Covering your garden bed

Benefits of using a Cover Crop
Cover crops, also known as green manures, are grown to improve and protect your garden beds. They are a natural way to suppress weed development in your soil by providing a little healthy competition for those unwanted intruders. Cover crops also reduce soil erosion and loss of nutrients leaching out of your soil because of the stabilizing effects of it’s root system.

Cover crops can also provide a home for beneficial insects such as ladybugs. Their root systems help loosen and aerate the soil, which improves rooting of future crops and promotes a healthy population of soil microbes. A variety of crops can be used such as field peas, fava beans, crimson clover, buckwheat, corn salad and fall rye. Each cover crop has specific benefits and care requirements.

How to Grow
A cover crop can be seeded anytime there is a bare area in the soil, however they are most commonly used in late summer or early fall when the vegetable crop has been harvested and the soil is bare. Another option is to sow cover crops around existing vegetables that are close to maturity, which allows for the cover crops to establish when the veggies are harvested.

To seed a cover crop simply broadcast the seed thickly over the soil and rake or till the seed to ensure good seed and soil contact. If the cover crop survives throughtout the winter, be sure to chop it up and till in into the ground to make sure it doesn’t grow too big. Wait two to four weeks after tilling-in a cover crop to start new seeds to allow for proper decomposition.

Different types of Cover Crops
Legumes, such as crimson clover, fava beans and winter field peas make an excellent cover crop because of they are nitrogen fixers. Legumes’ symbiotic relationship with soil microbes allow them to capture nitrogen from the atmosphere and make it available to the plant, thus building up the nitrogen reserves in the soil.

Cover crops add an amazing amount of nitrogen to the soil. An acre of fava beans grown and worked into the soil is equivalent to using about 10 tons of manure.

Grasses, such as fall rye, can be planted in the fall and tilled the following spring. Grasses are not high in nitrogen but grow rapidly creating a living mulch that prevents weeds and produces lots of organic material.

Another non-traditional cover crop is Corn Salad. It’s winter hardiness and ease of tilling in the following spring make it an excellent candidate. You can also snack on the leaves in the winter.

Sowing a mixture of the leguminous and grassy-type cover crops will increase your coverage and provide nitrogen for the plants to come.