Soil Health and Multi Manure Mix

Green manure is a plant grown before the main crop and undecomposed plant is tilled and plowed into soil or left on the soil. It is well recognized for its positive role on maintaining and improving health of arable soil from during ancient agriculture.

Sometimes there is a confusion between green manure, cover crop and manure. All are not the same. Cover crop is grown to cover the soil, individually to control weeds and along with a main crop or crops for an harvest. E.g. clover, alfa alfa, creeper beans etc. Manure is a decomposed organic wastes from livestock or plant matter.

Green manure is grown for its array of benefits as follows;

• Improves organic matter (micro flora and micro fauna) in the soil
• Loosen the hard soil for better aeration
• Increases water holding capacity of soil
• Control growth of weeds
• Prevent from soil erosion

It plays a vital role in improving the health of poor soils, and maintaining the already healthy soil after every harvests. Failure of imparting such traditional method leads to loss of organic matter after successive harvests.

MULTI MANURE MIX

The concept of Multi Manure Mix (MMM) developed by traditional farmers to ameliorate living soils. While there is practice of green manure crops like sun hemp, daincha; leguminous plants such as cow pea, green gram, black gram, alfa alfa etc. for their nitrogen fixing properties and reducing synthetic nitrogen use for the succeeding crop. However, their benefit may vary from soil to soil, crop to crop and biotic factors.

Green manure is gaining importance in recent years, for its ecological advantage. As fertilizers costs are mounting high, decline of soil fertility has increased usage of green manure to retain organic matter into soil.

In the context, to maximize potential benefits from using green manure – Multi Manure Mix has been formulated. It consists of 14 different seeds of green manure crops to perform better with the extant crops. Only traditional heirloom varieties are used.

For example: Red Sorghum is super robust variety of millet helps to get rid of your weed problem and its hardy root penetrate upto 6 ft depth even in hardened, semi-rocky soils.

Like the above 13 different crops with phenomenal benefits are used in preparing Multi Manure Mixture Seeds. On an average, 25 kg is enough for sowing an acre of land.

Heirloom seeds are open-pollenated seeds of plant varieties cultivated for its distinct characteristics identified and preserved for over generations. Hundreds of heirloom seeds have become extinct in the last few centuries and what is left is a handful.

For more details and queries, write to terrabean.india@gmail.com/ desiseedsco@gmail.com.

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