permaculture

["Jerome Osentowski" <jerome@crmpi.org>]

Not black, but clear plastic.  Black only warms the soil.  We use black on
our beds to speed up breakdown of residues in spring.  The worms and
micorbes find a great home under the black plastic for the ten days that it
takes for everything to go back to soil.  clear plastic would kill all the
worms down to two inches.  The two layers with a three inch gap between
creates a greenhouse effect. This is also good for solarizing a bed that
gets total infested with afids.   When I first started growing commercial
salad greens we would plant just one type of green in a bed , ie  a 20 foot
bed of mizuna , and it would sometimes get covered with afids. Then we got
smart and started mixing all the greens  with herbs on the  edges, and we
seldom  had the problem again .  We also did not need to mix the greens in
the large mixing box, because they were already mixed when they were being
picked.  It took a couple of years for that light to go, but it finally did,
and it saved us a lot of work.  Now I only plat a few salad green, and rely
on sorral, weeeds , and volenteers , and go down to the spring to get water
cress.  jerome
--
Jerome Osentowski, Director
Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute
PO Box 631
Basalt, CO 81621   U.S.A.

Tel/fax (970) 927-4158    E mail: jerome@crmpi.org

For more information, please visit our web site at <<www.crmpi.org>>


----------
>From: mIEKAL aND <dtv@mwt.net>
>To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
>Subject: Re: [permaculture] Broadminded thinking?
>Date: Thu, Apr 11, 2002, 10:31 AM
>

> Ive left black plastic over quack grass areas for several years & still 
> it'll
grow
> back within a month or two.  the only way we remove it here is by hand.  Ive
read
> numerous accounts that a pig tractor does wonders for removing quack grass 
> but
have
> never seen it in operation.  We make a great coffee substitute with 
> quackgrass
> roots, just dry them & grind them.. tastes remarkably like cafix.  mIEKAL
>
> Jerome Osentowski wrote:
>
>> Rick, In replaceing glyposphates, we use two layer of clear plastic to
>> solarize the quackgrass, which will come back through sheetmulch.  We leave
>> it on for a month, and have had good results.  I have wiped out much of the
>> quackgrass here and have only a few reserves ,that I manage as fodder for 
>> my
>> rabbits. It is 18% protien, and the only green in good supply at this time.
>> It also has many medicinal properties, helps with the prostate.  So don't
>> nuke all those weeds.  jerome
>> --
>> Jerome Osentowski, Director
>> Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute
>
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