Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Mixtures
Let's get back to legumes and grasses as off-season cover crops. Rather than choosing
one, I almost always mix grasses and legumes in order to get the benefits of both. By plant-
ing them together and occasionally going as far as to plant several cultivars or varieties of
each, there is a much greater chance that at least one or two of them will do well in your
soil and climate conditions. For example, if you have a soil with a lot of excess nitrogen,
your legume might not grow as much but your grass might be very happy, whereas a soil
that is low in nitrogen may favor the legume. It's more complicated than that, but the idea
is that one of them will be happier in your soil conditions.
If it's a wet season, even within one species, some cultivars will do much better than oth-
ers. Same for dry, cold, windy weather, etc. Different plants also have different growth
habits, so a mixture can better cover the soil, make full use of different levels of sunlight
and even grow off each other. Vetch will climb up a tall grass for support to reach sunlight,
which is one reason that it's often planted together with rye.
There are dozens of cover crops, each with their own strengths and weaknesses and
some more appropriate for certain regions, but there are a few that are used nearly univer-
sally and I recommend you start with them, or find out what works in your area. Once you
have success with the basics, you can try others. You can even experiment with cover-crop-
ping year round, in between your rows. This is being done very successfully in many
warm-climate countries where leaving fields fallow in only cover crops isn't economically
feasible, because the opportunity cost of not growing cash crops is too great.
Gardeners and farmers use all kind of plants as cover crops: dandelion, fava beans, fen-
nel/dill, yarrow, and even parsley, but let's start with the following: hairy vetch, clover, cer-
eal rye and annual ryegrass.
