Don't Leave Your Raised Beds Empty! Do This Instead...

If you're clearing your beds out for the season and your plan is to just leave them bare, don't. Leaving your soil barren like this over the course of the winter is a surefire way, whether you're going in a raised bed or in ground to set your garden up for failure next year because barren soil is exposed to the elements. It can be blown away in the wind. You can lose nutrients through leaching. And it's just not a great way to build fertility as you go into the next season. So in today's video, Jacques and I are going to show you how to plant something called a cover crop, even in a raised bed, no matter where you live that will pretty much grow on autopilot and make your garden even better next year. So you might be thinking, Hey Kev, why can't I just mulch my bed and be done with it? And you can, that is completely fine. That will protect the soil for the next season. But if you want a little extra credit, my first pick would be buckwheat. This is just common buckwheat. It's good for more mild climates like my own. I can grow this in fall through the winter as long as I make sure to terminate or kill that crop before it starts to produce more seed. Cause if it does, I'm going to have a weed problem. But in colder climates, this will do something called winter kill. So it will die just because the conditions are too cold for it to support its own growth. But the beauty of buckwheat for me, easy, easy to grow. About 35 days until it starts to form flowers. The seed is relatively inexpensive and it's fast and it outcompetes weeds. So to sow a cover crop, it's probably the most fun sowing you'll ever have. Come through, open a packet up and you just sprinkle. Just scatter it like this. How often do you get to do this in the garden? It is so satisfying. It's kind of like planting a big bed of microgreens. So what's nice is this also suppresses weeds. So if you've left the bed barren over the course of your gardening journey, you may have found that it wasn't barren by the time that spring came along, a bunch of weeds came in. So buckwheat will help push that weed pressure down. Now I might need another packet here. It's a pretty big bed. I'm going to cover this up. I'm going to water it in. And in about 30 days, I can actually come through, chop and drop, basically cut this crop off right at the base, let it decompose right in place. And actually I'm going to be putting garlic in this bed come about November, which is the perfect timing to get a little quick cover crop of buckwheat in before I do it. One of Kevin's favorite cover crops is buckwheat, which is really, really good for producing all of that massive biomass that you could then pile on top of your bed. But for me personally, I love the fava bean and that is because fava beans are one of the best nitrogen fixers out there. What that means is that they will literally take nitrogen out of the air, put it into their roots and become fertilizer. And that can be used by your future plants. In some studies they found that fava bean cover crops could even replace nitrogen fertilization and something as intense as corn. The way I like to start my fava beans is at the end of summer into fall, I'll go ahead and start seeding some. You could see a few of them right here. A few of them over here underneath my summer crops, like my tomatoes and my eggplant. What this does is it allows it to get established, start growing and then I could continue to harvest my wonderful eggplant. When that season's done, I'll chop the plants down and I'll have this forest of fava beans coming up, ready to go. Now for maximum nitrogen in the soil itself, you want to wait for those fava beans to produce flowers. Once they have flowers, cut them at the base, pile them on the surface and now all the nitrogen left in those roots will decompose and feed the future plants. One of the really cool things about fava beans is that they're also very cold hardy. You can even start them when the soil is count to 35 degrees. So definitely try fava beans out if you want to boost yourself, but not just a lot of biomass and mulch, but also a ton of nitrogen. We've been talking about putting our gardens to bed this season, but what about ourselves? That's where Birch Living, the sponsor of today's video comes in. Birch makes mattresses that are crafted with responsibly sourced materials such as organic cotton, organic wool, and a hundred percent natural latex. Their mattresses are free from polyurethane foams, which can cause harmful off-gassing and are constructed without fiberglass, which can be detrimental to your health. When I first moved into the homestead over four years ago, I was sleeping on a $40 air mattress for a few months. My back hurt like crazy and I decided enough was enough. So I upgraded to a Birch Living natural mattress about three years ago and my sleep has been forever changed. First off, it was super important for me to have a mattress constructed from environmentally friendly materials, but my sleep quality improved dramatically and it was probably the easiest bed that I've ever set up in my life. A big selling point for me is that Birch mattresses are fair trade certified, which means they partner with fair trade certified factories and only use fair trade organic cotton across the entire Birch brand. They give you an a hundred night sleep trial along with a 25 year warranty and deliver it right to your doorstep with in-home setup and removal to make your buying experience as convenient as possible. Each mattress comes with two of their EcoRest pillows made from recycled materials, which are super breathable and better for the environment. I use mine as a body pillow. So I love my Birch mattress and I think that you will too. If you're looking for a new bed, check them out birchliving.com forward slash epic gardening for a killer deal plus two free EcoRest pillows. That's birchliving.com forward slash epic. If you are a cold climate grower, I got you covered with weirdly named Hairy Veg. So the cool thing about Hairy Veg is it grows extremely fast. It's about 60 days to maturity. Buckwheat, my first pick was a little bit faster, but the benefit is it's hardy down to at least zone four, maybe even zone three, which means you could plant it now pretty much wherever you live in the country and it will do something for you. And what is that thing that it's doing? It is fixing nitrogen. In fact, it is one of the better nitrogen fixers out