Leguminous Green Manure Plants

Many plants can be used as gmccs but this document focuses on legumes plants belonging to the fabaceae family.

Leguminous green manure plants.

Used to refer to a plant that has its seeds in a pod such as the bean or pea. Leguminous green manures such as clover and vetch contain nitrogen fixing symbiotic bacteria in root nodules that fix atmospheric nitrogen in a form that plants can use. There are two types of green manures. Grasses such as annual ryegrass oats rapeseed winter wheat and winter rye.

You can think of them as plant offerings to mother nature that will increase future crop yields help make plants more resistant to pests and keep the soil fertile for another season. Planting cover crops some gardeners sow cover crops plants in spring especially in new garden plots to improve the soil and choke out weeds. Types of green manure. This performs the vital function of fertilization.

The seed is also called a pulse legumes are grown agriculturally primarily for human consumption for livestock forage and silage and as soil enhancing green manure well known legumes include alfalfa clover beans peas chickpeas lentils lupins. A legume ˈ l ɛ ɡ j uː m l ə ˈ ɡ j uː m is a plant in the family fabaceae or leguminosae or the fruit or seed of such a plant. Erosion control fallow operations especially tillage can leave the soil exposed to wind and water erosion. Green manure is the final product when crops are grown to be sewn back into the soil instead of harvested for human consumption.

Green manures usually perform multiple functions that include soil improvement and soil protection. Legumes are plants whose roots work with the bacteria in the soil to grab nitrogen in the atmosphere. The charity garden organic recently found that growing green manure can reduce the loss of the key nutrient nitrogen in the soil by up to 97 percent compared to soil left bare. Green manures include legumes such as vetch clover beans and peas.

Disease control legume green manures provide a break in cereal and oilseed crop rotations to help minimize disease pressure. Nitrogen is a valuable plant nutrient. Green manures belonging to the pea and bean family legumes have the additional capacity of storing fixing nitrogen from the air to their root nodules but only in summer. Green manure cover crops referred to hereafter as gmccs are plants used to cover and improve the soil as well as to positively impact the ecology of the land and other crop plants.

So green manures seem to be the perfect solution. This is called nitrogen fixating and is helped along by an inoculant or treatment medium to help the legumes work.