.

Really digging this idea and am planning to implement in a few areas! Like others, I’m eager to see Diego’s results. Happy soil building all!

This does work. I think UGA did experiments with corn and white Dutch years ago. It went very well. I personally have been using clover in my garden for the past two years and it works great. I did make the mistake of using red clover the first year and it was a nightmare keeping it cut back enough for my annuals to establish. I also think the clover spreads powdery mildew so you have to stay on top of it. Anywho have fun!

We have no frost here in new Zealand so this is the best for me

I was considering to implement bocking 14 comfrey plants in my garden beds inbetween veggies to feed the soil year round, and i can use the leaves als a mulch and it will feed the soil and build it up with a lot of time :)

Great great great video! Thank you so much

Clovers do well in South Central Alaska too. The moose and I love them.

I was surprised to hear you would possibly use roundup if needed. I have heard it stays in the soil for years?

You should not use round up. It stays active in the soil for a few years. It technically breaks down quickly bit it breaks down into metabolites that are just as bad or worse than the actual glyphosate. Advancing Eco Agriculture has a whole podcast episode about it.

I was looking at a clover or some legume as cover crop that does exactly that. Just starting out with gardening and put some beans for now, wich are not intended to be harvested but choped and dropped to put something else after. My idea is to make a policulture on each bed, so tall plants would be planted on one side to avoid shading. Still have to learn a lot because i literally have only one year experience :))

Nice experiment. I want to try this with my corn. Is there a follow up video with the results?

can we grow.white.dutch clover here in the philippines? in the tropical areas? and if so where can we find these seeds?

I I have been using this method this year. I had my rows growing wheat, turnips, crimson and white clover over the winter. It is a new garden with kind of poor soil. This spring I cut back the cover crops with a weed eater, then planted transplants into the row. The clover keeps growing back. When the other covers regrow taller then I think they should be I chop them off and use the residue as a mulch. The only problem I have had is that when I chop the covers back it gives weeds a chance to grow and I find myself having to do a fair bit of weeding - more then I would like to do.

You don't need fertilizers at all. But you need something. Vegetable crops are hungry crops, they're not natural. They've been selected to grow big, so they need more than a "normal" soil. It's especially true for hungry crops like cabbage or squash. In our community garden, we don't have fertilizers at all. But we do have wood chips, horse manure, a little compost, and spent barley. You can do it with pure wood chips. Why ? Coz it can provide everything, including nitrogen. But it takes time for those nitrogen fixing bacteria to develop in the mulch, and essentially turn carbon into nitrogen. It also takes time for a descent worm population to form, giving us the best natural fertilizer for plants : worm castings. Or for mycorhizae to develop, giving crops potassium and phosphorus, as well as additional water. So the answer is no, you cannot do a vegetable farm without any input. You need an outside mulch source at the very least. But if this source is from landscape gardeners around your area, then it's sustainable. If you want more yield, you can use spent barley from a local brewery, grass clippings again from local landscape gardeners etc... What is not possible, is to use a nitrogen fixing plant to give nitrogen to its neighboors. That's not how it works. If there is nitrogen in the soil, the legume will take it. If there is not, yes it will take it from the air through the symbiotic bacteria. But it's not been proven it can share it with its neighboors during the life of the plant. Why would it ? What's in this for the plant ? Despite this, some farmers are experimenting with cover crops, trying to be self sufficient. So far all they can tell is that you need about 3 times your crop surface in cover crops to produce enough mulch to feed your soil. That is, just feeding its necessary ration. Not building it. If your soil was already poor (and it often is for new gardeners in a new plot), you need a lot more. So cover crops work for cereal farmers, like wheat. Some even experiment with just wild weeds : they don't sow any cover crop, they just let the soil grow weeds. And it works even better, because those weeds are perfectly adapted. They have much better tools now to destroy those weeds before sowing crops, so it's a good method. But with vegetable farming, you need a lot more nutrients, so you have no choice but to bring in material. What's more difficult for me to understand, is why go to all this trouble, when your garden is inherently not sustainable at all, as you live near San Diego and have to water it like crazy ? If you want to lower your impact on the environment, simply move to an area with more rain.

Fast forward 2 years - did it work?

Diego, have you also considered perennial peanut?

