Plans for new food forest

Looking for ideal cover crop plant recommendations for improving our soil! Details below.

I'm planning a new forest garden in what is currently open pasture on our property (I'm in eastern Pennsylvania). The pasture is probably full of quackgrass, though I'm not very good at identifying grasses; plus there is a vibrant seed and rhizome bank of local noxious weeds and aggressive exotics: mugwort, canada thistle, porcelainberry, bindweed, vining honeysuckle, multiflora rose, mile-a-minute. There are one or two native plants I also don't really want in the garden, like poison ivy, and some dispersives like autumn olive, bush honeysuckle, burning bush, etc. in the area to watch out for. But mostly, I want to get the more expansive exotics knocked back as much as I can so I don't spend my whole life fighting them in the garden. I also want to improve the soil quality as much as I can; it's not terrible, but it's been pastureland for a long time and is compacted from years of tractor mowing.

My preliminary plan is to till once with our tractor to break up the quackgrass, build up any gentle mounds that are necessary for improved drainage for fruit trees, then use tarp/black plastic to kill back the grass and some of the seed bank before cover cropping and fertilizing. I've read that with the quackgrass in particular, I may need to cover crop for two years before I can plant trees. But then I will want to be able to just plant some guilds, either at once or in stages, without having to fight the remnants of the cover crop too much when the time comes to replace it. I know some cover crop plants may be more difficult to remove than others.

There are two different soil types to amend, because once upon a time, the central pasture contained a riding ring, which means it was effectively amended with pulverized lime gravel for many years. I'm planning to plant neutral to alkaline-tolerant plants in that area, and mostly plant acid-loving and tolerant plants in the south pasture, which has the more typical local acidic soil, so I won't need to amend the pH too much. But, it might make sense to use a slightly different group of cover crops in each area, and I'm in favor of a seed mix for diversity. I don't care about marketing or selling it, this is just for soil conditioning and weed suppression.

South Pasture soil: Silt loam, 3.1% organic matter, low salinity, acidic (5.. Plenty of Mg, micronutrients are fine, but low in Ca, K, P
Central Pasture soil: Silt loam, 3.2% organic matter, low salinity, weakly alkaline (7.3). Plenty of Mg and Ca, micronutrients look fine, but low in K, P

Cover crop goals:
-Improve and condition soil texture and compaction
-Suppress weeds and quackgrass after tilling and tarp coverage
-Be easily removable (or else, a non-aggressive ground cover I can keep around) for future forest garden planting

Suggestions?? Thanks!!

Oh! And we do have large piles of wood chips (like everyone around here; the ash borer has done its work). I'll use them in future mulch layers to get some carbon on top of the soil, too. The chips aren't particularly ramial, though, just whole ash trees. Some are from last year, others are several years old and currently farming a nice little plot of horse nettle (nightshade).

If you are planning to plant now I would suggest buckwheat.

For fall Winter rye and crimson clover.

How lucky that someone gave you both alkaline and acidic soils to plant in.
Although tilling is not a good idea as a habit for reasons, as one who also battles compacted acidic soils, I wish I had done a one time till and cover crop before planting out my trees. It is also possible to get a good result apparently if you have enough wood chip, or time for something like fodder radish to do it's thing.
If quackgrass is anything like couch grass, it goes dormant to rhizomes in winter and then regrows with vigour in spring. If you plough in spring, and then again once it starts growing, apparently you can knock it back quite a bit, although unlikely to get rid of it completely. It also dislikes shade, so in a densely planted food forest it will get out completed by taller plants.
So as far as a covercrop goes, there is a lot to be said for diversity. I would plant a mixture of nitrogen fixers, deep rooting plants and bulky plants. Buckwheat as Anne suggests is a good idea, field lupins or alfalfa/lucerne, and maybe fodder radish or chiccory?

Buckwheat is good for smothering but it won't touch quackgrass rhizomes. If the quackgrass is thick, a smother crop followed by deep wood chip mulch (6+ inches) over the whole area tends to work better than any single cover crop — starves the rhizomes of light long enough that they exhaust themselves. Worth doing that before you plant any permanent trees rather than fighting it afterwards.

Nancy Reading wrote:How lucky that someone gave you both alkaline and acidic soils to plant in.
Although tilling is not a good idea as a habit for reasons, as one who also battles compacted acidic soils, I wish I had done a one time till and cover crop before planting out my trees. It is also possible to get a good result apparently if you have enough wood chip, or time for something like fodder radish to do it's thing.
If quackgrass is anything like couch grass, it goes dormant to rhizomes in winter and then regrows with vigour in spring. If you plough in spring, and then again once it starts growing, apparently you can knock it back quite a bit, although unlikely to get rid of it completely. It also dislikes shade, so in a densely planted food forest it will get out completed by taller plants.
So as far as a covercrop goes, there is a lot to be said for diversity. I would plant a mixture of nitrogen fixers, deep rooting plants and bulky plants. Buckwheat as Anne suggests is a good idea, field lupins or alfalfa/lucerne, and maybe fodder radish or chiccory?

Really, I have as much time as my patience allows! So radish wouldn't be a problem. And I completely agree with these comments: I would rather be patient enough to do this right one time than fight problems forever. I definitely don't want to till regularly and I know why that is bad for the soil, but once or twice to recondition the soil out of the gate seems worth it. (Our tractor also doesn't currently have a tiller, and I don't think it's worth many thousands of dollars for a new one that I will only use a couple times, but I'm planning to get a used one or an after-market attachment for this.)

One thing I'm less knowledgeable about is whether any of these plants might be hard to remove later, either because they don't reliably die back over the winter or because they create their own seed bank that becomes a problem in the future. This is all going in over a pretty large area (maybe half an acre of forest garden altogether? the plan is currently separated into 2-3 deer-fenced zones, though, so that's approximate). That means I'm not realistically going to be doing only hand pulling if I can help it. I like the idea of all of this otherwise, though!

Joao Winckler wrote:Buckwheat is good for smothering but it won't touch quackgrass rhizomes. If the quackgrass is thick, a smother crop followed by deep wood chip mulch (6+ inches) over the whole area tends to work better than any single cover crop — starves the rhizomes of light long enough that they exhaust themselves. Worth doing that before you plant any permanent trees rather than fighting it afterwards.

This is a concern I have, yeah. We do have a lot of wood chips, but although the piles currently look really big, it's honestly probably nowhere near enough to spread a 6" layer over something like 0.5-0.75 acres, though, even if I do that in stages. At that point, I suppose looking at a lot of wood chip delivery, though I know you can usually get chips dumped for low cost. But do you think the plan of one-time tilling + smothering with tarps probably won't stop the rhizomes so well, either? Maybe if I tarp long enough? I'm not sure.