Cover crops - something harvestable?

I fully understand that having something growing all year round is necessary. But the seeds and sowing of a cover crop cost money and time.
What should i sow that is edible for either humans or animals?
Sowing something and then just cutting it and letting it rot seems fairly idiotic.

Hi, Kaarina

As far as I most cover crops can be eaten by animals as fodder.

The greens of turnips and mustard are well-known vegetables. Greens from forage radish and sugar beets can also be enjoyed.

Legumes such as cowpeas and pigeon peas will also enrich the soil besides being edible.

I am sure others will name some I have not thought of.

Hi Kaarina,
Technically it's not wasted if you just cut it and leave... it's harvested by all the bugs, worms, and microorganisms in your soil :), sorry, I couldn't help but give a smart aleck answer

For a real suggestion, perhaps buckwheat? It grows fast, produces lots of biomass, pollinators love it while flowering, and chickens will eat it afterwards.

Matt McSpadden wrote:Technically it's not wasted if you just cut it and leave... it's harvested by all the bugs, worms, and microorganisms in your soil :), sorry, I couldn't help but give a smart aleck answer

That's not a smart aleck answer if you agree with one of my area's longest productive organic farmer with a CSA program. Soils that only produce for the people who live on the land are generally not as at risk as soils which are constantly producing for people whose excrement doesn't get returned to the same fields. Huge areas of the world's farm soil is low in carbon, and one of the cheapest ways of building that carbon back up, is to plant a cover crop that rots in place.

However, having animals that do a certain amount of "pre-treatment" on that cover crop, can also be very effective. Try reading some of Gabe Brown's work.  He's a North American farmer using polyculture and mob-grazing to repair the soil on his old family farm. So, yes, growing something that you feed to chickens who's manure gets recycled onto the farm can be part of a really effective model of soil building and repairing. No-till, or very low, shallow till systems also protect those microorganisms, particularly mushrooms, that are critical in maintaining long-standing fertility by holding onto nutrients, according to a recent book I read which compared pairs of similar farms based on management techniques.

I'm going to try lentils. I was gifted two 5 gallon Y2K buckets of lentils from an aquaintance. I'll see if they grow.

Kaarina Kreuss I have a couple of ideas-

1. You don't need to put a cover crop in when your main crop is in, thus displacing high value items. ...Do it when you have garden real estate available or in the off season.
I do it over winter (in New Zealand).  (Though this may not work for you in your snowy, snowy Scandanavian world...)
Half my beds I devote to raising winter crops like cabbage, celery, roots and winter leafy greens... and the other half I set in cover crops.
The next year the two are switched around, so everyone gets a turn to play ....

2. Then... growing a cover crop, you are growing the soil... and that will have a benefit when you grow your high value food crops. So you are not growing "noting of value". Your food crops will be more nutrient dense and taste better.

3. Lastly you could use a leguminous nitrogen fixer as a cover crop. I use fava beans, these both give a crop I can eat, and enrich the soil. So beans and peas work as a cover crop.
.....
Cover crops I have personally used and loved include Fava beans (nitrogen fixing and food)
Red clover ( nitrogen fixing, spring pollinating insects and gorgeous flowers that make me feel happy),
Oats and peas (nitrogen fixing , pollinators and flowers-peas, and food).
Lupins (flowers, but I have yet to see one this time round).

This is a You Can Have Your Cake and Eat It Too scenario!!!
Bless you. I love the photos of your gorgeous house. They inspire me. I will acquire land and build mine one day.

Just winding up, I wonder to myself if next time I might not try intercropping with fava beans, and then a little later slipping pea seeds through the beads, so the peas could wind up the fava bean stalks.... maybe it might work, who knows?

Well, the trouble is
1. I do not do quick mid-season cash crops. I only grow veggies for myself
2. The growing season in Scandinavia is a bit over 3 months.

Sowing something else after harvest will be quite a challenge.
So maybe it would be better to sow soil improving crops in between the food crops?
And after harvest, leave leafs or whatever you do not eat, on the top of the soil?

I see there is a huge difference between my pasture and neighbouring monoculture in the spring. My untouched pasture probably has root activism and things sticking out so that the snow is not compacted. And frost does not go so deep. I looked at neighbouring farms today. Where they tilled and left bare soil, it is already frozen. My clover around my berry bushes is still green!

But if I plant cabbage, potato or carrots, they get harvested very late. There is no way to seed another crop and have it germinate before frost sets in.

