Uses And Benefits Of Cover Crops

What Are Cover Crops?

Cover crops are planted in rotation with other crops to improve soil health, control erosion and hold nutrients. With the right rotation of cover crops for your climate and soil texture, you can increase your garden’s yield and reduce your environmental footprint.

Cover Crops: What Not To Do

My first summer of serious gardening was in a community garden. I learned by trial and error, and by watching the other people’s garden plots changing through the season. When fall came, some of the plots were neatly mulched, others left to grow wild with weeds, and some were planted into cover crops.

That year I absorbed a lot of gardening theory, so I decided to try cover cropping. The community garden had a sack ofwinter ryefor anyone to use, so that’s what I planted. The seeds germinated before the hard frosts and by December I had a healthy plot of rye growing as tall as my waist. By spring it had almost reached my eyebrows, and when I went out with my shovel to prepare the ground for planting, I found myself battling with tall, sturdy stalks of rye, which is essentially a sturdy grass, with deep roots.

It took me three days to turn over my ten by ten garden plot for planting. I ended up tearing out a lot of the rye and composting it, losing a massive percentage of soil fertility in the processes. Cover crops are meant to be turned under and incorporated into the soil, returning their nutrients to the ground. But I was overwhelmed by the toughness of the cover crop I had chosen. It ended up being a waste of time, energy, and plant matter.

This mishap put me off cover crops for several seasons. I just covered my garden beds with cardboard and tarps for basic weed suppression. But as I learned more about the importance of soil health, the benefits of cover crops convinced me to try again, and I soon learned that some basic guidelines helps prevent frustrating failures.

Benefits of Cover Crops

Agricultural societies have known for thousands of years that letting fields rest improved crop yields. Fields left to rest are called fallow fields.Natural or traditional fallowing包括让一片未种植的区域回到自然生态系统模式。然而，根据气候的不同，一片土地可能需要休耕一个以上的季节才能恢复肥力。覆盖种植使农民或园丁能够控制和加速土壤的形成过程。2022世界杯四强亚盘赔率

Planting legumes as cover crops captures nitrogen and fixes this essential nutrient in the soil when the plant matter is incorporated into the soil. Legume cover crops are part of any holistic fertilization plan.

In addition to improving soil quality, planting cover crops helps to prevent erosion and nutrient leaching. Cover crops are an important part of sustainable agriculture and maintaining soil health, especially in regions with heavy winter rainfall. Even in raised beds, where topsoil erosion is minimal,nutrient loss can be significant. Nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, that help soil, are pollutants in water, so cover crops are not only important in protecting land, but in protecting watersheds by keeping those chemicals in the soil where they belong.

To sum up, cover crops can:

• Fix nitrogen, a key plant nutrient, into the soil
• Prevent erosion
• Reduce pollution
• Increase yields

Of course, any root system will hold soil and nutrients effectively, so a field of weeds is really performing some of the same tasks as a cover crop. However, those weeds are also producing thousands of weed seeds that will germinate in your field next spring. One important job of a cover crop is weed control, or weed suppression. A quick-germinating winter cover-crop can out-compete lots of weeds, and significantly lower your pest-pressure during the next growing season.

In the spring, cut cover crops can be tilled in asgreen manure. Increasing organic matter in the soil improves soil texture and provides food for beneficial soil microbes and small organisms including worms.

Choosing A Cover Crop

并非所有的覆盖作物都是豆类。Because the unique benefit of nitrogen-fixing, legume cover crops are very popular, but other kinds of cover crops havedifferent benefits. Cereal grains like wheat, oats and rye are other common cover crop varieties.

Wheat and rye are particularly fast growing, which makes them ideal for outcompeting weeds. Winter varieties germinate and grow quickly even in cool weather. Their deep root systems are excellent for preventing erosion, and take up nutrients that might otherwise be leached out by rainfall.

A common technique to combine some of the benefits discussed above is to plant a legume and a cereal grain together. This technique of inter-planting is calledmixed planting or mixed fallowing. Seed companies sellmixesof cover crops.

以下是仅在美国种植的众多覆盖作物中的一部分。If you’re feeling overwhelmed, trythis crop planning tool. Of course as always, your local land-grant university’s extension service is a valuable resource and can give you advice tailored to your climate and even soil type.

In choosing cover crop varieties, there is one last major variable: whether to plant winter kill crops or winter hardy ones.

