Fall-Planted Cover Crops Provide Many Benefits to Gardens

By Melinda Myers

Put your garden to work over winter by planting a cover crop this fall. Covering the soil with plants that are turned into the soil or smothered and allowed to decompose in spring provides many benefits.

Fall-planted cover crops protect the soil from erosion over winter and reduce stormwater runoff into nearby waterways and storm sewers. They also help reduce weeds by forming a dense mat that increases organic matter, adds nutrients, and improves the soil quality for your plants. These crops also help conserve soil moisture, and many provide welcome habitats for pollinators and other beneficial insects.

Oats, winter rye, winter wheat, crimson clover, and hairy vetch are common fall-planted cover crops. The crimson clover and hairy vetch are legumes that can add a lot of nitrogen to the soil when they decompose. Try combining these with non-legumes when possible. Consider purchasing a cover crop mix like the True Leaf Market notill pollinator-friendly cover crop mix, which contains both and helps support pollinators.

Most cover crops go dormant over winter and resume growth in the spring. Annuals like daikon radishes and oats are killed by cold winter temperatures. This makes oats a good choice if you want to get an early start on planting in spring.

Plant fall cover crops at least four weeks before the first killing frost to give them time to establish. Cereal rye is an exemption and can be planted right up to the first frost. You can plant the whole garden bed or just the area between vegetables that are still growing.

Remove any weeds, plants, and mulch when planting garden beds. Loosen the soil and rake it smooth before seeding. Just remove the mulch, loosen, and rake the soil between the rows of actively growing vegetables when planting cover crops in these spaces.

Check the seed packet for the amount of seed needed to cover the area you are planting. Spread the seed over the prepared soil by hand or with a broadcast spreader and gently rake the seeds into the soil. Make it easier to spread tiny seeds evenly by mixing them with compost and then spreading them. Once the seeds are planted, gently water using a fine mist.

incorporate the residue into the soil or plant your vegetables through the dead plant remains.

Avoid working wet soil—that can result in compaction, hard-as-rock clods, and take years to repair the damage. Do a moisture test before working the soil. Grab a handful of soil and gently squeeze. If it breaks into smaller pieces with a tap of your finger, it is ready to work. If it remains in a mud ball, wait a few days.

Two weeks or more after the cover crop has been killed or tilled into the soil, you can begin planting. Planting any earlier can result in nutrient deficiencies that will require a light spring fertilization.

Annual plants will be killed by cold winter temperatures, but the perennial cover crops will put on vigorous growth in late winter or early spring. Suppress this growth and kill the cover crop before it sets seed and at least two to four weeks before planting your garden. This gives microorganisms time to decompose the plant residue and avoid nitrogen deficiencies in spring plantings.

In springtime, use your mower or weed whip to cut the cover crop to the ground. You can till the residue into the soil at that time or cover the area with a black tarp or weed barrier for at least two weeks. Remove the tarp, then

Adding cover crops to your gardening routine will improve the soil and plant growth, and is good for the environment. Like any new gardening practice, it can take time to adapt it to your space, climate, and gardening style. The cover crop growing guide at trueleafmarket.com can help. With time and experience, growing cover crops can soon become a part of your gardening routine. o

Melinda Myers has written more than 20 gardening books. She hosts The Great Courses “How to Grow Anything” instant video and DVD series, and the nationally syndicated “Melinda’s Garden Moment” TV and radio program. Myers is a columnist and contributing editor for Birds & Blooms magazine and was commissioned by True Leaf Market for her expertise to write this article Her website is www.MelindaMyers. com.

The Ecological Farm: A Minimalist No-Till, No-Spray, Selective-Weeding, Grow-Your-Own-Fertilizer System for Organic Agriculture

Author: Helen Atthowe

Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing

List Price: $44.95

Order Links: https://amzn.to/3RqUiIT and https://bookshop.org/ a/79479/9781645021810

Reviewer: Marsha Douma

In The Ecological Farm, Helen Atthowe shares her 35+ years of observations and experimentation in organic farming and gardening. Her careful recording of which techniques have been most effective throughout these years are summarized in this book.

