I want to start with an admission.
I have said, on this podcast and on this website, that cover crops are hard for us. Our turnover is fast. I like leaving plants standing through winter so the birds have something to eat. It has never quite fit.
This year I am doing it anyway, and I wanted to talk it through with someone who actually knows what they are doing.
Jenny works with our local soil conservation district, and she and I have done soil things together for years. So I asked her to come nerd out about soil with me, and about halfway through I ended up describing my whole plan and asking her to tell me whether it made sense.
First, What a Soil Conservation District Actually Is
If you have never used yours, you are leaving help on the table.
The whole system came out of the Dust Bowl. In the 1920s and early 30s, soil that had been prairie for hundreds of years was blowing away, because people saw soil as an endless resource that would always be there. Within a couple of years of drought, land that had been productive turned to dust. It caused real health problems and made parts of the Great Plains genuinely unlivable. People stuffed wet rags into every crack in the house at night and still woke up with dust everywhere. Dust storms crossed the entire country.
Hugh Hammond Bennett is known as the father of soil conservation, and he was the one who took it to Congress. The story goes that he timed his testimony to coincide with a dust storm reaching Washington, and pointed out the window. This was productive soil, now blowing through the streets of the capital.
Jenny was careful to note she does not know how much of that has been Hollywood-ified over the years. But the outcome is real, and the United States is the only country with soil conservation districts working the way ours do.
Here is what makes them worth knowing about: they are locally led. Boots on the ground, run by people from the area, working on what that area actually needs. There are thousands of them across the country and nearly every county has one. And in general it is voluntary, not regulatory. They exist to be a resource.
I said to Jenny that government agencies can feel intimidating. You walk in somewhere and it is quiet and you had better know exactly where you are going. Soil conservation has never felt like that to me. You come in with a question and somebody says, I'll come out and help you with that.
The other thing I appreciate is that you do not have to be big enough to matter. Before I was a grower, I went in as a homeowner with a backyard question and got help. They will talk to anybody. And Jenny made a point of saying that if they cannot help, they will connect you with someone who can, whether that is extension or a nonprofit.
There are also cover crop programs specifically for small acreage vegetable and flower farms. You do not need a hundred-acre corn operation to qualify. I did not know that, and it is worth a phone call.
Why Cover Crops Matter More Than I Gave Them Credit For
A cover crop is something you plant between your main crops, so there is living cover on the soil at all times.
Jenny called their cover crop program phenomenal, and Maryland is the number one state in the country for cover crop use, which surprised me. She credited a combination of innovative farmers and a government willing to fund the programs. And she made a point I had not thought about: farmers here are swimming and fishing in the Chesapeake. It is their backyard. They have every reason to want it clean.
The soil and water connection is the whole thing. Cover crops:
- Hold soil in place, stopping erosion. That matters because phosphorus binds to soil particles and leaves with them.
- Take up excess nutrients and store them. Nitrogen is water soluble, so in a humid climate like ours it leaches straight into groundwater if nothing is holding it.
- Build organic matter, which improves water infiltration and water holding capacity.
So the nutrients stay where you want them, which is available for your crops, instead of ending up somewhere you do not.
How to Choose One
This was the part I most wanted Jenny's help with, because there is a lot to pick from.
Her answer: let the soil tell you what it needs.
If your organic matter is low, choose something with high biomass. Small grains do this well. Rye, triticale, wheat, barley. They produce a lot of material, they are excellent at scavenging excess nutrients, and they hold soil in place. This is the most common choice and the one you will see most often.
If you are trying to cut fertiliser costs, legumes are the usual answer, because they fix nitrogen. Crimson clover and hairy vetch are the two that come up most.
But here is where it got specific for me. Legumes are harder on a small, precise operation like a flower farm. And my real hesitation was different: I do not want to spray. That is the whole point. If I cannot terminate it without herbicide, it does not work for me.
I was also nervous about reseeding. I do not want to solve one problem and create another.
Why We Landed on Buckwheat
Jenny's response to my no-spray constraint was immediate. Buckwheat.
Here is why it fits a small grower:
It is allelopathic. Buckwheat naturally suppresses other plants around it, so it keeps early weeds at bay on its own.
