Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Patricia Ruggiero" <ruggierop@earthlink.net>]

Mitch wrote:

Last Fall.  Zone 8B

 

Some things to consider:

 

1) Cover crops cut in their vegetative state will regrow.  To kill them, you need to cut them when they are flowering and/or going to seed.  In this later stage, all their energy is in the seedhead; when you cut that down, the roots do not have sufficient energy to regrow the plant.

 

2) We use a mix of bearded oats, field peas, and hairy vetch (OPV) as a cover crop.  We plant it on various beds in the late summer.  The oats and peas make a quick, tall, thick growth, while the vetch is very slow to establish.  Come autumn the frosts (in zone 7)  eventually kill the oats and peas; they tumble down and act as mulch for the winter.  The vetch stays quiescent during the winter.  In March the vetch begins growing lustily.  In April it’s thick and lush and starting to flower.  We let it go as long as we can tolerate, because the pollinators flock to its flowers.  Finally we cut it (by hand, with a scythe or kame knife) and leave it in place to decay.  It does NOT grow back.

 

3) In your zone, it’s apparent the winters aren’t sufficiently severe to kill the peas and wheat.  You need, therefore, to consider when they, like the vetch, will flower and set seed.  Do NOT plant such covers on beds that you will need in the early spring.  Plant them on beds you won’t use until sometime AFTER the covers have flowered.  In our case, we do not use OPV on beds that, like right now, get planted to early salad greens, peas, potatoes.  They DO get planted on beds that we will not plant until at least May 1, by which time we will have cut the vetch.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Pat

Central Virginia, USDA zone 7