Her consistent finding is that prioritizing nourishing the soil all year round creates the healthiest and most vigorous growth. As a bonus, in her experience, healthy plants also have some ability to defend themselves against insect invasion and/or diseases. Her experiences as an organic farmer have convinced her that healthy soil, which she defines as soil full of invertebrates, microbes, and fungi, will naturally provide the nutrients the plants needs at their roots, where they can be readily absorbed, eliminating the need for additional fertilizers.

The first half of the book describes in detail her minimalist approach to farming, which means little to no tilling, selective weeding, and growing your own fertilizer. But if problems do occur, in the second half, she comprehensively identifies a wide range of issues crop by crop, fruit tree by fruit tree, offering solutions that don’t involve using commercial insecticides.

Creating a reliably reproducible “system” to “manage [the] ecological relationships” inherent in a garden is the author’s objective. Many garden writers these days advocate similar principles. What makes this book somewhat different is her recipe for how to do this. To that end, Chapter One sets out her 10 comprehensive principles formulated to work holistically with nature and thereby safely grow an abundance of the food we need. Many of these principles seem obvious, others less so, but they all center around building, planting into, protecting and leaving the soil, undisturbed as much as possible. The author recommends not worrying about the proper fertilization numbers. Instead, she wants us to focus on returning carbon to the soil. This works because the ratio of carbon to nitrogen is high in plants.

“Carbon is what plants are made of… and it provides soil microbes the energy to do their job. Nitrogen …makes up the proteins in plants. Both are vital, but traditionally farmers have focused on nitrogen…Soil microbes do best when growing roots are present [in the soil] and secreting carbon and plant exudates into the soil year round…Many of the most important soil microorganisms require root associations, which are destroyed by soil disturbances such as tillage and weed cultivation.”

Providing enough carbon throughout the year is easy to do by using what she calls “plant residues.” Chop and drop, living mulches, chipped wood, and cover crops, in the author’s experience, allow the soil to provide all the nutrients the plants need. Atthowe is building the soil from the bottom up, not from the top down.

The growth of organic agriculture—a brief history.

In the early 1900s, some farmers in Germany and Australia, when industrial agriculture began, who objected to the use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers and early pesticides on what was to become our food.

From 1930 to 1950 is considered the start of the organic movement in England and the United States. The loss of the top soil of approximately 35 million acres during the Dust Bowl, 1930–1936, started a conversation about understanding the land and treated it differently.

The most prominent British proponents of organic gardening were Gabrielle, Louise, and Albert Howard, who were sent to India to study botany, and instead studied their systems of how all waste was recycled and cover crops were used to protect and nourish the soil. When they returned to England, they advanced these ideas. In the United States, the most prominent proponent was J. I. Rodale, who founded and published his Organic Farming and Gardening magazine in 1942. Rodale was instrumental in trying to convince people to use natural means to build a healthy soil, rather than relying on synthetic fertilizers.

For probably thousands of years, gardeners and farmers used manure as a fertilizer. In the early 1800s, ground-up bones became commonly used as well. In the mid-19th century, the discipline of soil chemistry and plant nutrition developed. A German scientist, Justus von Liebig, introduced the Law of the Minimum, a principle that is still widely held. His law states that the growth of plants is not determined by the total amount of nutrients available, but by the least available nutrient.

It was also postulated that since plants would inevitably deplete the soil of nutrients, replacements were essential. These ideas resulted in farmers and gardeners thinking they had to add the proper amount of fertilizer all the time to be sure there was always enough.

During World War 2, there was a shortage of nitrogen fertilizer since it was being used for ammunition, and farmers who had started to rely on synthetic fertilizers, instead of soil building, had nutrient poor soil. Then, after the war, nitrogen fertilizer became relatively inexpensive since the factories producing nitrogen for ammunition in the Midwest were converted to civilian uses. As the price declined, its use increased.

