WATCH PART TWO: Garden cover crop termination (without a tractor!)
• Garden cover crop term...
Does companion planting with beans, peas, or other legumes give nitrogen to neighboring plants, or is this a myth? Have you ever heard to companion plant with beans or peas to give neighboring plants more nitrogen? Or that simply by planting beans in your garden, your soil will gain nitrogen? In this video, we dive into this topic more deeply!
While it is true that legumes CAN fix nitrogen from the atmosphere and onto their roots (stored in nodules on the root system), legumes do not fixate nitrogen for the benefit of the neighboring plants: they produce it for themselves, for the production of their seed pods! We explain this further in the video, but to summarize here: if you harvest the beans or peas from your garden, you no longer get the nitrogen benefits of legumes! In order to fix the nitrogen and keep it in your soil for OTHER plants to benefit from, you need to do two things:
1) Inoculate with rhizobia
2) terminate (kill) the legume before the plant has gone to seed, ideally at flowering stage or just before (though, note, you could choose to wait and terminate later but at that point the nitrogen in the plant will be held ABOVE ground, not in the roots below, and the entire plant, including seed pods, will need to be worked into the soil to achieve nitrogen benefits)
We'll go over this more in detail in this video, and show you how we cover crop with peas in the spring to help achieve organic matter and nitrogen benefits in our soil!