A Note on Tropical Cover Crops

Different climates of course grow different varieties of cover crop, but the rotation of legumes with fast-growing grasses and grains remains important.Here are some cover crop varieties for gardens in Hawai’i.在炎热的地区，可以在园丁想要生产的任何时候轮种覆盖作物。营养物质的捕获在热带地区尤为重要，因为大雨会导致淋滤。

Winter Kill vs Winter Hardy Cover Crops

In my first adventure with cover crops, I unwittingly planted the hardiest cover crop available, winter rye. If I had chosen a different variety of seed, I would not have been fighting with lush, green growing grain in the spring.

覆盖作物分为两大类，冬杀型和冬耐寒型。冬杀作物，顾名思义，将死于严酷的冬季天气，而冬耐寒作物仍将活到春天。对园丁来说，两者都有优点和缺点。

Winter kill cover crops are particularly useful inno-till gardening systems, where cover crops are essential to prevent weeds, but difficult to get rid of for spring planting. They are also useful in small gardens where you are turning over the soil by hand. As I discovered, ousting an established hardy rye crop with a shovel is back-breaking. A winter-kill crop will be much easier to incorporate into the soil in preparation for planting.

Planting Your Cover Crop

After you have harvested your final summer crops, turn over the earth like you would before planting anything else. If there are weeds (or abandoned broccoli) going to seed, pull them out to give yourself a clean seed-bed. Other weeds can just be turned into the soil.

The time to plant cover crops is from late August to mid-October, so some of yourwinter vegetables比如卷心菜和抱子甘蓝仍会生长。因为现在把它们拔掉还为时过早，所以用稻草或纸板覆盖根部以抑制杂草。你可以在春天让那片土地休耕，或者用它来种植早春豌豆，固定一些氮，同时仍能最大限度地利用你的土地。

Scatter your seeds, using the seed company’s recommended seed to area ratio. Often those ratios are in pounds of seed per acre, so you may have to do a little math to figure out how much seed to use on your smaller garden.

留在地球表面的种子也不会发芽，而且有被饥饿的鸟儿吃掉的危险!用花园耙子做临时搭建物harrow用耙子把种子耙到土里，然后浇水。Modernseed plantersmake furrows in the soil to drop seeds into so harrowing is not necessary, but the walk-behind seed planters used in gardens do not make sense for a densely-planted crop like grain.

Cover crops should not need any maintenance over the winter. They are a rest for the gardener as well as the soil!

Spring Preparations For Fallow Beds

When you are ready to reclaim your fallow bed in the spring, you can turn your cover crop into the soil just like you would incorporate any other green matter. A shovel and some sweat does the job, or awalk-behind rototiller可以节省你的时间和努力。如果是耐寒的，你可能需要先割草。不要担心有一台重型割草机，特别是对于一个小花园。一台普通的割草机就能做到这一点。

Once green matter is tilled into the soil, it needs a little time to decompose before planting. You can plant directly into a freshly tilled field, but some of the nutrients will still be tied up in the decomposing plant material. Leave the field for 2 to 6 weeks, depending on your climate and soil properties, to allow some of those nutrients to be released back into usable chemical forms in the soil.

这种短暂的休耕也让第一轮杂草发芽，这是非常好的，因为你可以在种植任何东西之前将它们再次种在地里。它省去了你在种苗周围除草的麻烦，而且土壤中大约一半的休眠杂草种子已经发芽了。这些都是野草，在生长的季节里不会再困扰你了!

Use Cover Crops To Save Energy In The Long Run

Facing my garden at the end of the season, when it is overrun with weeds, squash vines, and giant, prehistoric-looking kale plants, is daunting. The last thing I want to do is take my shovel and go to the effort of clearing a brand new seed-bed, when I know I will just be doing again for spring planting. But cover crops are part of the rhythm of the year, and they will save you time (in weeding) and money (in fertilizer) in the long run.

It is harder to clear up and turn in a miscellaneous garden full of decrepit tomatoes and dandelions than it is to mow and till a uniform cover crop. This reorients the cycle of your garden labor, putting the hardest tillage at the end of the season, rather than the beginning. Who wants that? But think of it this way. In September, you are already in the habit of working in the garden. It is easier to get started on a garden work day. Having a quick and easier start in the spring will help you get into the garden earlier and have crops germinate sooner.

Cover crops are an excellent way to protect and improve soil through the winter, and they take only a little extra work. With a little preparation, they can give you a leg up in the spring, and make your plants big and beautiful all season.