Cover Cropping: The LAZIEST Way to Improve Your Soil

If you are done with your garden for this year, I've got something in this bag right here that you can plant right now to help your garden out next year. Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening where it is our goal to help you grow a greener thumb. This is the easiest thing you can do. It's the laziest thing you can do in the garden right now. I have done it in my backyard, which I'll show you in a moment, but it is cover cropping your garden. So we're going to talk about why to do it, the crops that I have specifically chosen, where I got them and how to actually deal with your cover crop at the end of the season in this video. So cultivate that Like button. And I will guarantee that you have incredible nitrogen fixation in your soil. And let's get into the video. The first thing to understand are the benefits of cover cropping. And there are many. The first one is in the name. You are quite literally covering the soil with something living while you're not actively cultivating it for your vegetables or your fruits or just your edible garden. So that is the number one advantage. And what's that going to do for the soil? Well, number one, it's going to prevent any sort of evaporation and just getting crazy dry baked and caked soil because there's going to be plants in there and you're going to be watering and caring for them. The root matter is going to help hold the soil together, especially useful if you're growing a garden on a slope. I have a friend who did this. He has a crazy slope in his front yard and he cover cropped the whole thing and we had crazy rains, no problems whatsoever. So erosion is a really big benefit, but then you just get the benefits of the plants themselves and what those different species and varieties will do for the soil. So the first thing is going to be anything in the legume family is going to have a nitrogen fixation benefit where it's taking atmospheric nitrogen and in partnership with bacteria in the root area around these nodules down there, it's going to actually take it and convert it into nitrogen that's going to be usable by the soil life that's going to be in the soil. So that's a huge, huge benefit. We all know about nitrogen fixation. But things like brassicas, like your broccoli cauliflower style family, they're going to put out what are called exudates in the root area that can be used by soil life as well. And then also you have things like the daikon radish, any sort of taproot style plant that's going to grow deep. It's going to be mining nutrients from down in the subsoil, bringing it up. At the same time, it's going to be aerating that soil by creating a root that's going to go down and sort of pierce the soil. So when that dies and rots and is consumed by soil life, you're going to have a little bit more loose and aerated soil. There's another final benefit and I'm not even listing all of them right now, where you have biofumigation. So if you plant things like mustard, you can actually have an inhibitory effect on things like nematodes that are pretty nasty pests that are very hard to get rid of. So there's a whole host of benefits to cover cropping. I'm going to be doing it in all of my raised beds and all of my uncultivated beds that you see right here every single fall and maybe sometimes through the winter here in my zone. But now we need to talk about the actual varieties that I selected and which ones you should use for your garden. So this mix here is the mix that I've chosen. It's a fall cover crop mix from Truleaf Market. I'll put the link in the video description, but I'll just show you the breadth of varieties that are in this mix by sprinkling these seeds here on this surface. So all of these have the various benefits that we talked about. So if you want to keep life simple, just buy a fall or spring cover crop mix depending on what time of year it is and just plant that and don't worry about it. But just for the sake of education, let's talk about some of the different things in here and what they actually do. So I have wheat and then triticale, which is a wheat rye cross. That's going to basically just keep the soil together, prevent that erosion. The roots are going to help dig out and aerate the soil. Then I have a variety of legumes in this mix. So we have hairy vetch, we have berseem and balansa clover. I also have Austrian winter peas as a legume. That's going to be your nitrogen fixer. So that's the primary benefit to those. And then we have a couple of random ones here. So I have forage collards and then yellow mustard. So the yellow mustard is probably going to be acting primarily as that bio fumigant. So maybe attacking nematodes or any sort of thing that it would have an effect on pester disease wise. And then the collards are a brassica. So they're going to do a lot of that root action, but also they're going to provide some of those exudates at that root zone that the soil life can feed on throughout the winter. And of course, when spring comes again. Okay, we have educated ourselves on cover crops. Now let's sow them. It's a very simple process. So when sowing it's really the laziest thing of all time. You just grab handfuls, sprinkle it around, make sure you have a somewhat even distribution over the surface of the bed. And then we're just going to cover it with a little bit of soil. Let's give it some soil. You don't have to worry too much about the planting density because it's okay if they compete. In fact, that's kind of part of what we're doing here is creating a nice tight mix of crops that all interplay with one another. After that, just give them a nice healthy soak. We've covered them up with soil. So as long as we adequately moisten this soil, there's going to be enough moisture to start the germination process. So I like to give it a couple of minutes water here. While this is germinating, let's check on a crop I started in the backyard a couple of weeks ago. We're back here in the backyard where I've planted two different rounds of cover crops. Same mix, just a fall mix. But we're seeing one where it hasn't really started to flower yet. And then the one back there, which you'll see in a second, it has started to flower. So I want to talk about a couple of different things. First of all, like the timing. When should you get rid of your cover crop and how should you get rid of it? So a really good time to get rid of it is going to be when you start to see those flowers form. Because then the cover crops have gone through their useful life. When you chop them down, they're not probably going to try to be coming back up too much because they flowered. They've already kind of got what they were supposed to get done done in their evolutionary life. There's a couple of things that you can do as far as how to actually process the cover crop when you're done with it. So a very easy and lazy way is just, we call it the chop and drop. So you take some hedge shears, something like this, and you can just come through and just clip this and just let it lie exactly where it is. Make really short work of this. It's like making a salad green, but probably not going to want to be eating this. So this is a really easy thing to do. You want to let this sit for maybe two to four weeks before you plant into it. In a second I'll show you something more extreme where you can actually till and work it into the ground. And then the final thing you can do is just chop it. And if you want to, leave the roots in, but then collect all this material and toss it into your compost. So you could plant in this right away and then you have a bunch of green material, which can sometimes be hard to come by as the season ends, in your compost bin. Back here we have the more flowering, the a little bit more mature. It's probably twice as tall. So it's kind of interesting. What you could do is you could just chop and drop about half the height, steal that for your compost bin and the rest of it you could either let it be and chop and drop or just till it into the ground. And speaking of, I'm going to show you the extreme version of what we're doing to really get some organic matter in the soil, which is bring in a tiller. Here in the backyard we have tilled in all of that material into these new beds, which is coming up in a future video here on the channel. You'll see how we redid this whole section. But cover crops are such a fantastic way to deal with being a little lazier in the fall. It's very natural to feel that way. And if you're in a zone that gets cold enough to kill crops off, it's even easier. You just plant it. You don't even have to do everything we just showed you. You just let them die. It's called a winter kill cover crop and they'll do all the work for you. So until next time, good luck in the garden and keep on growing.