It’s almost February, which means it’s almost time for me to plant my radish seeds! I can’t wait to harvest those crisp, juicy seed pods. (Who needs spicy roots? The juicy seed pods are where it’s at.)
I’ve already strewn around a bunch of Austrian Winter Peas, and they’ve started sprouting, which is exciting. They’re growing realllllly slowly because they keep getting snow dumped on top of them, but they’re growing, and they’re doing just fine! This from seed in January. I can’t wait to see how they’ll do when I plant them again in October or November later this year.
I was originally pretty “eh” about the idea of cover crops, but once I clued in to the fact that I could plant edible ones and then snack on them all winter . . . muah ha ha ha.
So, how about you? What are your favorite cover crops to eat?
I planted lentils this winter – who knew they survived frost! They laughed at 15F. I’m looking forward to adding them to our winter cover mix from now on. Austrian pea shoots are the best – almost as good as fresh sweet peas. Salad burnett is a perennial, pretty tasty, very frost hardy. Overwintering parsley is super hardy and turns sweet, and then it attracts a bazillion parasitic wasps the following summer. Winter wheat is great – it’s harvested before any pests.
I’ve used up old vegetable seed in winter cover crop mixes in the past - including kale, spinach and winter radish. Not ideal if you’re following a strict rotation (brassicas can be problematic) but it was great to forage for fresh tasty kale and other leaves in the beds over winter. Also, the pigeons (a real pest on brassica crops over winter here in the UK) don’t seem to find the plants as easily when they’re mixed in with a whole load of other plants! Keen to try lentils after that suggestion @HAnderson , thanks!
I’m planning to encourage my brassicas to turn into perennials, so no, I’m not planning to rotate them. My plan is to grow everything all jumbled together everywhere all the time. Crop rotation seems like a bother, and wildly diverse intercropping seems much more fun.
As a commercial grower here in the UK, if you are organically certified you have to practice rotation (with some exceptions - using Shumei methods for example). Using diverse multi species cover crops particularly over winter feels like a good middle ground, but I agree, everything jumbled up together creates both diversity and beauty!
I didn’t know you had to practice crop rotations in those circumstances. That’s a good reason to do it!
I’m not planning to sell my produce – I want to eat it – so that gives me a lot of freedom. I’ve seen advice online on several YouTube channels (MIgardener was one, I think?) that crop rotation makes pretty much no difference in a small growing space, because if you’re only moving 50 feet away or so, the same diseases and insects are still going to be there.
I believe it was MIgardener who then pointed out that if you plant cool weather crops in that space, and then switch to warm weather crops afterwards, you’re basically practicing crop rotation anyway. He also pointed out that interplanting can be very helpful to reduce both diseases and pests, because you don’t have huge clusters of the same species all alone in one space. That attracts fewer issues.
I figure if diseases or pests build up, I can use that as an opportunity to breed for resistance to them, so it’s probably not a big deal. If does turn out to be a really big deal, then I can try crop rotation, and/or just not growing that species for a year, and hoping the problems migrate away or die.
What I took from this is that crop rotation is probably really important for monocrops (or even consistent just-a-few-species companion plantings) in large spaces, and probably not important for small spaces that have loads of different species growing closely together.
Winter crops and/or cover crops are probably equally helpful for both.
That was my attitude from the beginning. Also, I would much rather spend the time outside in the garden doing anything than bothering my brain with figuring out the rotation pattern and tracking.
Since my garden is on a small side everything is next to each other anyway, I just went with the “method” of mixing it all up and add some perennials and flowers in there too. Years later and I’m still doing it like that.
Same with the cool and warm weather crops at the same spot each year - we have mild winters and hot summers, and in some spots I can even have three different plants/crops troughout the year.
I love nasturtium! It’s not your regular cover crop, but I have it as a ground cover beneath some fruit and olive trees (in the photo) and as an edge plant for garden beds. I love to put young leaves and flowers into salads, and leaves can go in fritattas or basically anywhere with leafy greens. It has a spicy taste, and flowers are something special - sweet (from nectar) and spicy.
