Do cover crops make sense for a home gardener?

Well, this is something that people would do on larger scales to rehabilitate the soil over the course of the fall winter or they would also plant like a winter kill crop and then it would die and then it would break down over the course of the winter.

So what are they in general and do they make sense for a home

gardener like you or me? Cover crops are really quick growing plants. They're

grasses, legumes. They are planted in the late summer. They're planted in the fall, and you grow them over the winter.

What they do is they basically just cover the soil, as the name would imply, improve the soil structure,

they add organic matter, remember they're stealing energy from the sun

and turning it into plant tissues, right?

So there's a lot of different types,

some of the ones that you'll see all over the place,

Harry vetch, rye, clover, oats, buckwheat, field pea, forage pea, field beans, all these different things.

They're in pretty classic mixes.

Now, something I did about three years ago as I said okay well if I wanted to put a

segment of my garden to rest for the winter could I just cover crop in a raised bed

doesn't that make sense you can just do crop in a raised bed? Doesn't that make sense?

You can just do it on a micro scale.

And the answer is you certainly can.

Because you get really a lot of benefits from it.

Instead of leaving that soil, what we say fallow,

there's nothing in it and there's nothing on it, right? So

compaction will go down, water, root, and air penetration will go up. You will have better

habitat for beneficials in the area because something's still growing.

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