What Are Cover Crops? Plants That Give Back & Improve Your Soil (2024)

FAQs

What Are Cover Crops? Plants That Give Back & Improve Your Soil? ›

A range of cover crops provide bene ts for soil. You probably know some already, like cereal rye, field peas, radishes, oats, clovers, mustard, and even arugula. Among the less famous, but no less important, are hairy vetch, sunn hemp, and sorghum sudan.

Cover crops are “green manures” when a gardener turns them into the soil to provide organic matter and nutrients. Green manures include legumes such as vetch, clover, beans and peas; grasses such as annual ryegrass, oats, rapeseed, winter wheat and winter rye; and buckwheat.

Cover Crops To Improve and Manage Nutrients

Cereal rye is excellent for nutrient cycling. Buckwheat and brassicas improve availability of phosphorous in soils. Though known for nitrogen fixation, legumes such as clover, vetch, and partridge pea also help cycle phosphorous in soils.

Some cover crops directly add nutrients to the soil by fixing nitrogen at their roots. Examples include winter field beans and peas, clover and vetch. These are all types of legume and are a great choice for sowing before nitrogen-hungry brassicas such as cabbage.

Chemical fertilizers have environmental concerns so we usually use cover crops such as the legumes, clover, alfalfa, buckwheat or beans to fix nitrogen in the soil.

Comfrey, stinging nettle, chicory, lamb's quarters and many more weeds that have long tap roots break up the hardpan, bring up minerals from deep in the soil, and bring fertility to your soil.

Cover crops (grasses, legumes and forbs) recommended for seasonal cover and other conservation purposes include annual ryegrass, oilseed radish, winter cereal rye, and oats used for scavenging unused fertilizer and releasing nutrients back into the soil for the next crop to use.

Increased cost, labor and management – Winter cover crops require additional cost and labor for cover crop seed and planting. If the spring cash crop planting requires additional equipment or additional passes of strip tillage or roller crimpers, these are additional costs and labor.

Alfalfa is known for its deep, strong tap root that can reduce soil compaction over years of use as a cover crop. It can also protect sandy soil from erosion and improve the soil structure, particularly its permeability and infiltration.

Popular cover crops include cereal rye, crimson clover and oilseed radish. Familiar small grain crops, like winter wheat and barley, can also be adapted for use as cover crops.

What is the best ground cover for poor soil? ›

Dragon's Blood Sedum

This fast-growing ground cover for full sun grows well in various conditions, including poor soil. Bright green leaves in the spring with beautiful red flowers appear in the summer. If you've got weeds, it's also one of the most versatile weed-suppressing ground covers you'll find.

Once established a ground cover can grow thick preventing some germination, but it will not keep every weed out. Unfortunately, it takes a great deal of time and energy to remove all the weeds from a ground cover area if not kept tidy regularly.

The fastest spreading ground covers are ajuga and creeping thyme, which can spread multiple feet in a year.

Decomposing plant and animal material adds organic matter to the soil, improving its fertility and moisture retention. These ongoing processes, combined with sustainable farming practices like crop rotation and cover cropping, help maintain and replenish the topsoil layer over time.

If your soil needs a boost of nitrogen, consider planting cover crops like crimson clover, fava beans, or hairy vetch. If phosphorous or potassium is low, plant common buckwheat. If you need to break up hard soil, try crops with extensive root systems, like annual grasses, wheat, oats, or rye, which also build biomass.

Hairy vetch residues decompose rapidly and release nitrogen more quickly than most other cover crops. This can be an advantage when a rapidly growing, high-nitrogen-demand crop follows hairy vetch.

Addition of manure increases the nutrients in the soil. Keeping the land uncultivated (fallow) for some time allows soil to regain its nutrients from atmosphere. Crop rotation means changing the crops according to the nutrient requirements regularly which keeps the land fertile.

this nitrogen can be naturally replenished if the next crop grown is that of a legume, like a pea or groundnut. bacteria called rhizobium are present in the nodules of roots of leguminous plants.