White mustard is a lovely multipurpose plant - as a cover crop it is a good scavenger of nutrients, young leaves are edible (fritattas, steamed with other leafy green vegetables, chopped with other veggies with pasta etc.), and seeds can be used as a spice or to make a mustard (I didn’t try to make it yet).
I’m planting it as a part of a cover crop mix or interplanted with the main crop. Some of my fava beans are sharing the space with it at the moment. In this particular situation I’ll cut mustard plants bit by bit as favas grow, I’m guessing by the time favas are in full bloom only few of the mustard plants will be left standing. Some plants on the edge of the bed I’ll leave for full growth and later seeds.
And don’t forget the plant-family-specific-endophytes that might help the plants more if we’re not continually disrupting them with rotation. I think rotation might be a “rule” that has come out of chemical monocropping – much like plant/row spacing rules.
In our biodiverse smashed together garden, we have plenty of predator bugs all around, and they’re happy to eat outbreak pests whether they’re in a rotated bed or not. (except squash bugs…still working on them)
Another reason to rotate crops and plant many things rather than a monoculture is the root exudates that thd soil life feed on. If you grow only tomatoes in a bed then the soil life is being limited to only tomato root exudates.
I’m probably going to be feeding alot of garden cover crop to my animals. The rest being chop and drop. But I’m also not against eating them.
I believe rotation of crops came much earlier than chemical monocropping.
Even in earlier centuries (and I think we can say up to Romans and Egiptians amd probably even some earlier civilisations) they had somewhat large parcels (parts of field or whole field) under one culture that followed rotation rules. Those were smaller than your modern machine operated mmonocrops, but much larger than say a garden of 100-300m2 where we love to mix it all up.
I do think that you can do larger fields of intermixed sowing/planting and be much more relaxed with rotation rules but probably not skip them completely (not talking about food forest type of growing here).
I’m pretty sure crop rotation has been a thing since at least the Middle Ages. Probably further back than that. But yes, it was definitely a thing because the soil got exhausted in between monocrops, and had to be replenished by planting crops with different nutritional requirements there until it recovered. I figure if you never monocrop in the first place, and try to be as diverse as possible every year, it’ll probably mimic a wild ecosystem much more closely.
HI : my best cover crop to eat is Daïkon radishes, then mustard.
They actually flower at the same time if sown together: I sow them by end august / beginning of september and I crush it when flowering (beginning of March), them sow onions and other springtime crops.
Faba beans are good to eat too, but flowering later.
Thanks for mentionning nasturtium @mare.silba I will try add some next year, it is so nice looking, and spicy!
That sounds like a good system! I’d love to have radishes that overwinter through my whole winter, but I’m not sure if any of them are hardy enough. (I’m in zone 7b.) I might see if they can handle the whole winter under a hoop house, though! It would be very cool to have them available to pull out whenever I want to eat one, and/or to use for eating in spring.
Hey Holly, I was really interested in your video in the class on all of the cover crop experimentation you’ve been doing. Do you have any unusual or unconventional cover crops that you have discovered? In addition, you talked about some cover crops that worked best with certain plants, do you have any neat combos that you have found?
I’m sending thanks back to you @ThomasPicard for reminding me I also eat mustard and fava beans flowers .
I found a picture of a salad from last spring that has a bunch of different salad greens including wild rocket, then dandelion, nasturtium, wild plantain, lemon balm and sage leaves, and flowers of nasturtium, fava beans, collard, peas, borage, malva and calendula (just petals). So much diversity in just one meal!
I love those mixed salads with added wild plants (aka weeds) and flowers - they are so beatifull to look at and so full of flavour.
I can’t wait to harvest those crisp, juicy seed pods. (Who needs spicy roots? The juicy seed pods are where it’s at.)
My plan is to grow everything all jumbled together everywhere all the time. Crop rotation seems like a bother, and wildly diverse intercropping seems much more fun.
I will try add some next year, it is so nice looking, and spicy!
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