Hay vs Straw

Im just now seeing this this post but another option is grow your own green manure and let the freeze kill it which is much cheaper. I would use some type of annual. Its not something i suggest but in my area they would grow wheat or something and walk in and spray it with glysophate to kill it and plant your desired plants or trees after a month or two.

Fine to use alfalfa when your trees need more N. Managing an orchard is a delicate choreography of managing the vigor of ones trees. The quest is to establish the Goldilocks ideal- not too hot and not too cold.

Once trees are established, too much release of N in late spring into summer can encourage excessive vigor for the production of best quality fruit- it can also cause some varieties to get locked into the juvenile state of perpetual excessive vigor.

If you live in the west you can control this by controlling the spigot- reduce vigor by reducing irrigation. In the humid region, we donā€™t have that option.

Organic derived nitrogen peaks in summer, at least in moist warm soil, which, in excess, is not ideal for for mature fruit trees. Even annual wood chip mulching seems to lead to excessive vigor in many soils after a decade of so.

In my vegetable garden the soil canā€™t be too rich, but Iā€™ve learned to go leaner with my fruit trees.

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Before real cold weather sets in I put a generous pile of mulch on mature carrots that are still in the ground. Most years they make it through till spring, though sometimes if we have a cold winter without a good depth of snow the tops may freeze. Theyā€™re still good. Occasionally I lose the whole batch - it just depends on the winter. But itā€™s well worth the chance - itā€™s great to have fresh carrots at that time of year when everything stored is feeling old and creaky. They donā€™t last a real long time in the spring because they want to grow but it extends our season quite a bit. I also dig down once or twice in the winter to replenish my bucket of roots stored in the rootcellar. We eat a lot of carrots. Sue

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Are they frozen when you dig them mid-winter? How do you get them out of rock-hard ground? Being biennial, I guess that makes sense that they can survive the winter.

The deep mulch usually keeps the ground from freezing, plus the snow insulates. The top mulch will often be frozen though and I just peel it back to dig the carrots (have to dig the snow off first). The ground isnā€™t frozen. Itā€™s a real treat to dig in the dirt in the middle of winter! Sometimes the top few inches of dirt is frozen (and thus the top inch or so of the carrots) but the rest of the root is good. Those occasional years when the ground freezes deep then so do the carrots, but they can take a surprisingly amount of cold. This year with 2-3 ft of snow Iā€™m not worried about frozen ground. Sue

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So you are saying if the carrot freezes, it is junk? I donā€™t think they would handle winter very well here, then. The ground freezes much deeper than the length of a carrot, even with insulation I imagine. Parsnips can handle freezing solid.

I let carrots freeze one year and they were just mush- good soil conditioning, I guess.

Iā€™m going to move the carrot discussion to Gardening (or I will attempt to anyway) in case others have interest or some experience to add. Sue
Mmm - well, I canā€™t figure out how to ā€œmoveā€ this so I just cut and pasted my comments to a new topic in Gardening - Overwintering Carrots.