See how cover crops for gardens can improve your garden soil and can help your intensive vegetable garden grow even better!
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What is a cover crop?
A green manure or cover crop for a garden is an unharvested crop that is grown as part of a crop rotation plan to improve the soil.
How do cover crops help a garden?
There are a number of ways that cover crops for gardens help.
- They improve crop production
- Conserve water
- Improve water quality
- Decrease pesticide and herbicide use
- Improve nutrient use by plants
- Prevent soil erosion
- Improve water efficiency used by crops
- Provide habitat for wildlife and pollinators
How do they do this?
Cover crops help increase organic matter in the soil. The living roots of cover crops hold soils together, penetrate hardpan clay to create natural water passages into the soil. This means water filters into the soil not running off the garden bed and into pathways or worse into waterways.
Certain cover crops, particularly those which are legumes are natural fertilizers providing a source of nitrogen to the soil. Other cover crops have long roots that reach deep into the soil and pull up nutrients from deep down allowing other crops to use these nutrients. Cover crops for gardens trap excess nutrients that may be washed away in winter and provide a source of nutrients for spring crops.
They can provide food sources for pollinators and beneficial predatory insects which support a permaculture technique called integrated pest management. This technique means you can ditch the pesticides and herbicides. Nature will help with pest control with predatory wasps, lacewings, ladybirds or ladybugs, and even birds! Some cover crops for gardens naturally deter pests like soil nematodes. The food for pollinators can even increase your plant yields and harvests from the garden.
Weeds are smothered out of the vegetable garden with the shade canopy created by the cover crops so less weeding your you!
Nutrient Cycling
Organic matter is the food source in soil for microorganisms. Things like bacteria and fungi that live in the soil. These microorganisms break down the organic matter into smaller and smaller parts that can be readily used by plants.
Green manures and cover crops that are trampled or squashed down, mowed or cut and their cuttings placed on the soil surface or turned under start decomposing and break down. Their roots die back as well. Both the decomposing residues on the surface and the dead roots in the soil produce organic matter.
This cycling of nutrients is how not only soil fertility is increased in the garden but also improves the soil’s structure, pH, and ability to retain water.
Cover crops for gardens
So what plants are cover crops or green manures?
There are lots of cover crops for gardens available. Some common ones are:
- Fava beans or broad beans
- Red clover
- Crimson clover
- Daikon radish or tillage radish
- Phacelia
- Vetch
- Oats
- Buckwheat
- Rye
- Field peas
How to use cover crops in a garden
Cover crops for gardens produce biomass and need to be cut, bent over, and trampled or turned under to breakdown and release the nutrients into the soil.
What will be planted in the space?
Knowing what you will plant in the space after the cover crop will help you decide what cover crop to use in the garden. If you are planning on planting heavy feeders like corn, sorghum, squash, or tomatoes in the space, then think about crops that will add nutrients like nitrogen to the soil. Legume cover crops like clover, fava beans, cowpeas, or hairy vetch are a great idea.
Some cover crops suppress plants growing by releasing chemicals into the soil that stunts their growth. These are called allelopathic plants. So if you are planning on growing small seeds like lettuce, carrot, brassicas like cauliflower, kale, or Asian greens for spring in a garden bed then don’t plant winter rye over the winter in that bed. Winter rye as it decomposes can stop these small seeds from germinating. Try wheat or oats instead.
Timing
The timing of planting cover crops in the garden is important. If you are wanting to build soil over a few months, then grains like oats, rye, and legumes like field peas or vetch are a good combination to plant together. You can create your own soil-building blend of plants for your garden bed or buy cover crop mixes.
These are usually sown in early spring for spring through summer coverage of the garden bed. Building soil and providing habitat. Other mixes are for late summer and fall. These mixes may have winter rye, crimson clover, and field peas in the mixture. These are sown in late summer and help to reduce erosion of soil with winter rain and snowmelt in early spring.
Other cover crops for gardens die off in winter with the frost. Tillage or daikon radish is a good example. These are sown in late summer and are left in the garden bed to die off in the winter. They will decay and leave holes in the soil where water can penetrate better. This makes these radishes perfect for opening up clay soils. They also pull up lots of nutrients from deep in the soil.
Short on time?
For short growing seasons, cover crops that can build soil include buckwheat and field peas. These crops grow fast, helping to smother weeds and the peas provide a nitrogen source. Both of these crops break down quickly on the soil, feeding those microorganisms in the soil.
Killing the cover crop
Don’t feel bad about this step. It has to happen to release the nutrients back to the soil microorganisms as organic matter. There is an ideal time to kill a cover crop and it is usually before it produces seeds.
Seeds take up a lot of energy to make so keep an eye on your garden cover crops and get ready to kill them before they make seeds. Some ways to kill the cover crop in the garden are:
- mowing
- weed eating or cutting
- treading down
- digging or turning under
Winter rye will only die back if it is cut after it forms a seed head but before it releases its seeds.
Most cover crops you can kill when they start to flower. They have the most nutrients at this point. You might want to leave some flowers for the pollinators and that’s ok too!
When to plant in the cover crop
After killing the cover crop, there will be some plant residues that will be decomposing. You need to kill your cover crop at least 2 weeks before you plan to sow or transplant your edible crops into the garden space. 4 weeks is ideal as worms and other soil workhorses will be pulling these residues into the soil as organic matter that the microorganisms can break down more.
Experiment
Gardening is an experiment and trying cover crops for gardens is a great experiment to try in your garden beds. Keep notes in your garden journal of what cover crops grow well in your garden and what you grew in the space afterward and how those crops grew!
Allow some of the cover crops to go to seed and save these to grow the following year.
Learn More
This post is part of a mini-training series. Click the links below to take you to the next training.
Double Digging and Soil Improvement
What Plants to Grow in an Intensive Garden
Integrated Pest Management
Training not live yet? Check out some related posts below:
- How Can You Help Keep Seeds Patent Free?
- How To Grow Swiss Chard From Seed
- The Ultimate Guide To Choosing The Right Seeds To Grow In Your Garden
- How To Make Compost Even Faster
I want to hear from you! Let me know what cover crops you are planning to grow! Let me know in the comments or over in the Facebook Group!
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