Growing food is an empowering experience, even if it’s just a few items from your backyard garden. Harvesting fresh produce from your garden or allotment is incredibly satisfying, reminding us of our ability to nourish ourselves sustainably. Incorporating sustainable gardening practices, such as using cover crops, enhances our ability to produce healthy food while protecting the environment. The easiest, quickest, commonest foothold into this arena is probably a vegetable plot, say a couple of raised beds or some edible landscaping.
In permaculture, we often emphasize the importance of perennial food crops, which are less demanding on both the soil and the gardener. However, many of the vegetables we’ve come to love and enjoy regularly are annual plants, requiring new cultivation each year. While most gardeners are willing to put in the effort to get these veggies, we also must consider the soil, which supplies the food for our crops.
Annual vegetables are very hungry plants, and if grown relentlessly in the same space, they can zap the soil of the nutrients needed to grow more. That’s why good gardeners take the time to both rest their garden beds, as well as revitalize them. One of the favorite, most effective ways of doing this is using a cover crop.
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Cover crops are specifically cultivated plants designed to nourish the garden rather than provide food for the gardener. Often these crops are leguminous, a family of plant that fixes nitrogen into the soil, reinvigorating the garden’s fertility. If not legumes, cover crops are usual some sort of annual grain, which is grown to simply be cut down (before reaching maturity) and given back to the soil as organic, carbon-rich material. Different members of the brassica family, such as mustard and kale, are also sometimes used as cover crops.
There are many commonly used cover crops. For legumes, hairy vetch and crimson clover are used in winter, while cowpeas do well for resting beds in the summer. As for grains, rye and oats are popular wintertime covers, and frost-intolerant buckwheat is a fast-growing option in the hotter months. It’s important to remember that, while these crops aren’t going to make it to our dinner tables, they help to make sure our gardens can remain productive.
Cover crops play a vital role in maintaining healthy, nutrient-rich soils, while also offering numerous additional benefits.For example, cover crops suppress weeds. Rather than leaving beds bare, susceptible to weeds, and revitalizing them with compost only, cover crops will outgrow weeds and keep them at bay. Similarly, they can perform the natural duties that most weeds are trying to accomplish, such as breaking up deadpans, fixing nitrogen into the soil, or finding the bits of nitrogen that are there. They also help control pests and diseases by increasing biodiversity.
Equally important, however, is what cover crops do in aid of soil integrity. They act like a living mulch first, protecting the soil from drying out in the sun or washing away in the rain. Then, they are cut down and used as an organic mulch, providing the same protection. Their roots remain in the soil, keeping it stable and as they rot, they provide easy pathways for young roots to follow. This cycle adds organic matter to enrich both above and below the surface without any tilling, which destroys the natural soil layering, microbes, and mycelium.
In short, if we want to keep feeding ourselves from the garden, sometimes we have to return the favor and make sure the soil gets its due as well.
Cover crops are among the easiest plants to cultivate and require minimal care, making them ideal for sustainable gardeners. Using cover crops is an effective way to practice organic gardening while enhancing soil health and biodiversity. In fact, these attributes are why they are specifically chosen to be cover crops. They are planted by raking the very top of the soil, broadcasting the seeds thickly, and then raking them in or covering them with a thin layer of compost. Then, they usually spring up faster than weeds and provide a lush, impenetrable layer of green.
The other important part of using cover crops is to cut them down before they go to seed, which would result in them popping up again, this time like weeds. The best time to cut cover crops is about the time they flower or when seed heads first emerge. Some gardeners say to till them into the soil, but others believe this isn’t necessary, as we don’t till this way in nature, where everything grows just fine. Either way, allow the felled plants three or four weeks to dry out before planting vegetable crops. Mission accomplished.
In short, if we want to keep feeding ourselves from the garden, sometimes we have to return the favor and make sure the soil gets its due as well.” to: “In conclusion, to continue harvesting nourishing food from our gardens, we must prioritize the health of our soil by incorporating practices like planting cover crops.
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