Hairy Vetch by homeredwardprice
Don’t leave bare soil in your garden when you could plant a cover crop instead. Here’s why and how.
1. A cover crop is a short-term planting which is used to protect and/or improve your soil rather than for food.
2. Plant your cover crop in the fall rather than leaving bare soil in your vegetable beds.
Alternatively you can mulch with compost.
3. Seeds you can plant for cover cropping include: hairy vetch, common vetch, winter rye, buckwheat, oats, clovers, alfalfa, soybeans and favas.
4. Reasons you want to plant cover include: protecting your soil from erosion; breaking up your soil; adding nitrogen to your soil; and making phosphates available for vegetables you plant later.
If you don’t plant cover or use a layer of weed-free compost on your vegetable beds you will be weeding instead!
5. A cover crop can also be sown in spring or summer – you’re better off watering for a few days to get your cover established than you are weeding later. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been there and done that!
Places to get seeds for cover planting: Territorial Seed, Seeds of Change, Gardens Alive.
Sites with more information on cover planting: Organic Gardening Solutions, Cornell Gardening, Oregon State.
Have you tried this? What was your experience?
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I tend to just mulch like crazy, but I do like white clover as a cover crop (non-native, but so very useful…certainly earns its keep better than grass!) And coincindentally, I was just reading over at The Clueless Gardener a plea for spotted spurge, which is an annual weed we generally just uproot on instinct, but which is arguably a native drought tolerant ground cover, so I may have to rethink my position there.
The vetches can get crazy aggressive in this climate, so I tend to avoid ‘em, but I’ve actually found that strawberry, while not a cover crop per se, makes a surprisingly good cover in early spring. They never last all that long, and I get maybe two berries away from the wildlife, but it keeps that part of the bed from turning into a weed patch until I plunk something larger in there.
UrsulaV´s last blog ..THAT’ll wake you up in the morning…
UrsulaV, you make some great points. I’d much rather plant a native plant species as a cover crop than something which could become aggressive. I’m going to have to look into that further. I’ve seen red clover, which I’m using as a cover crop in my vegetable beds, take over an abandoned Kansas field which was returning to prairie. Not good!
Most annual natives in my area seem to be imported weeds. Then again, maybe I’ve been frantically removing something the birds would love. I need to get out my identification book.
Do you plant the strawberries from seed? I have some areas of my garden I’d like to plant with strawberries for ground cover, but I’ve not yet found a source of native, woodland strawberry plants and I’m not too confident about using seed.
I’m off to look up spotted spurge.
I will confess one of my great gardening sins…I plant hardly ANYTHING from seed. My last experiment with butterfly weed from seed went dreadfully, and my sunflowers generally made about six leggy inches and were duly devoured by woodchucks. About my only success was zinnias, which are as idiot-proof as plants get. I’ve found that I actually wind up saving money if I just buy plant starts to begin with. (Although if I ever plan to convert the field out front to native prairie plants, I’ll have to figure SOMETHING out…flats of little bluestem in the quantities required would start to set me back three figures…)
On the other hand, I have fantastic luck growing both millet and sunflowers from seed under the birdfeeder, but since I do absolutely nothing related to that, I can’t really crow about it.
UrsulaV´s last blog ..THAT’ll wake you up in the morning…
UrsulaV, I confess that I have not yet grown flowers from seed either, unless you count the hundreds of wild violets, and other native prairie and woodland plants which have self-seeded in my garden over the last 9 years.
When I plant a new perennial native flower area I start with 3 good-sized potted plants, from the native plant nursery, of each type that I want to include. After a year or two I end up with tons of them from self-seeding.
On the other hand, I do plant vegetables from seed every year with good success and I have a nice cover crop of red clover, which I put in last week, getting established in my raised beds right now.
I think perennial natives are harder to grow from seed than veggies because they often have specific pre-germination needs. The orange butterfly weed hasn’t done well for me, even though I put in plants, not seeds. Not everything I put in from plants does well – yarrow hasn’t done well for me either. I accept losses as part of the adventure – plants have their own needs and some just like a spot better than others do.
Same here–no luck at all with yarrow, which is odd, because it’s supposed to be extremely vigorous to the point of “Oh god, kill it with fire!” for a lot of people locally. And the orange butterfly weed wants dry sandy feet, apparently, which I have exactly none of, here in the clay swamp. (I should just resign myself to swamp milkweed, but hope springs eternal…)
UrsulaV´s last blog ..Rags and Tatters
If it’s early enough in fall, I plant white clover in my raised beds to help increase the amount of nitrogen in the soil. I always seem to need more nitrogen. White clover is available at most garden centers. If it’s later in the fall I plant winter rye because it can take cold weather and keep growing. Winter rye seed is a little harder to find.
Bill Brikiatis´s last blog ..Growing Cover Crop
Hi Bill, yes cover crops are a great way to add nitrogen to the soil and preferable to just leaving bare soil in the fall and winter. I usually buy my cover crop seeds from Territorial Seed Company. Territorial also sell a good range of garlic, which needs planted in the fall, so they can both be ordered together, for convenience. Thanks for your comment.