By now, parts of your summer garden are probably toast.  That early sweet corn should be long gone, maybe you pulled out some buggy beans, and you're about to dig your potatoes.  Or perhaps you have trouble zones where the soil wasn't good enough to support much of a crop and you're thinking about writing that bed off entirely.  Once you set aside some good ground for your fall garden, now's the perfect time to plant the rest in winter cover crops --- they'll create organic matter, prevent erosion, cut down on winter weed growth, and add beauty to the winter garden.

The perfect winter cover crop for a no-till garden can handle problematic soil conditions, will thrive in the fall and early winter, then naturally dies back when the coldest part of winter hits.  Here in zone 6, I've found only two winners that really fit the bill --- oats and oilseed radishes.  Oats have the advantage that they are available at my local feed store (which means the seeds are dirt cheap) and the plants leave behind a light mulch that will protect the soil until it's time to plant summer vegetables.  Oilseed radishes hold their own, though, by aerating and adding organic matter deep in poor soil, then rotting fast enough that I can plant spring vegetables directly behind them.  After a year of experimentation, I've decided that oilseed radishes will go into the very poorest soil of my garden while oats will be planted almost everywhere else.

So, when do you plant winter cover crops?  Again, this will be climate specific, but I plant oats betwen August 1 and September 15 and oilseed radishes between August 1 and September 7.  If you plant too late, your cover crops won't do much good and you'll instead enter the next garden year with lots of weeds.  On the other hand, plant too early and your cover crops might go to seed and produce weed problems of their own (although you can stave this off with oats by mowing the mature plants.)

Unless you have fancy equipment to do the work for you, cover crops aren't worth the extra effort of seeding in rows.  Instead, I've had good luck broadcasting oat seeds on the soil surface and covering them with a very light mulch of straw to keep the ground moist while preventing seed predation by our intelligent sparrows and cardinals.  Radish seeds are less tasty, so I often toss them directly onto the soil surface with no further care.  (Do be aware that in really hot, dry weather, the radish seedlings can burn to a crisp if planted this way.)  A safer (but more time-consuming method) for planting both is to rake back the top half inch of soil, broadcast your seeds, and pull the soil back overtop.

There are several winter cover crops that can be planted later than September 15, but I've found that barley, crimson clover, and (especially) annual ryegrass are tough to kill without tilling.  I suspect that any cover crop that can be planted within a month of the first frost date will be too cold hardy to die on its own over the winter.  For beginners who live in zone 6 or colder, I'd recommend sticking to oats and oilseed radishes this year for a beautiful and bountiful winter cover crop.

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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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