It smothers what it does not suppress. When you crimp it and roll it down, you create a mat that blocks sunlight from reaching weed seedlings underneath.
It has good biomass and breaks down well, so you are adding organic matter, which improves infiltration and water holding capacity.
You can roller crimp it. Which means I can terminate it without spraying anything.
It works on small acreage, which is not true of every option.
Short season, too, which matters when your beds turn over fast.
The Plan, Start to Finish
Since I said I would bring you along, here is exactly what we are doing.
We grow in blocks, and our centre block is finished. The cool season crops are done after the weather we have had. So:
- Strip the block completely. Every pole and support comes out. All the landscape fabric comes out, along with the bags that hold it in place. All the plant material.
- Deal with the biomass. This is the problem I have been chewing on. Traditionally you pull a row and drop it next to itself, but then you have big material and small material and a lot of reseeding. There had to be a better way.
- Plant a short season buckwheat cover crop. We looked at three options and buckwheat felt like the safest place to start.
- Crimp it.
- Possibly tarp it for a while to get the biomass fully broken down. I am genuinely torn on this one.
- Drop compost on top.
- Put the landscape fabric back down for the cool season crops.
The crimping question
Will and I have gone back and forth on this.
You can crimp manually, which is literally a board, two people, and rope. In a small area you can walk it across and keep folding it over. It feels like making crop circles.
Or you can use an actual crimper, which crushes the stem more effectively, which means it breaks down faster. Then there is the question of whether you run a cultivator over the top afterward.
There are a lot of ways to break that stem and get the biomass back into the ground, and I do not yet know which one is right for us.
The compost problem
Related, and on the list for winter.
We buy in a lot of compost. And we have a spot in the woods out back where everything we pull just goes. Which means I am buying in the thing I am also throwing away.
I should be composting properly. There is a small part of me saying I do not need another project.
Jenny pointed out something that makes it more appealing, though. At our scale you can actually get the pile hot enough to handle things a home composter cannot, including meat and egg scraps and compostable plastics. And you do not necessarily have to turn it constantly. There are forced-air systems, including one she has seen that runs off a small solar panel and a blower. I have seen larger PVC with holes drilled through it doing the same job.
Middle of the growing season is not the time to figure this out. It is a winter project, and it is first out of the gate.
While We're Here: Test Your Soil
Jenny recommends testing every year, or at minimum every three.
Some things stay fairly stable. Phosphorus does not move much, so unless you have an erosion problem you are probably not losing a lot of it. Nitrogen is far more volatile and will leave more easily.
But if you only track one thing, track pH.
That is my hill. pH is what unlocks everything else in the profile. If it is too high or too low, you can get nutrient toxicity, things can leach out, and nutrients can get locked up so that even if you have plenty in the soil, it is not bioavailable to your plants. You can have everything the plant needs and it still cannot reach it.
The Part That Made My Week
I asked Jenny about soil biology, because bugs and worms are my favourite.
Her fun fact: a handful of healthy soil contains more living things than there are people on this planet.
She has also heard the version about a teaspoon holding over a billion organisms, and she is careful about it. There is so much variation between sources that she sticks with "a handful of healthy soil," because that one is safe no matter whose numbers you use. I appreciated that honesty.
And then she explained mycorrhizal fungi, which genuinely is the coolest thing happening under our feet.
The fungi cannot make their own food, so they get it from plants. Plants cannot move, and their roots and root hairs only reach so far, but they need water and nutrients from beyond that reach. So the fungi vastly extend the plant's network, pulling in water and nutrients from much farther out and delivering them to the plant. In exchange, the plant photosynthesises and sends a little sugar back.
A genuine partnership, happening in the dark, all season.
This is also the single best argument against heavy tillage. When you plow, you break up those networks.
Farming Messy Is a Good Thing
This was Jenny's answer when I asked about misconceptions, and it applies just as much to a backyard as to a field.
Your ground should not look perfectly pristine and fluffed up. Working soil hard breaks up organic matter so it decomposes too fast, aerates it, and destroys the fungal networks that support your plants.
Which is why no-till has taken off. Farmers plant directly into last year's stubble and into all that messiness. Minimising disturbance is one of the core principles of soil health. Jenny mentioned farmers in our county who have been doing it 30 and even 40 years, and said walking their ground has a sponginess to it.
