Thank you, Dr. Redhawk, for all of your information, I am learning a lot and hope that I can transform my rocky, clay dust into nutritious soil for my family's veggies but I am new to some of these ideas and have some questions:
1. If the root systems of even weeds are valuable for building soil nutrition webs and I struggle to get enough mulch to keep the weeds at bay, should I cut weeds off at soil level and let their greens lie and repeat, repeat, repeat or pull them roots and all for mulch? What about grasses?
2. What do I do once a crop is finished? Unless it is a root crop, do I just cut it at soil level and use it as mulch with roots left to rot in the ground? What about corn (I only grow types that are harvested once dry), do I leave such thick roots in-ground and try to plant around them? Stalks take a long time to break down, do I try to use as mulch?
My Aussie climate is very dry so it takes a long time for things to break down but the ground also quickly bakes dry if uncovered yet I can grow something year round so I don't want to let a plot sit idle if I can help it. Still, I struggle to keep things from drying out.
I
compost but struggle to get things to break down, heaps of kitchen scraps, leaves, browns, but rarely do I have anything like green grass clippings because we never have excess green here! I do vermicomposting also and rabbit litter and poo go directly as mulch.
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