We will be experimenting with permanent ground covers in our vegetable beds – specifically planting and allowing perennial plants interspersed with our vegetable crops. The purpose of this is to keep essentially a living mulch to help conserve water, suppress weeds, and to keep the ground covered with leaves engaging in photosynthesis. This will ensure that the life in the soil is being continually fed by root exudates.
I’ll be writing a post later about the biology of the soil that will give much more context to this. 🙂
One important note is that I’m not leaning on these crops to fix nitrogen, a role commonly given to cover crops, although they will certainly help to make nutrients available to the plant by maintaining a vibrant soil food web.
I want to see what it is like to disturb the soil as little as physically possible: sowing or transplanting into fully intact ground covers. No strip tilling, no mowing even. For this reason, they need to be short. I’d love to include dutch clover as a nitrogen fixer, but in most of the annual beds it simply grows too tall. Doing this with crops grown as annuals (like spinach, broccoli, or carrots) is pretty far out. I don’t know how well it will work – this is most definitely experimental.
I made a list of plants starting from Elaine Ingham’s list of perennial cover plants, then finding ones that seemed like they were a good fit for my climate and market farm context. I was looking for plants that:
- Are tolerant of foot traffic
- Are easy and inexpensive to establish but not too aggressive
- Are pretty short, because I’ll be growing these among annuals
- Are not woody, so that if I need to, I can cut or rake them away from the soil easily, and seeding / transplanting tools don’t get gummed up.
- Tolerate wet / moist areas. We get a lot of winter rain, and I will likely be irrigating at least some in the summer – this needs to not kill the plants.
- Tolerate dryness / drought. This is a little at odds with the previous point, but I’m looking for a mix of plants. We have dry summers, and I want to be able to get away with as little irrigation as I can to grow the crops.
- Dense growth habit. I’m looking for plants that will grow densely and cover the soil to protect it from rain compaction, evaporation, and excessive weed seed germination.
Permaculture market farming, plant breeding and perennial grains: http://jasonpadvorac.com
It's never too late to start! I retired to homestead on the slopes of Mauna Loa, an active volcano. I relate snippets of my endeavor on my blog : www.kaufarmer.blogspot.com
Su Ba wrote:Personally I haven't seen that my annual veggies will thrive in close competition, be it with themselves, weeds, or any other plants. The more competition, the worse they produce.
Sally Munoz wrote:Last year, I scraped a patch out and planted cress and cauliflower just to see how it would do and they both grew fine. Strawberries don't have a tap root so are super easy to pull out and just plunk down somewhere else or add to the mulch.They spread like crazy here in zone 7. I didn't mean for them to be a living mulch but in that area of the garden, that's what they've become and they are doing a great job. In another area, I water the strawberries a little and keep them a little more under control and they get a lot taller and are way more productive, but the ones that are more of a ground cover stay shorter (maybe because they are so crowded?) and don't produce a huge amount, which is fine because they are doing a different service in that area.
Permaculture market farming, plant breeding and perennial grains: http://jasonpadvorac.com
Hans Albert Quistorff, LMT projects on permies Hans Massage Qberry Farm magnet therapy gmail hquistorff
Jason Padvorac wrote:Thanks Su, I certainly will keep you posted! I'm curious - were there any plantings you tried on purpose that competed with the vegetables? And could you tell what the competition was for - light, nutrients, water, space for roots, allelopathic effects? I'd love to hear more about your experiences.
It's never too late to start! I retired to homestead on the slopes of Mauna Loa, an active volcano. I relate snippets of my endeavor on my blog : www.kaufarmer.blogspot.com
Sue Ba wrote:plus the chocolate mint spread into the pineapple beds and established itself there.
Permaculture market farming, plant breeding and perennial grains: http://jasonpadvorac.com
Jason Padvorac wrote:Joseph, I might try that, but I wonder if we have different dandelions (or if our different climates make the dandelions behave differently). Where I'm at, when I grow dandelions in my garden they get about a foot tall - and that is without irrigation!
Joseph Lofthouse wrote:Around here, dandelions grow tall in moist shady places, and hug the ground in sunny dry places. My fields are all in full sunlight.
Shane Kaser wrote:I keep a shaker of collected seed that I sprinkle on every bare patch of dirt.
Shane Kaser wrote:I know you said it's not all about the nitrogen-fixer, but really it should be the foundation of any ground-cover in disturbed sites (annual vegetable beds). I know you said White Clover is too aggressive for you, but you really have to give it a chance. It is everything you wanted in your list of worthy attributes. Much less aggressive than mint, but still resilient. I haven't had much trouble with it overtaking my plants, but I'm also wandering around with a hoe and clippers most evenings of the growing season...
Shane Kaser wrote:And I don't expect too much from any given foot of bed; they should actually be categorized somewhere between vegetable and herb beds... Herbs are much more at home in this kind of situation, so don't be shy with kitchen herbs; they are the best bang for your DIY-buck compared to supermarket prices.
Shane Kaser wrote: Sometimes, for a little extra care, I cut a slot to a hole in the center of a piece of cardboard (1-2' square), and slide that onto the crown of a plant - pretty quick and easy root-zone weed-barrier mulch. To get big, juicy vegetables takes a more active disturbance regime of soil amending and irrigation. But the ones that had to fight the ground-cover and search deeply for water, they may be smaller and blemished, but I wager they carry at least as much (and probably much more) flavor/nutrition as the equivalent big-juicy (water-filled) specimens.