My mom is in her seventies and has watched farming her whole life. Our farmer Casey has the front field in no-till with very targeted spraying only when it is necessary. She told me this was the first year the field looked genuinely messy to her, with cover crop residue and other material still standing. And that it took her a while to understand that messy is fine.
What messy has done for us
Our three acres sit surrounded on four sides by traditional row crops. Corn, soy, wheat. Same region, same weather, different practices.
The birds are in my field.
The flycatchers this year have been phenomenal. We have a king bird, which I had never seen before. Insects I have never seen before.
Goldfinches went from a consistent 10 to 15 to something like 40 to 50. Yes, they eat what I am growing. I understand the trade and I will take it.
We put up a purple martin house after a tiny moth wiped out a celosia crop and I refused to spray but also could not lose hundreds of feet of a crop. Three days later a flock arrived. I put up a second house and it filled too. My grandfather wanted purple martins for years and never got them.
The mosquito reduction has been huge. You can sit and watch them dive. If you fly a drone, they all come out to investigate it.
We are also seeing fewer European hornets and more natives. More bumblebees, more solitary bees, more hoverflies.
None of which means everything is perfect. We had a thrip problem this year we have never had before, and the calendula and scabiosa took the brunt of it. We put out lacewing larvae. It is a constant rebalancing act.
But the plants do better when the soil is good. Everything works better.
Leave Your Garden Messy Too
This is the part that applies to everyone, whether you farm or have a front walkway.
Our style of landscaping has stripped out an enormous amount of habitat. Insects need hollow stems. They need to get down inside things. They need leaf litter. And we have built a culture where a garden is not "clean" unless it has been cut back to nothing.
Cut it back in sections and let some of it sit. Clean it up later. We have physically watched creatures living in hollow stems and in leaf litter.
Show me your messy garden.
Jenny lives in town and has watched fireflies increase noticeably in her own small front planting, which is only a couple of feet deep. Coneflowers, black-eyed Susans, bee balm, moss phlox, a serviceberry tree. Bees, butterflies, birds sitting on it. In a space most people would have put turf.
Because turf grass gives you about three inches of root and essentially zero habitat value. You mow it and that is the whole relationship.
A few things anyone can do:
- Leave part of it unmowed and messy. The single biggest and cheapest change.
- Consider clover instead of grass. It grows in sun, shade and part shade, needs far less upkeep, flowers for pollinators, and takes a lot less fuel to maintain. Historically it was far more common than turf.
- Plant natives. A lot of non-native ornamentals look pristine precisely because nothing eats them. An oak can feed hundreds of species of caterpillar, and those caterpillars feed birds. If you want birds in your yard, native plants are the best bird feeder available.
- Learn the life cycle. If you love swallowtails, plant parsley and dill. Then do not get angry when something eats them, because that means it worked. Do not get mad about caterpillars on your milkweed. That is what you planted it for.
People say they love butterflies. Butterflies come with eggs and caterpillars and a messy garden.
If You Have Marginal Land
Worth knowing about if you have a corner that never quite works.
The Conservation Reserve Program and Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program take vulnerable, marginal land, the steep slope or the piece right next to water, and put it into wildlife conservation. That awkward hilly back field that erodes and never yields well becomes prairie grass and habitat.
The programs pay a yearly rental payment, and there is state and federal help with establishment costs, seed and labour.
Jenny made a case for warm season prairie grasses over turf-style buffers where you have the choice. Roots eight to twelve feet deep. Not inches. That is enormous soil stabilisation, organic matter built underground, and carbon pulled from the air into your soil.
She also talked about bobwhite quail, which used to be everywhere here and now are not. Habitat loss is the main reason. They are an indicator species, and the habitat that suits them suits a lot of grassland birds that are also in steep decline.
Which is why I lost my mind a little when three of them turned up in the flower section last week. I was walking the fence line with the dogs in the evening, doing my perimeter check, and they popped up. Two went over the fence and the third stood there looking like it had no idea what had just happened. I pulled the dogs back and we walked a very long way in the other direction.
If you see bobwhite quail, something is going right.
The Thing Underneath All of It
Jenny does the environmental education for her office, and her favourite lesson is telling students that pizza comes from the soil.
