Cover Crops in the Grape Harvest Bins

Every year I change what I am growing in my winter gardens. The majority of the time it is a cover crop. This last winter, I chose to grow out Mustard Greens. Mustard Greens are usually very good at cleaning the soil, though they don’t provide a lot of organic matter. At both of the gardens where I planted them, they grew a bit wispy. However, at the old chicken plot, they were a little more vigorous. Once I had taken the time to cut the plants down, I covered them with a high quality soil mix.

 

 

 

 

 

For the second garden, which had received a lot of city compost with excessive pathogenic bacteria, the results were nowhere near as good. The plants dithered and only grew a little. We tried planting buckwheat, but to no avail. So in the end, I planted some fava beans in some high quality compost. Those seemed to do very well and helped better prepare my garden for the summer crop