I read this book and absolutely love it, but the plants and climate are different

Karina it sounds like you are working pretty intelligently, and things are working for you.
Hmmm, what about calling your nitrogen fixing crops and carbon sequestering crops, cover food crops,and after your harvest simply rotating them through your beds so every bed gets a turn on a yearly or two yearly cycle?
So you would think in terms of cover Food crops? Just as a mindset? But whether this may lead to New insights, or be no different to what you are already practicing, I do not know.
I like your chop and drop idea.
Wow. Short growing season. I bet everything grows like a bomb. I lived in Maine USA for a few years. I reckoned that during the growing season you could squat down by the garden for an hour or two and watch the change happening....
We have a longer and slower burn here in temperate New Zealand. A small island with two mighty oceans influencing things from the east and west and Antarctica to the South.
I ordered the book you recommended from the library.

At least one presentation I read of Gabe Brown's implied that he planted a field as a mass polyculture, then harvested about 25% of the nicest stuff for people, put cows on it to harvest another 25% direct access, then the last 50% is left to feed and protect the soil and he turns that under in the spring when he plants for the new year.

So your idea of planting your "overwinter crop" in the same row at the same time as the veggies you intend to eat sounds as if it would have a similar outcome. Or at least in close succession. The Eastern North American "3 Sisters" crop system planted corn first, then two weeks later planted beans which would eventually climb up the corn stalks, then two weeks later, planted squash to shade out the weeds and decrease evaporation. That system didn't work all that well for me here on the West Coast because my garden didn't get enough sun for the corn, however, I planted some bush beans in my squash bed just for the nitrogen because I had lots of extra bean seeds and I knew that if would help the squash to grow, that was a good use for them.

I was thinking oflover for the paths between rows, they tolerate walking. They are great for my bees. But my berry garden (300 bushes) already has clover around the bushes and I don't want a "permie monoculture" 😄

I could plant the cover crops late in the summer so they would not get overly big before I harvest. None of the three sisters grow here, too far north.

I am a bit at loss with this...

Are there native spring bulbs that live in your ecosystem?
Consider what cover crops are supposed to be helpful for:
1. holding onto microbes and soil nutrition through the winter
2. adding fertility by being chopped and dropped in the spring
Any others?
If spring bulbs grow, they'd cover 1 but not 2.  Are any of the crops you can and do grow, nitrogen fixers? Like peas? Or do you do a rotation of your garden area in thirds where you grow for harvest 2 out of 3 sections each year, but instead of leaving the third "fallow" which was done in some farming traditions, you actually plant a poly-culture of soil supporting plants and chop and drop those. That however, doesn't meet your idea of having "something harvestable". Short of having some sort of big composting program/buying animal manures locally, I can't see alternatives beyond that myself.

I've got such tall trees and deer pressure, that I've got very limited garden space. I put a thick layer of leaves on top of my beds in the fall, and until some horses I knew retired and moved off the Island, they shared their output with me, so I too, more or less gave up on "cover crops". Some years I can manage some, but lately, every time I've tried they've not been able to out-grow all the creatures that wanted to eat them. I'm trying not to let "perfection" be the enemy of "it will have to do"!

Kaarina, For garden paths I use chamomile, it lasts nearly the whole season here but dies off in the hot late summer unless in a shaded area and it reseeds itself. I buy it in a bulk organic tea  from Amazon because it is so much cheaper than buying seeds. Harvest seed heads if you like or just let them go. Smells good when you walk on it and I just ignore it. It is a nitrogen fixer and in my area pest free so far. I have never thought about planting it between rows but It might be an interesting green mulch experiment.


https://www.amazon.com/Matricaria-Chamomilla-Resealable-U-S-Wellness/dp/B01KKJIJKS/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?crid=23WRQJ2XEGWIQ&keywords=bulk+chamomile+tea&qid=1669758201&sprefix=bulk+chamomile+tea%2Caps%2C205&sr=8-1-spons&psc=1&spLa=ZW5jcnlwdGVkUXVhbGlmaWVyPUExTkxNNUxTTlpLSUE5JmVuY3J5cHRlZElkPUEwMjcwNTg2M0FJWTlIMjY1RjA1UiZlbmNyeXB0ZWRBZElkPUEwMzgxNzQ0NzJHVzc5R0IwRzVIJndpZGdldE5hbWU9c3BfYXRmJmFjdGlvbj1jbGlja1JlZGlyZWN0JmRvTm90TG9nQ2xpY2s9dHJ1ZQ==