My swale is five months old, and while we didn’t have a birthday celebration (we’re not crazy – we’ll wait until it’s six months before baking a cake), I did treat it to a new cover crop.
The cowpea (an annual legume) that looked so beautiful back in March was, a couple of weeks ago, a leggy mess and just about ready to keel over.
The sweet potato that is going to be the swale’s perennial cover crop had spread a little, but not sufficiently to cover the swale mound. So what I needed was to plant a cool-season cover crop to take the place of the dying cowpea and keep the soil covered over winter – hopefully outcompeting grass and weeds in the process.
Following the advice of my local permaculture guru, Geoff Lawton, I went down to my local rural produce store and got three types of legumes that grow around these parts (northern NSW) in winter: lupins, vetch and field pea.
I also bought some inoculant, which is used to coat the seeds. The beneficial bacteria in the inoculant allow the legumes to do a very important part of their job: taking nitrogen from the air and fixing it in the soil.
We had a bit a wet weather after I broadcast the seeds all over the swale and the dam wall and there have some good germination rates, as you can see from this photo, which shows the new legumes emerging as a living mulch around an orange tree, amid sweet potato and straggly bits of dead cowpea in the background.
Stay tuned for more swale updates as my food forest takes shape.
