Fall Gardening: Plant Cover Crops To Protect Your Vegetable Beds
Many gardeners see Fall as the end of the gardening season: Pick the last of your tomatoes, peppers and beans and put a lid on it. But Fall is a critical season for your vegetable garden beds. You must prepare them for winter and the next growing season and the best way to do that is by planting a cover crop, also known as a “green manure”.
- Crimson Clover
Before the invention of synthetic fertilizer, cover crops were planted every summer and fall to scavenge and store nitrogen and other elements, preserve soil structure, slow water runoff and evaporation, protect garden beds from erosion, and suppress weed growth. It’s a sustainable method many gardeners ignore, but it’s widely used in organic agriculture.
Many different plants are used as cover crops: rye grass, oats, hairy vetch, clovers, winter rye, buckwheat, winter peas, forage or daikon radish and tall fescue to name a few. Green manures are planted at different points in the gardening cycle – some in spring, some winter, some fall, but the intent is to let them grow until they winterkill or until the next planting cycle when they are tilled into the soil to provide nutrients, serve as a mulch layer and to increase soil tilth. Protecting your garden with cover crops is more effective than mulching, because cover crops have the added benefit of creating passageways for air and water via their root systems.
- Vetch
The choice of cover crop depends on a number of factors:
- what was planted in the soil bed most recently
- your geographic region
- condition of your soil(compaction)
- what you’ll plant in the same bed next season
- recent disease or pest problems
What’s appropriate for your garden? The Old Farmer’s Almanac has an excellent, easy to understand chart of the best cover crops for your area.
The official U.S. position on genetically-modified organisms is that there is no difference between them and natural organisms. The issue goes even further to suggest that no country should be able to require mandatory GMO labeling on food items, even though science shows that GMOs act differently in the body than do natural organisms and are a threat to health.