Weekends in Paradelle

I’m looking out the window at my vegetable garden and thinking about the first frost coming the next week or two. I actually enjoys clearing out the dead and dying plants and turning the soil one last time.

This year I was thinking about planting a winter cover crop. It’s not that I have any erosion issues (that’s a big reason for farmers to do it), but it’s also a good way to improve your soil.

I do other things already — mulch the surface with biodegradable mulches, dig in compost, grass clippings, rotted manure, wood chips.

Cover cropping is not usually a home garden technique for soil improvement. From what I am reading that’s because many cover crops are designed for farmers using tractors to mow and turn under crops and for farmers planting acres.

Cover crops bulk up soil with organic matter, suppress weeds, and create and recycle soilborne nutrients. Many plants release sugars and other substances through their roots deeper than your pitchfork goes (6 feet for oats and rye).

You need cold-hardy crops (cereal rye or oats, for example).  If you pulled up young fava beans or alfalfa seedlings, you would actually see nitrogen nodules on their roots. Buckwheat can go from seed to bloom in four weeks, so it’s not like they will be growing all winter.

Usually these cover crops are plowed under, but in my home garden I could chop, cut or pull them, and then use them for mulch or compost. (I read that if you chop in fresh cover crop residues next spring, you should wait two to three weeks before sowing new crop seeds.)

Cereal rye (AKA winter rye) can be planted as late as November 1 in hardiness zone 7.

I found a list online recommending these 6 cover crops for home use:

• Buckwheat (Fagopyron esculentum) is better suited for summer cover planting it seems.
• When the soil is still warm (late summer for me in NJ), barley would be a good choice (Hordeum vulgare). It would suffer winter injury in my own Zone 6, and is often killed altogether in Zone 5 and above. That’s not all bad though because the dead barley residue shelters the soil through winter, and dries into a plant-through mulch in spring in cold zones.
• Early fall is the best time to grow oats (Avena sativa) mixed with cold-hardy winter peas (Pisum sativum). Both make a little fall growth when planted in September, and in spring the peas would loop their way up the oats. These two are tough to turn under or chop and in north of Zone 5 they won’t make it very far in growth before winter hits.
• There’s also hairy vetch (Vicia villosa) which needs to get into the ground a few weeks before frost nights but is hardy to Zone 4.  If you behead the crop about a month before it’s time to plant those Jersey tomatoes, you can supposedly just dig planting holes and plant through the dried mulch.
• Perhaps my best choice is cereal rye (Secale cereale), the cold-hardiest cover of all which can sprout after the soil has turned chilly. Warning: take it out early in spring, before the plants develop tough seed stalks.

I actually planted some very late Bush beans which I can turn under this fall, and I will empty out my two compost bins and start refilling them with fall leaves.

I do like that these cover crops can capture solar energy to recharge your soil. It feels very green.

Have you done any cover cropping on a small home garden? I’d love to hear about your experiences.

* Don’t know what plant hardiness zone you live in? Check at usna.usda.gov/Hardzone/ushzmap.html