What's your favorite cover crop?

AMKuska

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I've heard so much about cover crops in other threads and also in books, I thought it would be nice to discuss them here. What are your favorite cover crops? How do you use them? Any tips?
 

journey11

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I have used winter wheat and buckwheat.

The winter wheat is winter hardy and will help hold your soil in place and prevent erosion. It also suppresses the growth of new weeds in the spring. In the spring, I mow it down and turn it under. The deer like to nibble it, btw.

The buckwheat is neat because it grows so fast, maturing at about 30 days after germination. I plant it in August to use to keep something covering the ground if I didn't have anything for a fall crop to put in. You can let it flower and it will provide a very valuable late season nectar source for the honey bees. If you can get the timing right, you don't even need to kill it or do anything to it as long as the frost kills it before it goes to seed. Then just till under the dead vegetation in the spring. It will also fix nitrogen for your soil, like clover, except clover can be harder to control.
 

TheSeedObsesser

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Vetch is one of my favorites, any kind of vetch. Pretty flowers, makes a nice carpet of dense foliage, shades out the soil nicely, great at attracting bees, fixes nitrogen into soil. I think that it's mostly summer (maybe fall) planted. It reseeds here, I've never intentionally planted it myself.

Fava beans are another good cover crop that doubles as an animal fodder and a human food source. They fix nitrogen in the soil, have neat looking flowers, again attract bees well, and...well, pretty much all of the stuff that the vetch does. Plant sizes ranges from relatively short to downright stinkin' tall depending on variety.
 

AMKuska

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You can use fava beans as a cover crop? I never even thought of that.
 

AMKuska

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What is the difference between a cover crop and a manure crop?
 

thistlebloom

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They're pretty much the same thing AMKuska, cover crops are intended to keep soil from eroding or blowing away, and green manure crops are planted to be tilled under to improve the soil.

The terms are used interchangeably most often. Although I suppose with a manure crop you would aim for something leguminous, that would fix nitrogen in the soil.
 

digitS'

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I have grown winter rye (annual) several times. It works great as a "compost crop" - throwing another term in there ;). You see, the best way I've found to use it is to plant it well before the first frost, allow it to stay until about May 1st of the following year. It is waist-high! I suppose it could be tilled in but would require far more power than what I've got with my tiller. It is fairly easy to pull by hand and could be used as a mulch but will compost well.

Something that I've done a few times in plant mustard in September. It was a very good idea and I'd saved lots of my own seed. Mustard plants can sometimes make it thru our winters but comes out in real bad shape, anyway.

I figured that there weren't any more than 10% of the Austrian field peas that made it thru the winter when I tried them as a winter cover crop. Fedco suggests planting them very early in the spring and that sure seems like it would work and I'd like to try them again.

Last year, I grew hulless oats. I've grown them several times but wanted to pull and use them as a mulch in 2013. That worked fine and I'd like to use the oats in the tomatoes as a mulch this year rather than putting them around a few squash plants. The squash do fairly well looking after themselves. Oats can also be used as a "winter-kill cover crop" if sown at the right time, before going to seed but early enuf to make some growth. I will see if there is some place to work that into my garden this season . . . :)

Steve
 

AMKuska

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Do you plant these crops at the same time as your vegetables? I thought you planted cover crops after the harvest was over.
 

AMKuska

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Oh no, its the planting times that are throwing me off. Some of these are planted in summer, some in spring. To me, those are the times that you want to plant vegetables or currently have them growing out...so if you're planting in spring where do the veggies go?

I hope that makes sense, as I'm rather confused.
 

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