Growing high quality food requires healthy living soils.
Cover crops are great allies improving soil quality. In this video I show some examples of cover cropping on our homestead.
Buckwheat, one of our favs!
Cover crops are any plants grown for the purpose of soil building & ground coverage.
There are many mechanisms involved, but one major benefit is increased organic matter in the soil.
The biomass of cover crops contributes to organic matter in the soil and helps improve water retention, nutrient exchange and increases diversity in the soil food web.
Ripper bean leaves
Most crops take from the soil (except nitrogen fixers) and cover cropping is a low tech inexpensive way to feed the soil. What seeds are planted depends on what the desired result is. You may have need for more nitrogen, weed suppression, soil aeration or to destroy harmful nematodes. There are different cover crops that can help with these issues.
Buckwheat
We like to sow buckwheat as it grows fast, provides forage for insects and helps liberate calcium in the soil. It also can smother certain weeds. The tender stalks grow, seed and then decompose quickly.
Ripper Beans
Ripper beans aka cowpeas are a great hot weather legume that thrives with little moisture.
They not only fix nitrogen through a symbiotic relationship with bacteria in the roots, but also provide a great deal of biomass.
Flower of the ripper bean.
Ripper bean pod.
Oats
We also sow oats as a multipurpose crop that provides us with medicine (milky oat tincture) and also helps suppress weeds and increases organic matter in the soil.
Alabask amidst the ripened oats.
We sow a mix of seeds (buckwheat and ripper beans seen here) and often include some edible greens such as kale, radish and purslane. Before or during flowering is a great time to cut down the crop as the plant is at its peak.
Before doing so, under sowing with another crop is a great way to get as much soil improvements in as possible allowing for many successions in a season.
The residues can be left as mulch or dug into the soil to hasten the decomposition process.
Fall is a great time to put unused garden space to bed (and help it regenerate) by sowing peas, cereal grasses, vetches, turnips, radishes and other seeds to improve soil quality simply and easily.
Tending the soil is one of the greatest things a human can do. Growing the best food is a result of years of careful soil building. In a century when the soils are being depleted on a massive scale, cover cropping is one of our best solutions and salves.
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