Lawn and Garden Cover Crops

By David Wall
Guest Columnist

A cover crop can ensure a green lawn 365 days a year! For lawns, try annual rye grass. You simply over-seed your Saint Augustine by roughly October 1. The rye will come up as your lawn grass is turning brown and will give you a green lawn all winter. In the spring, the rye begins dying back as your preferred lawn grass starts turning green.

As your fall garden marches toward fall, a cover crop to protect the soil over winter by preventing erosion, building nitrogen and improving next year's garden should be considered. Cover crops usually require little to no maintenance.

For gardens, you can go "massive" with hairy vetch and durana clover, but these get so dense, working the garden without repeatedly falling flat on your face becomes difficult.

Everybody has different desires from a veritable plethora of cover crops, and most have undisputed value in helping the garden. One newly preferred cover crop is cereal rye.  While not a legume. it does protect the soil. Cereal rye offers an additional advantage in that root knot nematodes, which can wreak havoc on tomato plants, don't like it. As such, it can lower such damage in next year's tomatoes and okra, which is more susceptible than tomatoes.

One of the simplest cover crops is either mini-clover, Dutch white clover, or a combination of the two.  Both have roots that take nitrogen from the air in the soil and store it in tiny capsules.  Aha you say.  I'll have plenty of nitrogen in next year's garden. Well, that's both true and false! The capsules hold the nitrogen until clover begins a die-back in June. Clover root die-back allows the contained nitrogen to become usable by vegetable crops.

Ideal time for cover crop planting is late September, but October will work.