Planting Into a Green Cover Crop

Garden Update 2018 Week 22

The spring planting continues in my garden. This week I was able to get all of the warm season crops transplanted. The fall cover crop had grown a lot on me, so I had to come up with a way to kill it before planting. With my seeds, I cut it back and piled it between the rows. For the transplanting area, I decided to spray it with RoundUp a few days before transplanting.

Many farmers are trying to plant green. They are wanting to keep live roots in the soil as long as possible. (Check out my article Rethinking Soil for more information on this.) There are many methods out there to accomplish this but one of them is to spray the cover crop just prior to, or just after, seeding. Since I am transplanting the only option is to spray ahead of time so that is what I did. The RoundUp takes 1–2 weeks to fully kill the plant so its still green as I plant but it dies out as the transplant takes off.

I followed a similar procedure as with the onions except that I didn’t need to move the rye. I just augered a hole, put the plant in, covered with some soil, and topped off with compost. I watered in advance to get the soil profile full. I wrote in a previous post, Cover Crop Lessons, how by letting the crop go too long I dried out my soil, so I needed to do this to get it re-charged. I still gave it some water with liquid fertilizer just to set the soil and make sure it had enough.

Tomatoes are a bit different than all the other crops in that I put the stem down in the ground up to the first leaves. The stem will grow roots where it touches the soil so doing this gives an even bigger root system. The rest of the crops — peppers, cucumbers, & pumpkins — just went in at soil level.

Until next week,

Scott.