QuickTake:
Planting cover crops now will give your garden a jump start next year, and provide you with some food to enjoy over the winter and spring.
This is a good time to plant fertilizer for next year’s garden, and get something for the table this winter and spring at the same time.
Cover crops — planted in the fall — are a time-honored way of adding organic matter to the soil, reducing compaction from rain (we get a bit), keeping weeds under control (OK — less out of control), and with the right cover crop, adding important nitrogen to the soil.
This fall’s early rains left the ground ready for quick seed germination, so a cover crop you put in now can be well established by the time colder weather arrives.
Let’s go over the benefits of cover crops in more detail.
Organic matter — the chant found in Buddhist and yoga practices — is also the mantra of soil improvement. More decaying plant material — organic matter— in your soil helps with nutrient uptake, water retention and easy workability.
Crimson clover Credit: Walter Frehner / Unsplash
The crowd-out effect of a thick bed of crimson clover can be a very effective weed control tool. If there is clover everywhere, there is no room for the weeds. If you pluck out the weeds as the cover crop grows, you can have a beneficial monocrop that will make weeding less of a chore next spring.
But the most essential feature of a good cover crop is nitrogen fixing — taking atmospheric nitrogen and converting it into a form all plants can use.
Despite an atmosphere that is 78% nitrogen, most plants can’t use gaseous nitrogen. However, legumes, peas, beans, clover and vetch, to name a few, can perform this atmospheric alchemy.
Growing a cover crop this winter will provide fertility next summer. Yes, you can add nitrogen to your soil, but don’t — especially now. Water-soluble chemical fertilizers will dissolve in our prolific winter rains. And since most plants are growing very slowly, if at all in the winter, the chemicals will head straight down the river, or even worse, into the water table.
If you have empty space in your garden — where corn, potatoes or tomato plants are no longer present, plant a cover crop now. Just scuff up the soil, and scatter the seed; no need to rototill.
My favorites are crimson clover (not red clover) and fava beans — the ‘Broad Windsor’ variety. The crimson clover will grow slowly all winter, then jump out of the ground in the spring. When the beautiful blossoms are at their peak, mow or weed-whack them down — in the morning so the honey bees won’t chase you away.
Leave the stems and flowers on the ground and push them to the side to make rows for corn or to make open soil patches for tomatoes, peppers or squash. No need to work all that organic matter into the soil. Sitting on the surface, it will suppress weeds, preserve water and add organic matter as it decomposes.
Fava beans planted now will provide salad greens all winter (simply pick the leaves) and wonderful beans in May and June before your green beans have even sprouted.
You have to shell the beans, but don’t shell the inner beans as some French cookbooks recommend. Steamed after shelling, they are a great early-season hint of all the summer produce that will come.
When the tops die down in July, just leave them. If you want to remove the tops — they can reach six feet — leave the roots in the ground, or dig them up to see the white nitrogen fixing nodules. That’s your free fertilizer.
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