>>1068501To my understanding you're not wrong; you'd take the cover crops, break them down a bit (shears or just brute force), mix them well into the soil, THEN tarp it to trap the heat and cook any bad disease/bugs/bacteria in the soil. The last part might not be necessary, but goodness knows the heat will help break down the plant material.
I've been solarizing my beds for the first time, since both are full of root knot nematodes. The closer bed in my pic was my first ever garden, and just tilling in marigolds and growing brassicas/resistant tomato varieties has reduced the RNN dramatically. I'm hoping this will finish the job.
The red box had BAD RNN my first year, which sucked because I really thought I had been careful about not introducing it to the new soil. There were also tree roots coming up into it, which may have been a carrier for the "pathogen".
There's hardware cloth and weed cloth at the bottom now, with one round of marigold tilling with solarizing, I hope to cut the population by at least half. I'll do the same brassica/resistant tom technique I used for "the pile" and hope for the best.
I get to pull the plastic off August 1st for the red box and September 1st for the round pile. I can't wait. The soil is literally 120+ degrees on a sunny day, so I'm hopeful.
