Just a week after noticing that the six week old buckwheat was going to seed, I saw these beautiful oat flowers popping out of my two month old oats.  Since I'm growing the oats as a cover crop right now, I went ahead and mowed them down with the hedge trimmer.  Incidentally, the hedge trimmer got slightly bogged down in the thickest parts of the oat beds, so I wouldn't want to use it on anything tougher than ripening oat stalks.

Meanwhile, I'm continuing to go a little overboard testing out every possible autumn cover crop.  Two weeks ago, I planted several beds with crimson clover, the only fall-planted legume cover crop that is supposed to be at least semi-reliably winter-killed in our region.  Early October is late to be planting crimson clover, but the seeds are already up and I have high hopes we'll get enough growth to give me an idea of the quality of the variety before our first hard freeze.

I've got a lot more beds opened up now that the summer garden is officially dead, so I'm going to try out one last cover crop this year --- barley.  If you're curious about the pros and cons of different cover crops in your region, I highly recommend that you download Managing Cover Crops Profitably.  This 4.5 MB, 248 page pdf file gives a lot of regional pointers that will help you figure out which cover crops are worth a shot and which ones should be avoided at all costs.  The results you'll get from a cover crop are highly dependent on your climate and soil, so it's worth doing a bit of research rather than just planting the cover crops that have done well on someone else's farm.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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