You can apply some common practices used in farming to your garden this fall for a spectacular garden next spring — plant a cover crop!

Often, green manure crops are grown for a specific period, and then plowed under before reaching full maturity in order to improve soil fertility and quality. These practices are beneficial to both large farmers and small family gardens.

The most common cover crops are the legumes or peas – crops with pods which are typically high in nitrogen such as beans, lentils, lupins and alfalfa. To learn more of this go to (www.permaculture.org)

Cover crops are also vastly beneficial for all these reasons:
• improving soil quality by increasing organic matter levels over time
• improves the water and nutrient holding and buffering capacity of soil
• increased soil carbon sequestration, which has been promoted as a strategy to help offset the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels
• compete with weeds or provide an impenetrable cover for weed seeds
• some cover crops even suppress weeds: they have a biochemical that is toxic to or inhibits seed germination of other plant species. These crops are rye, hairy vetch, red clover, soghum sudan grass and species in the brassicaceae family, particularly mustards
• cover crops can also break disease cycles and reduce populations of bacterial and fungal diseases, the same way they suppress weeds,
• improve habitat for wildlife such as songbirds
• adds plant diversity
• fixes macro and micro nutrients particularly nitrogen

It’s no Dirty Secret, still to this day the secret to successful small and large scale gardening is to feed the soil with a high quality compost to feed the biological cycle of microbial life. After all, our planet continues to exist because of the decomposition cycle that exists around us.

To learn more about the reasons for this farming practice go to www.soilfoodweb.ca to learn about the microbial life that lives and thrives in healthy soil.

Please let us know if you have any dirty secrets of your own that you would like to share on our blog. We are also interested in crops that can be harvested throughout the winter season in the Okanagan.