How To Plant Cover Crop Seed By Hand In A Backyard Garden

Cover crops provide many advantages in a home vegetable garden. They help maintain and improve soil structure and fertility, suppress weeds, and support beneficial wildlife.

There are a wide variety of cover crop species to select, depending on your priorities and goals. Legumes such as clover or winter field beans may be particularly suitable as they fix nitrogen into garden soils that has become depleted over time.

1. Prepare the Soil

Late summer and fall cover crops are planted into empty or fallow garden beds and allowed to mature throughout winter before being tilled up again in spring. Cover crops range from annual grasses such as oats or daikon radish, to legumes such as crimson clover or Austrian field pea, acting like green manure that renews soil health and structure while fixing nitrogen into root nodules that decompose over time thereby improving next year’s vegetables.

Plan to plant cover crops between September and early October so they have time to establish and flourish before cold weather threatens their development. For optimal results, lightly rake in the seed before covering it with 1/4-1 1/2 inches of soil; make sure the area stays moist until spring rains arrive and water it regularly until rainfall returns in full force.

2. Broadcast the Seed

Cover crops have the ability to loosen and enrich soil while others like oilseed radish and mustard seed produce large amounts of foliage that smothers weeds before they can germinate, keeping them at bay from sprouting again. Determining which cover crop is right for your garden depends entirely on your goals and what cover crop will serve best as part of an integrated gardening system.

Before sowing seeds in your garden bed, be sure to rake over it carefully to clear away debris and create an even surface for planting. Sow the seeds according to their rate on their seed packet before lightly raking after sowing for optimal soil-to-seed contact.

Row sowing is best used for cool-season vegetables that need precise spacing, while hill sowing works best for warm-season vines. Broadcast sowing provides an efficient method of planting many small seeds such as basil and carrot seeds at once.

To use this method, make a small mound 6-12 inches across and dig a hole at its center. Sow seeds according to your seed packet’s recommended depth setting; once germinated, thin to identify only strong seedlings.

3. Cover the Seed

Cover crops are quick-growing mixtures of annual and perennial plants that you sow into empty garden beds in late summer or fall to reduce winter soil erosion, enrich the soil with organic material when ploughed under in spring, and supply nitrogen for future vegetable plantings.

Cover crop legumes such as crimson clover or hairy vetch work together with special soil bacteria to “fix” nitrogen – one of the nutrients most often lacking in garden soils. The nitrogen-fixing organisms live within the roots of legumes and convert atmospheric nitrogen into forms easily absorbed by other plants; you can assist this natural process by using inoculants available from many seed retailers.

Buckwheat or oil-seed radish cover crops have proven particularly useful at suppressing weed growth by exuding chemicals that inhibit their sprouting. To get optimal results, broadcast seeds evenly by hand before lightly raking them into the soil surface before watering thoroughly afterwards.

4. Water

Cover crops planted between vegetable beds can help mitigate soil erosion while adding organic matter back into the soil, as well as controlling weeds and pests.

Home gardeners looking for winter-kill or termination-natural cover crop options will find that many of their top choices will winterkill themselves over time, such as oats (Avena sativa), which decompose quickly come spring, or winter wheat or rye (Secale cereale). Red clover/crimson clover legumes add nitrogen-rich soil through redistribution while hairy vetch (Vicia villosa) also counts.

An optimal cover crop mixture combines grasses, broadleaves and legumes in appropriate proportions for maximum performance. Many seed companies offer mixed species cover crop seed mixtures that make planting simpler than planting single species alone.