Help with Chopping and Dropping

[fliptop]

I got some seeds of Pigeon Pea with the dual purpose goal of getting some home grown eats along with engaging in this thing called Chop&Drop. So these things have grown quite vigorously. One has even surpassed my 6' tall PSM seedling by at least a foot. But alas, no peas to harvest.

For those on this forum that Chop&Drop, could you explain how? At what point do you chop? Where do you drop? Do you ever get peas, if you please?

Here's the PSM and PP friend:


Here's my M-4 leading a conga line of Pigeon Peas:

Thanks!

[Finca La Isla]

Perhaps you can chop and drop pigeon pea but we’ve never thought of it for that really.  I don’t think it makes sense to chop and drop a productive tree.  We use glyrcidium, flemengia, Mexican sunflower, and many more.  With these you don’t worry about production cycles and they don’t die quickly like gandul. 
You walk around, cut branches, and cut the stuff up for mulch at will without worrying about the cycle of the chop and drop plants themselves.
Peter

[elouicious]

never used pigeon pea but in general for chop and drop you cut the plant at the base, mulch or chop in some fashion, then spread around the base of whatever you want to fertilize

[Frog Valley Farm]

Intuition, for situations like this.  I like the look of the unchecked diversity but to stimulate life, removing less than 1/3 and either dropping in situ or to be used for composting will still build soil.  That makes the most sense and still keep whatever aesthetic you prefer whether that be hedged or thinned..  Common sense and your own intuition is usually the right way for most gardens.  Yes pigeon peas mak peas in Florida.

[fliptop]

Thanks for the replies! At this point I'll just let the Pigeon Peas do their thing and only trim when they're touching their neighboring mango trees. I am hoping for peas, both for food and for replanting. These root very easily from cuttings, by the way.

[Satya]

We had them interplanted with mangoes and papayas. They had pods and my wife harvested them and sprouted more from those seeds. Ours looked scraggly not as beautiful and dark green leaved as yours and tipped easily with strong winds. We were planting for nitrogen fixation then for chop and drop. In my experience they don’t take transplant well, i tried and killed some.

[pineislander]

I can help since I've used them for both food and chop/drop. Most pigeon peas varieties are day length sensitive. In Florida that means they tend to grow vegetative during long days of summer and begin to flower as daylength shortens into fall and winter. They bear on branch tips so some formative pruning can increase the number of branch tips. The prunings can be used as chop/drop when they are vegetative then when fall approaches you can get the pea harvest.
After the peas finish near the end of the dry season you can get a massive chop/drop by pruning very low almost all the branches which will regrow during the rainy season. Depending on position, density and luck you might get 1-2 or 3 years before the pigeon peas reach old age and die off.

I agree with Peter there are other great long term perennial plants including legumes but in the very early stages of succession or just for a short cycle pigeon peas are easy and ideal dual purpose.

Here is a drone eye view of a first year pigeon pea hedge along both sides of a 100 ft long tree planting. There are 10 Sweet Tart mango trees in there, banana, plantain, papaya yam, cassava, sweet potato eggplant and many other plants, herbs, etc. The pigeon peas were direct seeded and thinned to one foot spacing. The pigeon peas lasted about 2 years and even after removing them a few volunteers still come up here and there into year 3-4. I did harvest many meals of fresh peas, froze some and eventually harvested 20 pounds dry peas. I considered it a success.



During the second year I planted banana between the tree beds @ 6 ft spacing and various longer term legume trees between each banana. The banana served to produce chop drop and by year 5 I expect the legume trees to be ready for chop/drop.
This pic shows them well grown just before a large chop/drop cycle.


I'm still using them elsewhere.

I see yours are planted in a grass lawn which does make mowing complicated. You could probably encircle a well mulched fruit tree in a hedge form and still mow around that. Just control them from growing inwards and crowding or shading the tree favoring the outward growing branches. 

[fliptop]

Great info, pineislander, and great images! I was wondering when they would produce . . . I don't have as much space as you do, so don't think I'd mind reseeding every couple years. I didn't think about encircling the fruit trees--so far I've just tried to give each mango a pigeon pea friend to serve as mulch every so often. I did start a couple plants very easily from cuttings, so may do a bunch more to help circle the wagons. My goal is to get rid of as much grass as possible by crowding it out with plants. Thanks again for that helpful info!