The 1940s were the beginnings of wide spread use of insecticides, including DDT—first used in 1939. It was felt the various insecticides were desperately needed to combat insectborne infections affecting soldiers in the war. At the time, the harm to the environment and the long-term health of the citizenry were not considered, or were thought minimal and acceptable. But there were critics of the use of insecticides—most prominently, Rachel Carson who published her book Silent Spring in 1962.

An interesting response to the harm of pesticides, is the development of GMO seeds, which have been modified by adding a protein that causes the insects who eat the plants grown from these seeds to die. The developers of these seeds assure us that nothing can possibly go wrong.

The Ecological Farm builds on the ideas that came before it. How fortunate we are to have so many good books to choose from in advocating organic, sustainable growing practices. Who will find this particular book valuable? Any gardener. Even for the reader who is familiar with organic gardening practices, the extensive second part of the book, about how to organically grow and trouble-shoot a wide selection of crops, is a valuable, carefully researched reference to have on hand. o

Marsha Douma is a retired dentist and lifelong gardener who also enjoys swimming, tennis, and playing the piano. She lives in Rockville, MD.

The Preserving Garden

Author: Jo Turner

Publisher: Thames and Hudson

List Price: $29.95

Order Links: https://amzn.to/48gY51r and https://bookshop.org/ a/79479/9781760763824

Reviewer: Stacey Evers

We’ve had a strange growing season: drought in June followed by two months that were cooler and wetter than normal, and then—as if Mother Nature suddenly remembered her summertime duties—record-breaking highs in September. Cucumbers, historically my highest-yielding and least-problematic crop, utterly failed this year. Tomatoes went on strike for six weeks.

But now, harvests are picking up.

Peppers are popping, tomatoes are blushing, and fruitful figs are feeding my family and all the neighborhood birds. I want to make the revived 2023 garden last as long as possible.

Luckily, Australian author Jo Turner has written The Preserving Garden, a fun-to-read and easy-to-follow primer about pickling, pureeing, bottling, roasting, and more. Illustrator Ashlea O’Neill’s bold, colorful, 2D eye candy adds to the book’s breezy, page-turning style.

Turner, who lives on 50 acres in Australia, grew up preserving fruits and vegetables with her mother and aunt at her grandmother’s table. Canning peaches from a cousin’s orchard was “a production line and a family ritual,” Turner says, recalling the sounds, smells, and sights of the annual process.

Preserving harvests “doesn’t need to be a factory-sized operation,” though, Turner notes, and she backs it up: Her recipes are for smaller batches that can be processed in a stockpot or large saucepan, no preserving kit required. However, most of the recipes can be scaled up by gardeners with larger crops.

A well-organized table of contents and index allow readers to use this book as a reference guide if they don’t want to read it straight through, but the clean layout lends itself to a quick skim. Preserving the Garden is divided into five chapters.

How to Preserve: In a handful of introductory pages, Turner explains different preserving methods with clear, simple instructions. She includes the scientific explanations of the roles of enzymes, yeast, bacteria, and mold but you don’t have to remember high school biology to understand her.

Preserved Veggies and Preserved Fruit: These chapters comprise the meat of the book, so to speak. Turner includes 43 plant profiles, each with its own page and a streamlined sidebar of growing tips, such as how much sun the plant needs, whether it’s frost-tolerant and, for fruit, what year it first bears a harvest. Turner recommends specific varieties that are well-suited to certain preservation methods, as well as fruits, veggies, or herbs that are good flavor companions. (Before buying the recommended varieties, make sure that they’re suitable to the Mid-Atlantic U.S.).

Each profile is followed by recipes for that crop, such as gherkins made with cucumbers or zucchini, ginger beer, roasted garlic paste, raspberry vinegar, and apricot chutney. The usual suspects—tomatoes, cucumbers, peaches—make the cut, but the author also includes plants that often get less attention, such as capers, fennel, and mulberries.

