Small cover crop experiment.Parsnip, cow peas, sunflower, fennel, silphy, salsify

Nancy got me thinking about covercropping with peas, my neighboring cattle ranger ordered me some. It's so amazing the prices we gardeners pay in retail. I would have had a pound, half a kilo for that money, he gave me 14 kilo or 28 pound. That aside, i wanted to do more with Parsnip for a while. I just cannot get Daikon to grow in my context while Parsnip literally overtook the grasses last year in a spot. I have that strain for some years and add new genetics at every opportunity i get, so it's slowly becoming a landrace. Sunflower is one from Peru that i grew in the greenhouse last year. I got it at a seed conference from Peruvians and it turned out that the flower closed in on itself. Might discourage some of the birds. The fennel i just have a lot of and the Silphy is an American perennial sunflower, grown here for cattle feed.
So there is quite some diversity in this mix, i hope for nitrogen fixing by the peas and that the deeper rooting plants will mine nutrients and after dying leave a decaying plug which worms get to feast on.
I have surrounded the small plot with bigger comfrey to keep the grass somewhat from entering. I planted a foot apart a bigger clump, a smaller one,m a bigger one etc. Hope it will close nicely next spring, so that even if it turns out to be a failure i can try again.
I'm a bit late, because nowadays we have these mini dry spells in spring in France just when crops seem to need most water. Luckily i got a bit and i soaked the seeds over the weekend. And covered the raked in mix with some old straw the farmer had laying about. Not too much, so the seeds get a chance to sprout, but it will take a shot at shading the soil i soaked before putting the straw down. Winds will have less of an easy time with drying it out completely.
The reason i do these kind of experiments is that i try to activate the soils in a way differently than grasses and their companion plants do. I'd like to prepare the soils for something of a landrace of pumpkins or butternuts or some no input cucumbers or maybe a winter rye. The inputs of cattle dung is going down since the cattle farmer seems to be selling quite a bit on his way to retiring. I'd like to find a way of getting these poor granite soils into a bit more productive land than just for cows. Moving towards a food forest/ syntropic hedge situation maybe partnering up with chicken raising or whatever i am dreaming about achieving one day...
I'm lucky to be able to experiment like this without being attached to a university or something, because i can doi exactly what i think i need to do and no bureaucratic strings attached.

Because it's going well i'm doubling down, with bushbeans instead of peas and sunflowers. The weather has changed, we're experiencing a heat wave. Hopefully it will do just as well.

It's going well despite the scorching summer heat wave that has arrived. Not sure i can keep up if it starts to need water. But so far so good.

I never got any cow peas of those, they just shrivelled up and died, will try again next month to see if an autumn seeding will have a better result. The Salsify and Sunflower did not too bad, no fennels turned up, no silphy. But it has been the hottest and driest it has ever been so... I'm happy something did manage to flourish.
The bush beans that did so fine mostly died as well, i even intervened with the odd watering or i would have nothing left.

Thanks for sharing your results Hugo. Having a diversity of seeds obviously increases your chances of getting something. Those sunflowers really sound interesting - hiding from the birds sounds like a great crop feature, as long as they aren't too much of a pain to harvest too!
And you have a nice patch for cropping again next year - hoping for a better year weatherwise for you.

I'd not heard of silphy - I can't find it on a web search (except this thread!). Do you have another name for it?

Hi Nancy, this is the crop. Silphium perfoliatum.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium_perfoliatum
I hope it was not a recessive trait the curling up of the sunflowers, i've not noticed any so far, but it is still early.