Grow Cover Crops for the Best Garden Soil

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Chickens, ducks and geese all make excellent cover crop processors.
Chickens, ducks and geese all make excellent cover crop processors.
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Cover crops at work: Cowpeas (center bed) will add nitrogen to this garden’s soil and Dutch white clover (right bed) will make a great living mulch for interplanted food crops.
Cover crops at work: Cowpeas (center bed) will add nitrogen to this garden’s soil and Dutch white clover (right bed) will make a great living mulch for interplanted food crops.
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Field peas are a popular leguminous cover crop.
Field peas are a popular leguminous cover crop.
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Bird’s-foot trefoil is a flowering cover crop with striking, bright yellow blossoms.
Bird’s-foot trefoil is a flowering cover crop with striking, bright yellow blossoms.
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Common vetch, a winter annual legume that flowers from April to July, performs well as a self-seeding cover crop.
Common vetch, a winter annual legume that flowers from April to July, performs well as a self-seeding cover crop.
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Before chickens: A large garden area with a lush mix of mature cover crops.
Before chickens: A large garden area with a lush mix of mature cover crops.
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After chickens: A garden area that was full of mature cover crops just two weeks before, after chickens worked their magic.
After chickens: A garden area that was full of mature cover crops just two weeks before, after chickens worked their magic.
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Flowering cover crops such as red clover will attract butterflies.
Flowering cover crops such as red clover will attract butterflies.

Consider cover crops your most important crops, because the requirements for abundant food crops — building soil fertility, improving soil texture, suppressing weeds, and inhibiting disease and crop-damaging insects — can be best met by the abundant use of cover crops, season after season.

5 Benefits of Cover Crops

Soil Fertility. A vast array of soil organisms decompose once-living plants into nutrients easily taken up by plant roots, and add to your soil’s humus content (the final residues of organic matter in your soil, which assist nutrient uptake, improve texture and hold moisture). I grow organic matter in place using cover crops because, in many ways, a living cover crop is even better than adding manure and compost for fertility.

The area of most intense biological activity — ultimately the definition of soil fertility — is the rhizosphere, the zone immediately around plant roots. Plants release nutrients through their roots to feed their buddies in the soil — beneficial microbes and mycorrhizal fungi — that increase access to water and convert soil nutrients into forms more readily utilized by plants. If the intense bioactivity in the rhizosphere is the key to fertility, imagine the contribution of closely planted cover crops with vastly more root mass than more widely spaced food crops.

Soil Texture. Mycorrhizal fungi (beneficial fungi that grow in association with plant roots) produce glomalin, a substance which glues microscopic clay and organic matter particles into aggregate clumps, stabilizing the soil and making it nice and crumbly. This crumbly texture is more porous to oxygen and water. Bacteria encouraged by cover crops produce polysaccharides, which also act as soil glues.

  • Published on Sep 8, 2011
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