Intercropping Vegetables in Flower Fields Brings an Extra Five Thousand Yuan per Mu

In Shangyuan Village, Linglong Town, Lin'an City, Zhejiang, whenever the name Mei Hongxin, head of Zhexi Grand Canyon Flower Co., Ltd., comes up, the villagers all sing his praises. "Xiao Mei is a clever one; he has really brought the land to life, opening the eyes of those of us who have farmed the land our whole lives."

Mei Hongxin, who had just "fished" a handful of "gold" out of the land, was beaming with joy when he heard this. He said, "In a few more days, after the perfume lilies hit the market, other vegetables will be planted here."

A technician busy at the flower base explained that growing flowers is highly profitable, but flower cultivation is strongly seasonal, with the lily planting season running from July to December each year. As a result, from January to June each year, large tracts of land sit idle and abandoned, greatly reducing the land's utilization rate.

To keep the land from lying idle, Mei Hongxin decided to plant seasonal vegetables such as corn, cucumbers, green beans and tomatoes right after the lilies are harvested, which both meets the land's crop rotation needs and raises the land's overall utilization rate.

Pushing aside the soil beneath a vegetable plant, the technician explained, "The land is never idle, and it also purifies the toxins and bacteria in the soil, improves the soil's acid-base structure, and makes it more suitable for growing flowers." Any field where lilies have been planted will contain large amounts of bacteria and toxins. Moreover, flowers need a lot of fertilizer, and a single batch of flowers goes through several rounds of fertilizing, leaving quite a bit of excess fertilizer behind in the soil, which makes the soil salinity too high and is bad for flower cultivation. Planting vegetables can sterilize the soil well and change its structure. After the vegetables are harvested, all you need to do is irrigate the field a little and spray some insecticide, and you can plant lilies, saving quite a few steps and earning extra income on top of it. By rough calculation, after replanting with vegetables, the base's output value per mu was about 5000 yuan higher than before.