Permaculture market farming, plant breeding and perennial grains: http://jasonpadvorac.com
Joseph, I might try that, but I wonder if we have different dandelions (or if our different climates make the dandelions behave differently). Where I'm at, when I grow dandelions in my garden they get about a foot tall - and that is without irrigation!
I do that with bok choy. One plant allowed to go to seed is enough to thickly plant a garden bed. It sprouts rapidly suppressing other smaller weed seeds. I just snipped out the largest ones this evening for my salad. In this case it was to fill the surface while the New Zealand spinach gets large enough to hand over the edge of an elevated planter..hrm, if the things I was clipping were saleable products, that might do the trick. That'd be stacking "weeding" (or control of overbearing plants) with harvest, which has to happen anyway. That's something to think about.
Hans Albert Quistorff, LMT projects on permies Hans Massage Qberry Farm magnet therapy gmail hquistorff
"Also, just as you want men to do to you, do the same way to them" (Luke 6:31)
I’d love to include dutch clover as a nitrogen fixer, but in most of the annual beds it simply grows too tall.
I know you said it's not all about the nitrogen-fixer, but really it should be the foundation of any ground-cover in disturbed sites (annual vegetable beds). I know you said White Clover is too aggressive for you, but you really have to give it a chance. It is everything you wanted in your list of worthy attributes. Much less aggressive than mint, but still resilient
Jason Padvorac wrote:As the title says. I'm planning out some experimentation for this growing season involving very short, perennial ground covers in my annual beds. I'd like to be able to have a constant, living mulch growing among my carrots, onions, garlic, lettuce, and friends. I would love any feedback or suggestions you all might have!
I wrote up some thoughts on my blog here: http://jasonpadvorac.com/2017/02/permanent-ground-covers-for-vegetable-beds/
Here's the core of the post, you can read the whole thing if you want the list of plants I came up with:
- Are tolerant of foot traffic
- Are easy and inexpensive to establish but not too aggressive
- Are pretty short, because I’ll be growing these among annuals
- Are not woody, so that if I need to, I can cut or rake them away from the soil easily, and seeding / transplanting tools don’t get gummed up.
- Tolerate wet / moist areas. We get a lot of winter rain, and I will likely be irrigating at least some in the summer – this needs to not kill the plants.
- Tolerate dryness / drought. This is a little at odds with the previous point, but I’m looking for a mix of plants. We have dry summers, and I want to be able to get away with as little irrigation as I can to grow the crops.
- Dense growth habit. I’m looking for plants that will grow densely and cover the soil to protect it from rain compaction, evaporation, and excessive weed seed germination.
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Su Ba wrote:I will enjoy following your experiment to see what you come up with, both successes and fails. It should be interesting.
Personally I haven't seen that my annual veggies will thrive in close competition, be it with themselves, weeds, or any other plants. The more competition, the worse they produce . So I'm curious to see what perennial ground covers might actually work. Keep us posted. Thanks,
This is all just my opinion based on a flawed memory
Sally Munoz wrote:Strawberries?They spread like crazy here in zone 7. I didn't mean for them to be a living mulch but in that area of the garden, that's what they've become and they are doing a great job. It's all an experiment over here!
Hans Albert Quistorff, LMT projects on permies Hans Massage Qberry Farm magnet therapy gmail hquistorff
Kit Veerkamp wrote:Two other groundcovers you might consider are sweet alyssum and creeping thyme. Super easy to grow from seed and persistent. And they help attract and feed a host of beneficial insects to boot.
Todd McDonald wrote:I've used the mini clover from outside pride mentioned above. I seeded some into a 20ft section of a raised bed last spring to see how it would work. So far it has performed as advertised, stays very short and not very aggressive. Now that its established I'll keep an eye on it to see if it tries to spread.
Regarding white clover, at least in my area (central Missouri zone 6), I have observed that white clover comes up early in spring, then gets knocked back a little in the summer heat and returns again in the cooler fall temps. It would seem ideal in the role of permanent ground cover so that's why I am giving it a try. 3 years ago I tried red clover and can confirm that this plant is too tall and too aggressive to use as a ground cover for an annual vegetable garden, it's great around fruit trees and pastures though.
Why is this seed so expensive? I'm relatively new to buying bulk seed and though I recently purchased 10# of this seed (waiting to see the outcome), I'm dumbstruck by the cost..... reminds me of big Pharma. Am I just seed naive?Todd McDonald wrote:I've used the mini clover from outside pride mentioned above. I seeded some into a 20ft section of a raised bed last spring to see how it would work. So far it has performed as advertised, stays very short and not very aggressive. Now that its established I'll keep an eye on it to see if it tries to spread.
$10.00 is a donation. $1,000 is an investment, $1,000,000 is a purchase.
Su Ba wrote:I will enjoy following your experiment to see what you come up with, both successes and fails. It should be interesting.
Personally I haven't seen that my annual veggies will thrive in close competition, be it with themselves, weeds, or any other plants. The more competition, the worse they produce . So I'm curious to see what perennial ground covers might actually work. Keep us posted. Thanks,
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