They look at her like she is wrong. Pizza comes from the store. It comes from the delivery driver.
So she works through it. What is the crust? Flour. Where does flour come from? Wheat. Where is wheat grown? By the end they have traced every single thing on that pizza back into the ground. Then she challenges them to find something in their lunchbox that did not come from soil.
Soil is what feeds all of us. Over eight billion people, a planet that is not getting bigger, and limited resources.
And limited people willing to do the work. The average American farmer is around 58. If you feel called to this and you do not already have land or equipment, the barrier is enormous. Which makes it much easier for a farmer to sell.
Even the innovations do not get around it. Hydroponics, controlled environment growing in converted trailers, growing underground, extending the season. All genuinely exciting. But if you are growing hydroponically you are supplying the nutrients yourself. If you are growing in containers you are still putting in a medium. At the root of it, you still need soil, or something doing soil's job.
Jenny mentioned Eastern Shore Land Conservancy and the Maryland Agricultural Land Preservation Foundation as organisations doing real work to keep farms farming.
I asked her what she is most excited about. Her answer: farmers getting genuinely excited about soil health, and starting to see the farm as a whole system rather than a set of parts. Not just healthy soil to grow more crops, but healthy soil to take up excess nutrients, protect water quality, sequester carbon, and provide habitat. Marginal land turned into something valuable rather than fought with.
Soil conservation really is the foundation. Without it working, none of the rest works.
Listen to the full conversation on The Flower Files, Episode 131.
I am going to document the buckwheat experiment as we go. If it completely flops, I want you to see that too, because maybe it works in one section and not another, and you do not know until you try it. So just try it.
Have you used a cover crop on a small growing space? Tell me what you planted and how you killed it, because I am still deciding on the crimping.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best cover crop for a small flower farm?
It depends on what your soil needs, but buckwheat is a strong starting point for small growers. It is short season, produces good biomass, is allelopathic so it suppresses weeds on its own, forms a light-blocking mat when crimped, and can be terminated by roller crimping rather than spraying. If your organic matter is low, high-biomass small grains like rye, triticale, wheat or barley are the more common choice.
Can you kill a cover crop without spraying?
Yes. Roller crimping is the main method, and it works well on buckwheat. Crushing the stem kills the plant and lays it down as a mat that blocks sunlight to weed seedlings while it breaks down. On a small area you can crimp manually with a board and rope rather than buying equipment, though a proper crimper crushes stems more effectively, which speeds decomposition.
What does allelopathic mean?
An allelopathic plant releases compounds that suppress the growth of other plants around it. Buckwheat is allelopathic, which is part of why it is effective for weed suppression.
Do I need a large farm to get cover crop help?
No. Soil conservation districts run programs specifically for small acreage vegetable and flower operations. Nearly every county in the country has a district, they are locally led, and in general their work is voluntary rather than regulatory. They will also talk to backyard gardeners and homeowners, and will refer you elsewhere if a question falls outside what they handle.
How often should I test my soil?
Every year, or at minimum every three. Phosphorus tends to stay fairly stable unless you have erosion, while nitrogen is more volatile and leaves more easily. If you only track one measure, track pH, because pH determines whether the nutrients already in your soil are actually available to your plants.
Why is tilling bad for soil?
Heavy tillage breaks up organic matter so it decomposes too quickly, over-aerates the soil, and destroys the mycorrhizal fungal networks that extend a plant's reach for water and nutrients. Minimising disturbance is one of the core principles of soil health, which is why no-till has become more common.
What are mycorrhizal fungi?
Mycorrhizal fungi form a partnership with plant roots. They cannot produce their own food, so they take sugars the plant makes through photosynthesis. In exchange, they extend far beyond the reach of the plant's roots and root hairs, pulling in water and nutrients and delivering them back to the plant.
What can I do in a small yard to help pollinators?
Leave part of it unmowed and messy, since insects need hollow stems and leaf litter to overwinter in. Consider clover instead of turf grass, which flowers, tolerates sun and shade, and needs far less maintenance. Plant natives, because many non-native ornamentals stay pristine precisely because nothing can eat them. And learn what your target species need at every life stage, including the caterpillar stage.
