You know, after reading Eliot Coleman's ideas, I decided I don't want cover crops -- I want
winter crops. I want to treat the plants I'm growing in winter as full-on crops, every bit as valuable and eaten every bit as often as the crops I grow in summer.
We get most of our
water in the winter as snow, and we often have 50-degree days in midwinter, so it seems to me that winter crops are an even better idea than summer crops here.
I don't do crop rotation, per se -- too organized for my taste! I just sow winter crops whenever it seems appropriate and summer crops whenever it seems appropriate. My eventual hope is to rarely have bare soil, because there's pretty much always something new ready to go into that space as soon as I harvest whatever was there before.