Edible Yards

This week in our garden …

Buckwheat (above & below)

Purple Hull Peas

Black-eyed Peas

… our cover crops are up and growing. We use buckwheat, purple hull peas and black-eyed peas as summer cover crops. We broadcast the seed in late June and July and then lightly rake them into the soil. Sometimes we’ll add a thin layer of grass clipping mulch or leaves onto the top of the seeds to help them stay moist until they sprout. Once the seeds sprout, we manage the cover crops in several ways. We clip some of the buckwheat sprouts at the soil surface using our garden scissors and throw them into our summer salads. Buckwheat leaves and stems are delicious! By letting the roots remain in the soil, they add valuable organic matter as they breakdown. (Back on our farm, we used to let some of our buckwheat go to flower for our honeybees. Buckwheat honey is something special for sure! It’s thick and dark like molasses.) We’ll let some of our peas go to seed too so that we can harvest the pods and eat the peas. We don’t usually turn the cover crops into the soil although you can certainly do this (before they go to flower and seed) and they will add some nitrogen and organic matter to your soil. But be careful when tilling under your cover crops in the summer – you might burn off more organic matter than you add! Another way to ensure that your cover crops are building your soil is to skim or trim off the tops, leave the roots and soil structure intact, and add the tops to your compost pile. This way most of the valuable nutrients and biomass is captured in your soil and in your compost pile.