You may think that the soil would be bare after all that clearing, pushing, shoving and leveling - well, you are correct, ground cover reinforcements incoming.
I have 2 ground cover species that I've planted. One is the normal cow grass (Axonopus compressus) which you'll find in school fields and housing areas and on road sides planted by the local councils while the other one is a creeping legume (Arachis pintoi), an aesthetically pleasing plant with oval shaped leaves, thick rhizomes with yellow flowers.
I sourced the cow grass in Sg. Buloh, Selangor state approx. 110km from my land.
The reason was that its the only few places that I could buy the grass in sod form
and not in flat plastic pieces. Although both are sized 1ft x 2ft, the sods are freshly cut from the ground with much thicker soil layer to slow down drying of the roots during transportation. It could also give some safety margins if I delay planting by a couple of days. Price for each sod is RM 1.20. The benefits that I gain from using this grass are:
1. The cheapest type of grass for sale
2. Fast growing
3. Best drought tolerance
Other grasses for sale are japanese carpet grass, bermuda grass, zoysia grass and pearl grass - normal and variegated
Grass planting is done by a couple of workers that I hire. Since the land area is big and a single shipment of grass sods could not cover the whole land, a planting strategy is required.
Considerations for planting are:
1. Slope areas having high soil erosion or rain water washdown.
2. Areas adjacent to durian sapling planting locations to establish the grass faster which in turn cools the adjacent soil where the sapling roots are.
The sods are divided into four smaller pieces. This ensures faster spreading and prevents the grass sods from growing vertically too much. What we want is horizontal spreading.
I've timed this grass planting to be in-line with the rainy season in Malaysia so that I won't have to do any watering before the sods are established and they will not get dried out.
We now talk about my second cover crop which is the pintoi peanut. As far as my own research goes, at least in Malaysia this plant is not being cultivated in any nursery. The seeds are also not sold anywhere. I've contacted seed sellers and nurseries in Thailand, Miami until a potential supplier in South America but none of them carry it.
The only thing that I can do is self-pick the plant that grows wildly at roadsides along Tapah and Chenderiang. Don't ask me how the plant got there but I believe someone must have planted it or throw it away and the plant survived and spread.
Advantages of the pintoi peanut as a ground cover are:
1. Nitrogen fixing legume
2. Drought tolerant when established
3. Has a landscaping plant characteristic with heart-shaped yellow flower
These are the cuttings that I've propagated from pintoi plants that was harvested from the roadside as I've mentioned before. These pintoi plugs are ready to be transplanted at the farm about 2 weeks after the cuttings were made.
As long as the roots are established they will do well. In all, I've prepared 100+ plugs and to be completely honest it's far from enough. I may need 1000+ plugs to cover the whole land area.
As far as other available options for ground cover crops, the below are the commonly used:
1. Mucuna bracteata (MB)
2. Calopogonium mucunoides (CM)
MB is almost always planted as cover crop in palm oil estates in Malaysia. Very fast growing (10-15 cm/day) which results in increase frequency of mowing. Unless mowing is done periodically (weekly basis), it will form layers that could reach knee length in height at least and could then be hiding places for snakes and other poisonous critters.
As a small farm owner, I couldn't afford to spend time and money for maintenance work for this particular cover crop and that's why I opted not to plant MB.
CM as it is commonly known when asking for its seeds in agricultural stores is a legume. It grows in a creeping manner and also a climber. It stems and leaves have hairs which could be abrasive to the skin which makes working with soil in the farm covered with this may not be desirable.
The fact that this plant is a climber poses a nuisance to small durian saplings and results in periodic maintenance work of freeing saplings from this climber is man hours I'm not willing to spend.
Update:
In all, I had mowed the cow grass 4-5 times since planting to keep it low so that the humidity around the soil would not get excessive and become breeding grounds for fungus. The grass does grow tall if not mowed. Mowing and leaving the grass clippings would add nitrogen back to the soil.
As for the Arachis pintoi, I observed that it will continue to spread albeit slowly when it's being smothered by weeds. It does not flower due to the same reason, I guess this is because the plant does not get full sun.
Spreading rate of the pintoi peanut seems faster than the 2 sq meter per year mentioned in websites discussing this plant. Most likely in my case it's due to the high rainfall that I have here in Tapah.
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