there, meaning that it can take nitrogen from the air and affix it into the ground which of course makes it more available for the plants that you're going to put in the ground after you grow the Hairy Veg. It also has these beautiful flowers that bees love. So if you still have a little pollinator action as the season winds down, really good choice. But the thing you have to remember is all of these plants will flower and they will go to seed and they will reproduce. And because this is not one that tends to die in the winter, it can survive through it. You have to make sure you kill it yourself. So the way that a lot of people do this, especially in like the farming world, is what's called crimping. They might take a board, they'll tie some string to that board and they'll kind of step on that board and it'll break the stems, which will kill the plant. And then they just let it decompose in place. Hairy Veg is great. It takes about three to five weeks to decompose and then you can plant right in it. So again, even in a zone three or four, this could be a great pick right now if you want something to do in the garden without you having to do very much. There are some cover crops that you could actually grow without having to dedicate a whole bed to it and just grow it in addition to something you already have in your garden. In this case, I'm talking about crimson clover, which is a really, really, really wonderful cover crop for fixing nitrogen in the soil while also providing beautiful red flowers that attract all sorts of pollinators to your garden. And one of the best ways to utilize this is to actually seed it right underneath the fruit tree. So right here I have a pink lady apple. So what I'm going to do here is scatter this across the surface. This is not a perennial by the way, it will die back after it flowers. If you want to maximize like the actual physical amount of nitrogen present in your soil, you would go through and mow this down once that red flower has appeared and that would maximize your nitrogen in the soil. Now this plant will die in zones eight during the winter time. So if you are going to start this now, make sure you have a good six to eight weeks before that first frost comes. But this is just one of those wonderful things where I don't have to worry about it taking over. I don't have to worry about killing it. It will die on its own and provide tons of nitrogen to benefit my fruit trees. This next cover crop is definitely the tastiest. And I think a crowd favorite who doesn't like a good old wheat product. This is a big old bag of wheat that I harvested out of this very patch in front of me. You could see that it is actually a mounded structure, which is exactly why I planted wheat in the first place last winter. Wheat is very good at erosion control. So it'll send out many roots all across the soil, hold it in place and stop it from washing away in the winter rains. It also is very good at scavenging nutrients. So if there's like any leftover nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, it'll suck all that up into the plant. And the beautiful thing is that once you harvest your wheat berries to make delicious picachas or breads or whatever you want to do with it, you could use the rest of the plant as literal straw mulch. That is what straw is. It is just wheat straw sold in a bale. So by doing that, I actually produced my own mulch was able to lock the soil and any of those nutrients that were trapped in that wheat is now returned to the soil via that wheat straw. Now one thing I'll mention is that wheat is actually quite winter hardy, particularly winter wheat. It could go down to, I think like negative 15 degrees. But if that's not hardy enough, you could try rye. Rye is another cereal crop that does really, really good work for cover cropping and has an extremely cold tolerant down to like negative 30 degrees. So wheat, rye, really good at scavenging nutrients, really good at producing tons of mulch. And as a bonus, you get to eat delicious wheat berries in whatever form you like to eat. I'm here in my test garden, a 16 by 16 square foot area. That was pretty much topsoil fill dirt when I moved into this property about four years ago. So we had to do something to build the soil. And what better pick than soil builder, peas and oats. The reason this pick to me is so exciting is it's sort of something you can do right now. If it's at least six to eight weeks before it starts to get really cold and frosty in your area, you can plant it right now. No problem. It'll help build the soil and I'll tell you exactly how in a second. But my favorite use of this is if you have an area of the garden that you haven't gotten to yet, but you know you want to improve the soil for when you eventually do plant in that area. Use this stuff. You've got peas and oats. Peas going to fix nitrogen, much like we just talked about with my hairy vetch pick. The oats, nice fibrous roots. They're going to start to hold onto that soil. They'll also provide a little structure for those peas to climb up, get nice and big, fix even more nitrogen. And then both of those together just produce a ton of what's called biomass or organic matter that you can then chop and drop or you can let kill. So these will die at about 10 degrees Fahrenheit or so. So it will winter kill. That's why you have to plant it before the frost comes through. But if it doesn't winter kill, then you can come through, chop and drop it with some shears or you can even just take a lawnmower and run it straight over and let all of it sit right on top. That's why this is such a good pick for someone who already has an established garden. Maybe there's an extra plot that you're just not ready to deal with yet. Sprinkle some of this on and it'll be a lot better when you're finally ready to build that garden out. So cover crops are not just for farmers. You can do it in your in-ground garden, even in your raised bed garden. In fact, almost three years ago, Jacques and I planted this entire area out with a massive amount of cover crop. We chopped it down with machetes and it really improved the soil to the point where this is some of the most productive space in the garden. So cover crops, not just for farmers. You can do it in a raised bed or in a backyard garden just like this. And if you're looking for something edible still to plant in September, check out our monthly planting guide right here. Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.