Winter Garden Preparation

This appeared in the September 16, 2021 edition of The Fish Wrap.

Mid-September, row croppers are ready to harvest corn and soy.  Some backyard gardens are still in good shape with summer crops finishing strong and fall crops germinating for a late last harvest, while others are covered in weeds.  Either way, most gardeners are burnt out by now.  But this is the time to preserve your vegetable harvest for winter and to start preparing your beds for spring.

Nature abhors bare ground and the most important thing you can do is keep living roots in your soil year round.  While most turn to tillage in the fall and the spring, consider a cover crop instead.  Healthy soil never sleeps, whether farming thousands of acres or a few square feet in your backyard, cover crops should be a part of the system.

There are many options for cover crops and choosing depends on how you want to manage them.  Some cover crops winter-kill while others will survive the winter and provide early growth in the spring to help get the soil going.  Like any crop, a cover crop needs water to get established making it tricky to get started in late summer/early fall which is usually dry.  

The extra effort of growing cover crops may seem too much for some, but the benefits are well worth it.  Even better than a cover crop would be a cash crop that could grow in the late fall and early spring.  At RLF, we still have veggies in the ground, but will be clearing beds and planting rye for a cover in most of our beds.  While in others we are looking for some cover/cash crops to grow through the winter, like a couple beds of garlic and a couple of hardy cool season flowers that would be ready to harvest early spring.