Where is the follow up video on this? I want to see how it turned out.

To make it simple , can one use weed killers to kill off the weeds to use as mulch instead of having to cut it.

The headline is really asking, can plants survive without human intervention. The answer is yes, they survive better.

an this be planted in clay soil to help break it up toward my journey to loam soil?

I've got some peanuts intermixed all over my yard. The only problem is they grew really well, and in some cases it grew big enough to start covering my main crop in a few cases. I see it's been a year since you originally posted that video. How did it work out for you?

Chuck Norris jokes never get old for me.

Just make your own liquid with weeds+water in barrel ferment for 6 weeks.

I like the idea thumbs up... BUT, there are some questions: what if we're growing other cash crops like lettuce? Also, have you considered the fact that the roots of annual cover crops are beneficial ?

Whatever happens don't use roundup

Has there been a follow up to this yet? looking through the videos i do not see one...

How bad would it be to use aquatic plant life laying on the Shoreline of Lake Erie as fertilizer? Would the pollution from the lakes plant life be more detrimental than beneficial? Can anyone help me on this question please thanks.

I was shocked to hear you say round up is in your bag of tricks. Any context would be greatly appreciated.

During the first minute, when he was talking about getting enough nitrogen, I was like “pee, pee, pee, pee, pee, pee, pee, pee, pee, pee, pee, pee”

I like your idea but just to let you know those nodules don't give out nitrogen until they start breaking down which is going to be a year or two after you drove those plans still worth it but that's how it works as far as I know

Clover seed does better when mixed with another seed.

Hi Diego, I love your way of thinking. If it works, which I will defenitly try, how will you call this system

1:40 and this sh'.. you can make 🤣🤣🤣

Just do what the native Americans did , they buried fish next to their plants .. use a can of water only packed sardines and watch your plants get more than just nitrogen and see them grow ,grow, grow ..Happy Gardening!

Clover on bottom 🐝 🌽 peas trellis nitrogen tree's

Looks good!

This why I say grow gardens not lawns

From my own research, I believe this will work best with a sandy soil, and if you first top dress with a very rich compost (not mix in) and then some mulch on top (leaves, sugarcane, more broken down wood) and continue to chop and drop over time. The sandy soil allows for the roots to go deeper and be less likely to be choked out, and it allows for nutrients to drop down as you water. A lot of the world's "best soil" is very sandy with a heavy top dress of dead organic matter. It isn't mixed in. You are essentially copying that.

oh, Masanobu Fukuoka...

Link to the fallow up video?

Interesting.

Gidday Diego. Firstly loving the podcasts great content, very interesting and a complete different aspect of agriculture that I am used to. Regarding to the above video definatly has potential personally I think the white clover will outcompete the other species in this case tomatoes. I'm not from america but I can only assume that the Californian climate is the ideal growing condition for white clover. Therefore I suspect mowing or trimming the white clover may be needed. I just wondered if you had considered using other white clover varieties perhaps cultivars that have smaller leaves which may result in lower production. They may grow to a lower height allowing less competition or the possibility to grow other cash crops. www.specseed.co.nz/portfolio-item/clover/ Keep up the good work Greetings from new zealand

Love it

If clover seed looks like it is to deep it is Better to broadcast and tamp

Wow your on board you sound like me now

It's time for an update....

Good Job Diego if you want to see this already in action watch my video

Permiculture 101

Definitely want to see how this filled in.

You would use Round Up in your ORGANIC garden?! 😱

...🙂🙂🙂

Im pretty sure I watch old video with growing clover with annual vegetables. I don't remember it very good, but the results made me abandon this idea.

Way better off covering the full bed with cardboard, than using roundup. I wouldn't ever consider roundup as an option. The stuff will be banned in our lifetimes; 21 countries already banned or restricted it's use. it's that bad.

Like I said dude I don't fertilize I just water seldomly

I made it almost to end of video and when I heard you mention that you could use a one time shot of roundup??????? Please tell me you did not say that because I thought you knew what roundup is? I'm quite confused and really quite disappointed to say the least. I enjoy your channel and just could not believe you actually would use that vile chemical Diego. Hoping for a response......

KELP, blood meal, bonemeal. Guano from bats. Worm castings. Compost tea.

You could put urine on the list.

Urine