Hello,
I've been a lurker here for quite awhile and decided to sign up. I own a smaller garlic and hot pepper startup farm and hopefully will begin selling this year to the permies. Last year I produced a few thousand lbs of peppers and a few hundred lbs of garlic and donated all of it. This year is scaled up even further and I plan to have 1/2 acre of garlic densely planted this fall. I've purchased a 5 row garlic planter from europe, I plan to develop some sort of notill/lowtill weed free method of planting garlic every year. Right now the plan is to plant 1/2 acre of Oats, i'll run the planter through the tall oats planting the garlic than i'll chop and drop the oats with a sicklebar mower (just a sythe for this year, ill probably buy the mower next year if I like this method). I'll than rake the long oats on top of the garlic beds as best as I can. Eventually I will have a compost spreader that I can drop a layer of 1"-3" thick well composted leaf and manure compost on top of this as nutrients and further weed supression.
My question is, when does the oats become viable seed? I will need to chop the oats before this happens so i dont get a large crop of oats comming up as well.
Thanks for the input
