Covering garden with plastic.

I have just dug my allotment over having now finished picking almost all produce. I have also covered the freshly dug ground with a layer of 10 year old horse manure at the rate of 1 barrow load per 10 square yards.
Conflicting views seem to exist on whether or not it is best to cover everything over now with black plastic damp proof course sheeting.
Has anyone out there got any thoughts on this or experienece with this.

Allen

 

It would stop the winter rains washing the nutrient out Allen. I sliced plastic into the ground on the field I had, as it was too much for me to sort out straight away.

I grew stuff in pots on top of it for the first year & then had reasonably clean ground under it the following year.

Other thing you could do instead would be to sow a green manure crop on top, that would hold the nutrient, then you dig it in in the spring.

 

Hi Allen

Why do you want to cover up ,, is it to stop weeds etc , I would wait a while and let some rain get into the soil first which the worms will apreciate and help with soil structure , I know horse muck can contain weed seed as I top dressed my borders in late spring and the amout of baby pussy willow plants I have had to pull out , when I had a alotment I did use old carpet to keep the weeds down so I would say yes but leave a while .

Spruce

 

If you've already had crops out of it, then I'd hazard a guess that you don't have a major problem with weeds (of course there'll be some, but I mean deep rooted perennial infestations).

At this time of year, not much will be growing now until spring anyway, so I'd guess that the plastic sheet won't do a great deal of weed controlling between now and spring.

Another reason some people recommend covering the ground with black plastic sheeting is to get the soil to warm up quicker in spring. Fair enough, but to me it seems like a lot of effort for little gain.

There are downsides to consider too. If the soil is under plastic sheeting, guess where all the slugs are going to hide, where the birds and hedgehogs can't get them. Another downside is that you can't control the air circulation under there. There will be pockets of air, which is fine, but there may also be areas where the plastic is so flush with the ground that no air can circulate, and then you start getting nasty sour ground.

I think there are pros and cons, which is why you get conflicting advice. But to me, even the positives don't seem significant enough to me to justify the expense and effort.

 

I put plastic sheet down over winter where I've cultivated in the autumn and want to keep my clay soil dry (and warm) for a seed bed in spring, or for weed supression where I'm going to plant out early from cell trays.

I've keep getting newcomers telling me that green manure is the right way to do it, and keep watching them struggling, churning it up in the sticky wet clay in spring and failing to get something usable.