Winter is an important time of rest for both the farmer and gardener, but it can also be a productive time. It’s a good time to work on building healthy soil, which can improve your harvest for years to come. One of our favorite ways to improve soil is by planting cover crops. They are low effort and offer great rewards! Now is a great time to establish cool season cover plants in your garden.
Benefits of Winter Cover Plants
Winter cover crops have amazing benefits, even for small gardens. You don’t need a large farm to reap the benefits of cover cropping.
- Add organic matter to the soil.
- Protect the soil from erosion.
- Improve fertility.
- Provide habitat for beneficial insects, microorganisms, and fungi.
- Suppress cool season weeds.
- Improve moisture management and heavy clay soils.
How to Choose a Cover Bowl
When choosing a winter cover plant, there are a few considerations. Does your soil have a particular issue? Is it compact? Does it have low fertility? All should be considered when choosing a crop.
However, one of the most important things you want to consider is how you will use the land in the spring. If you need to get a plant in the ground in early spring, you may want to choose a winter-killing cover plant. However, if you want to suppress early spring weeds, you may want to choose a winter-hardy cover crop that will continue to grow the following spring.
Note that which plants are considered winterkill versus winterkill hardy depends on your location, hardiness zone, snow cover, and winter temperatures. Understanding your hardiness zone and looking at the specific needs of each plant can help you make the right choice.
There are advantages and disadvantages to both winter hardy and winter cover crops.
Winter Hardy Cover Plants
Winter hardy cover crops are those plants that can withstand winter temperatures. They don’t grow all winter. Instead, they hibernate when it’s too cold and put on growth when conditions allow. In some areas of the Southeast, this may mean you see some growth in the winter. However, in mountainous areas, winter hardy plants tend to grow in the fall and then again in the spring.
These hardy winter cover crops have the added advantage of competing with spring weeds. As they establish root systems, they it tends to promote more biological activity in the soil than a winter cover crop.
Winter hardy cover plants are often hardy growth in spring as the sun rises and temperatures begin to rise. This growth can be good for suppressing weed growth, but you should also manage these plants as you prepare to plant.
Mowing and planting hardy winter cover crops is a popular method. Some gardeners prefer to use a tarp or crimping to kill the plant and leave it lying on the bed as a place to plant it. However, as mulch begins to break down it can temporarily bind nitrogen. To reduce this risk, you may want to wait two to three weeks before planting in that bed.
There are many winter crops that are suitable for sowing in autumn. Here are a few of our favorites:
Winter Kill Cover Plants
Generally, we plant winter cover crops earlier than winter hardy crops. The goal with a winterkill cover crop is to allow them to grow well in late summer and fall so that when they die during late fall or winter frosts, they cover the ground. This mulch helps provide habitat for beneficial insects, protects the soil, and adds organic matter as it decomposes.
In the spring, beds with winterkill cover crops are ready for immediate planting. You can lightly till the crop residue into the soil or leave it on top. Usually, it’s easy enough to jump aside to plant or transplant if you have seedlings.
Unfortunately, depending on where you live, these winter cover crops need to be sown early. Since the main goal is to build biomass, you need to allow them plenty of time to grow first they were killed with snow.
As with hardy winter cover crops, what is considered a winter cover crop in your area depends on your climate. For example, daikon radishes are often considered winter killer cover crops, but this may not be the case in parts of the southeast. Daikon radishes they were only killed where temperatures regularly drop below 20°F.
Here are a few of our favorite options for winter killer cover plants:
Mixing Cover Plants
Want the best of both worlds? Consider trying a mix of plants. Many winter cover crops are better suited to tolerate the hot temperatures of the southeast. Mixing them in with a winter hardy cover crop can provide a little shade and protection for the winter hardy plant to stand. As the winter killer plant begins to die, the hardy winter cover plant will grow and continue to grow in the spring.
If you want to learn more about using winter cover crops in a no-till system, check out this article Organic Cover Plants and Till it’s our neighbor Pam Dawling, author of Sustainable Market Farming.
It’s time to build healthy soil! Try adding some of these winter plants to your garden to add organic matter, improve fertility, prevent erosion, and more.
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