Chopping cover crops

[habitat-gardener]

So I’m growing Kodiak mustard this year for its glucosinolates, which suppress nematodes. To activate the nematode suppressive chemicals, the instructions from Mighty Mustards say to chop the mustard as finely as possible, then incorporate it into the soil and water it in (and then wait 3 weeks before planting). We’ve been chopping by hand (knives and cutting board!!) and wondering if something like a string trimmer in a garbage can would chop it finely enough. Or other suggestions?

It just started flowering this week and is 5-6 ft. high, so that’s a lot of biomass!

[Whwoz]

Anywhere near that you could hire a flail mulcher from?

[habitat-gardener]

Anywhere near that you could hire a flail mulcher from?

That looks like an ideal solution for a farmer!
But this is a community garden plot with 2-4 ft. wide beds and mulch trenches between the beds.
We used a rototiller when I first got the plot because it was bumpy and had not been gardened well. It was kind of awkward to maneuver it in this plot, and that was before we built beds and mulched between them.

I noticed that Renee's Garden Seeds (which generally sells small packets to backyard gardeners) sells Kodiak mustard, but does not link to instructions from the company that produces Kodiak. Renee's does include generic cover crop info, though. I wonder how many people. have tried to use the Renee's packets and been faced with a 6 ft. stand of mustard!

[MissS]

The garbage can sounds like a good idea unless someone at the CG has a small mower to run over it with or a chipper/shredder to shred it.

[bower]

I've grown mustard, and it's not an easy plant to handle. Very irritating, and even with gloves it was no fun to hand process seeds. That is after drying it as well. (That is, the regular mustard Sinapis alba).
But it seems to me, there are too many textures in a six foot stand of mustard for one process to work. You almost want to strip the leaves and process separately from the stalks, which are very tough. Leaves are an easy chop but stems were hard to reduce to small pieces - I just composted them in the end. There wasn't enough leaf to bother with either by the time they had set seeds.
Let us know if you figure out a machine solution that works well for the whole plant.

[habitat-gardener]

@bower, we have ended up just composting the toughest stems. I started out wanting to get all the biomass back into the soil, but it has already taken a couple weeks to do a few beds (the whole plot is just under 1000 sq. ft., and I planted Kodiak mustard on fewer than half of the beds). A cutting board and sharp knife work well for the tops (including leaves stripped off the bigger stems), and then we use straight-bladed pruning shears to cut some of the stems (the long straight blade enables cutting several stems at a time). It's still a lot of biomass to incorporate! I figured out the recommended seeding density for my planting beds, so I didn't overseed. It would've been easier if we were getting started at daybreak instead of 9-10 am, because by noon it's almost 80F some days.

If I ever grow this cover crop again, I will probably plan to incorporate it when it's still tender and no more than a foot high. I bought a pound of it!

[karstopography]

I used my machete and hacked away as the mustard was resting helpless and innocent in the beds. Forty whacks, or was it forty one? I later covered up the carnage with a shovel full or two of soil. In a matter of days, there’s was no evidence of mustard ever being there.

[zeuspaul]

I am dealing with local native wild mustard (Brassica nigra?) which seems similar to Kodiak mustard. That stuff is a pain to deal with once its stalks reach 1/2 inch / 12 mm or more. I use heavy duty Rotary Vortex .013 string and it has to fight to cut the stalk.

I think the method and tools @habitat-gardener used would be a good way to deal with it in small quantities. I would add a chair and a hedge trimmer. It would likely also struggle with 1/2 inch stalks.

hedge.jpg

[bower]

WRT the possibility of overseeding - I tried this as an animal barrier/deterrent on the border of a bed. I sowed thickly in a band, and I didn't thin them afterwards. In the oversown condition, they only grew about a foot tall, and flowered earlier.
So the plan to cut them when a foot tall and tender, could also be sown more densely to get more biomass from your plot.
This might work for me too, if the result is tender enough to run through a blender (I have an old one I wanted to repurpose for garden things.) Our soil is too cold to break down chopped material in the same season it is grown.

[jbclem]

I use an old 20" x 24" paper cutter, from my photography days. It has trouble with tough stalks, but I use it to chop up weeds and plants for my compost pile. I also have long blade ARS pruners that work well but the paper cutter is faster.

You could also soup up a weed wacker with an Echo string head that will take up to .155" strings, I'm using Oregon square .155 strings on my Flowtron leaf mulcher(which is an upside down electric string trimmer) and they really work well and last a long time. Or you could use a metal brush cutting blade on the string trimmer and try it inside a large plastic garbage can.

[habitat-gardener]

I use an old 20" x 24" paper cutter, from my photography days. It has trouble with tough stalks, but I use it to chop up weeds and plants for my compost pile. I also have long blade ARS pruners that work well but the paper cutter ….

I thought about looking for a used paper cutter!
And we have been using a long blade pruner for the stems.