Recipes are in metric measurements, so U.S. readers may need to rely on the conversion chart on page 16. Americans will also have to make two other adjustments; Turner uses a 20 milliliter (mL), or 4-teaspoon tablespoon, but a US tablespoon is 3 teaspoons (14.7 mL). The book relies on 250 mL cup measures, but U.S. cups are 240 mL.

The Preserving Garden chapter sums up garden basics like soil, composting, and plant nutrients. Turner’s explanations are to-the-point, offering just the basics of what a gardener needs to know. Beware, however, of the assertion that a complete fertilizer with even amounts of nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium is always necessary. Phosphorous and potassium are often sufficiently present in the soil, and overapplication can have harmful environmental consequences. Use a soil test first to determine what nutrients are deficient in your soil.

Turner also refers to climate zones. In the U.S., those zones are called plant hardiness zones. If you don’t already know yours, you can do an online search for the USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map. (Most Washington Gardener readers are in zones 7a or 7b.)

The final chapter, Preserving Charts, consists of six pages that summarize the highlights of the plant profiles: flavor companions, suitable preservation techniques, how to use the preserves, and the required timing if you use the water bath method.

At the very end of the book are four blank pages divided into rows and two columns, perfect for your own recordkeeping. This addition shows great foresight on Turner’s part. There’s a lot to learn and many things to try out in The Preserving Garden, and you’ll want to keep notes. o

Stacey Evers is the urban agricultural specialist for the Northern Virginia Soil and Water Conservation District and board chair of Hands On Harvests, a nonprofit that teaches people how to grow food, manages community gardens, and helps gardeners donate surplus harvest.

The Halloween Hare: A Story for Gardeners of All Ages

Author: Carol J. Michel

Illustrator: Ty J. Hayden

Publisher: Gardenangelist Books

List Price: $16.99

Order Link: https://amzn.to/3sSLlO9 and https://bookshop.org/ a/79479/9781733500913

Reviewer: Kathy Jentz

Disclosure: This reviewer is a friend of the author of this book.

Halloween is my favorite holiday and there are few children’s books on the topic—even fewer that are gardeningrelated—so I was pleased to hear about the coming release of the Halloween Hare in time for this year’s holiday season.

The story follows a rabbit who waits all year to visit gardens on Halloween to search for leftover Easter candy. He collects the candy with his friends the spiders, bats, and mice.

The illustrations are simple and colorful. My favorite page in the book depicts the journey of the informa- tion collected about gardens from the Halloween Hare to his cousin at the North Pole, the Christmas Cottontail. It starts off with the bats, then is passed on the crows, and finally gets delivered to the snow owls.

Bonus: There are a few blank pages in the back to add your own Halloween Hare illustrations.

This book is a companion to The Christmas Cottontail, written and published in 2019 by the same author. If that one tickled your fancy, I think you will want to get this one as well. You might also buy a few copies of both books to give out to budding young gardeners and naturalists on your holiday gift lists o

Groundcover Revolution Is Out

By Kathy Jentz

Published by Cool Springs Press

Order it today at: https://amzn.to/3IlYHYL

“Groundcover Revolution is must-have book for anyone who is interested in having less lawn, fewer weeds, and reduced mulching. The properties charts will save the reader time and money, the pictures provide inspiration, while the detailed plant portraits give the focused information needed for creating beautiful, functional landscapes.”

―C.L. Fornari, GardenLady.com

Love Reading?

The book reviews in this issue are by volunteer members of the Washington Gardener Reader Panel. To join the Washington Gardener Volunteer Reader Panel, send an email with your name and address to: KathyJentz@gmail.com. o

Note: These book reviews include links to Amazon.com and BookShop. org for ordering them. Washington Gardener Magazine may receive a few cents from each order placed after you click on these links.