Nurse Crops | Kaelan

Instead of fighting weeds or maintaining bare soil, you can plant fast-growing “nurse crops” that protect, feed, and prepare the soil for your permanent plantings — then die back naturally when no longer needed.

Traditional forestry uses this approach. Fast-growing alders fix nitrogen for slow-growing oaks. The alders create the soil conditions oaks need, then get outcompeted as the oaks mature. The nurse removes itself when its job is done.

Daikon radish breaks up compacted soil with its deep taproot, then winter-kills and leaves channels for tree roots. Nitrogen-fixing clover shades out weeds and feeds young fruit trees, then gets mowed as mulch. The nurse crop does the work — weed suppression, soil building, nutrient cycling — that you’d otherwise do manually.

Timing matters. The nurse crop must die or yield before competing with the permanent crop. Clover that becomes aggressive steals resources from what it was meant to support. The design includes the exit.

Masanobu Fukuoka used nurse crops in his no-till rice/barley system. White clover undersown with rice fixed nitrogen and suppressed weeds. No tillage, no weeding, no fertilizer. The system maintained itself through designed succession.

Any complex project benefits from temporary scaffolding that does work and then removes itself. Outsourced customer service teaches you what to build in-house, then you internalize. A rough outline structures thinking, then gets deleted. Worked examples scaffold understanding, then you wean off them.

Design for helpful obsolescence.

Related: [[stacking-functions]], [[zone-5]], [[creole-technology]]