Catch 22 Composting

[ChocolateMouse]

I store it in my garden beds! XD If I don't have anything planted a cover crop works great to keep all the nutrients in place.

 

[jthornton]

I store it in my garden beds! XD If I don't have anything planted a cover crop works great to keep all the nutrients in place.

What is a cover crop?

JT

 

[aart]

What is a cover crop?

JT

A 'crop' meant to keep the soil healthily working instead of sitting dormant and bare.
Improves the soil, eliminates erosion, deters 'weeds'.
Lots of different plants can be used depending on future land use.
Usually something short and easy to till under or be planted right into.
It's a whole other threads worth of discussion.

 

[ChocolateMouse]

What is a cover crop?

JT

Aart summed it up well. It's usually a fast growing plant you grow during your off season so you can have something deliberately planted that's good for the beds instead of weeds. Usually it's also a unique species to your rotation to break up pest cycles. (IE, if you grow corn you plant something that's not a grass/grain so corn pests die out. Then it's safer to plant corn again.) Depending on how long your off season is (some crop rotations have a whole year for recovery built in every 3-4 years) almost anything can be a cover crop. Some common cover crops are things like rye, oats, clover, vetch, radishes, or even cowpeas (black eyed peas).
So for example, if your soil is dormant over winter and you plant some clover in the bed and it covers they whole bed, come spring it will have layed a lot of nitrogen into the soil cause of the rhizome bacteria and carbon into the plant bodies. If you then till the delicate spring plants into the soil they die off and compost adding nutrients right there to the bed without burning the plants you plant into the beds.
If you let the bed sit bare, a lot of the nutrients can wash away or dissipate into the air. But if there's root structures, bug tunnels, fungi, etc. still working in the bed that doesn't happen nearly as much.

 

[aart]

Aart summed it up well.

I knew you'd come in with the details

 

[ChocolateMouse]

¯\_(-)_/¯ It's what I do, right? I was quoted, asked, and I have nothing better to do right now anyhow.

Except maybe take my kitchen compost outside. But I'm procrastinating.

 

[aart]

It's what I do, right?

And you do it well!!

 

[jthornton]

Aart summed it up well. It's usually a fast growing plant you grow during your off season so you can have something deliberately planted that's good for the beds instead of weeds.

In my garden if I don't till it up several times in the winter it will have the thickest cover of grass you ever saw... I don't plant much in the big garden any more, moving to raised beds and planters on the deck. The garden gets out of sight out of mind and the weeds take over. Would you plant anything in a raised bed or just leave it bare?

I am thinking of putting in a food plot for the deer this winter where the garden is, it's about 50' x 50' or so.

JT

 

[aart]

In my garden if I don't till it up several times in the winter it will have the thickest cover of grass you ever saw

The right cover crop can help prevent this from happening.

 

[ChocolateMouse]

Yeah, I have raised beds, big ones tho (3x12 is the smallest), and cover crops help keep them healthy. Cover crops as aart said would also help prevent the problems in your big bed.

A food plot for deer works as a cover crop as long as you cut it down and till it in to add nutrients to the soil. I know someone that does a mix of beets, grasses, wildflowers and legumes as their cover crop, then sends her pigs thru when they're grown to fertilize and till her soil. Mind you she does this as part of a BIG crop rotation over several fields and years, not garden beds, but the principles still stand.