How to Plant Cover Crop Mixes in Your Garden

0:00 I'm out here in my garden and I want to show you how to plant a summer or fall or spring for that matter a cover crop mix in your garden. So, I have a bag of garden summer rest from green cover seed. It's early August and I planted some of this about 2 weeks ago right in front of you.

0:24 We didn't get the back of the bed cleaned out until today. So, now I am going to plant the second half of it just cuz that's when we got to it. But,

0:33 You can see about 2 weeks growth here. It came up great. So, I'm going to just kind of show you how I do that. There's a couple of things really just principles that you want to keep in mind when you're trying to plant a cover crop.

0:47 First off, you have to get seed to soil contact. So, I've got a nice clean seedbed. We pulled out all of the weeds. We had onions in this bed. So, we harvested the onions. We pulled out the weeds and now we've got a clean.

0:59 Seedbed. I raked it up just a little bit with a garden rake. Then we're going to broadcast the seed. And then we want to incorporate that just a little bit.

1:07 So today I'm just going to rake it in. Sometimes we put some compost over the top of it. So that kind of simulates it being in the soil a little bit more. Today it'll be good enough for me to just rake it in like I did in front of you. You can see the germination was great.

1:25 So, first off, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to pour some of this seed into my bucket here, just to make it a little easier for me.

1:45 Just to make it a little bit easier for me to broadcast. And really I don't like using a spreader in the garden because at least for me, I've got these, you know, 3 and 1/2 4-ft wide beds, I have these living pathways, so I don't.

2:01 Really want the seed to go everywhere, so I just get a little bit in my hand and I sprinkle it across, but I'm kind of aiming for a seed every inch or every half inch. And if I have that much seed, I should be good. So I just kind of broadcast that all the way through.

2:24 Quick shout-out to my son for helping me take this shot.

2:35 Okay, now I am going to incorporate the seed, so I've got my garden rake and I just kind of rake it back and forth a little bit. I'm not trying to move the seed from place to place too much, so I just kind of do these short rakes back and forth. Just a little bit incorporation and that will help with the seed-to-soil contact. Okay, so I mentioned a couple principles, you want

3:02 Seed-to-soil contact, you want to incorporate it a little bit. I have a couple more: I like to keep it covered just a little bit with a light layer of straw or some other light mulch to just help it keep moist while the seed is germinating.

3:15 The last principle is water—you got to get water on it while it is germinating and in that first early week. After that first week of growth, you really don't need to baby it, you don't need to water.

3:57 Here. We tried to remove any seed heads, but I'm sure some will come through. I'm not too worried about it because we're going to grow a nice diverse cover crop here.

4:09 Okay, so now we get the water lines back down. We'll keep it nice and moist for about a week or so. Once we've got the plants up and they're growing, we can just let it be. So this cover crop mix is highly diverse.

4:25 What's special about our garden line of cover crops seed mixes here at Green Cover is that we don't have any brassicas in the mix. So if you've got lots of cabbage moths like I do, I try not to have brassicas in my garden unless I'm trying to harvest cabbages or something like that. So no brassicas in this mix. Lots of legumes. We've got mung beans and sunn hemp and cowpeas in the mix. There's some flax, there's some

4:58 Sunflowers, there's some okra. It's just a really good diverse mix and it is going to fix the nitrogen in the soil here. It is going to get a lot of diversity that I maybe wouldn't get, break up some pest cycles in the garden, and it's going to keep this bed covered for the rest of the garden season rather than being empty. So yes, I could have planted some other vegetables.

5:28 That I'm going to harvest this year, but I really like what this is doing for the soil. It's going to really set me up really well for next year.

5:37 So the other thing about this mix is that it will winter kill. As soon as it drops below freezing, all of these species are going to die. So that really allows me to plan ahead and in my garden next year since this will not survive the winter, I can plant something in early April. Maybe it is those brassicas, some cabbages, things like that that need a longer season.

6:00 Anyway, this is again, this is garden summer rest that I planted. We also have a garden spring and fall mix. I could have planted that. I've got about 8 weeks till our first frost might happen. So that's enough to really get a good benefit out of this. If I wanted it to last a little longer, I could have planted that spring fall mix.

6:23 And then if I waited until maybe mid-September, then I would it would be time to plant an overwintering mix if I wanted to make the bed to overwinter. And we have our garden winter survivor. Again, all those mixes, no brassicas, designed to work really well in the garden.