Why Perennial Cover Crops Don't Work

Perennial cover crops are often touted as the ideal way to grow food but our experience is, well, they just don't grow that much food. In today's video I talk about why perennial cover cropping fails and how it could be changed.

There are arguably better crops to be used as perennial cover crops and as crops to be planted into them. There are also probably better methods. I'm open to critique here! Still willing to try some perennial cover cropping, but not optimistic yet.

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[Nurse_Nuggets]

You hit the nail right on the head at the 7:30 mark. We MUST breed for success in our area with our gardening practices. Stop trying to grow genotypes and phenotypes that simply will not do well in your environment. Buy seeds once. After that you should only be propagated seeds that came from healthy plants grown and harvested at home.

[iamorganicgardening]

I agree and have done a 2 ft square area of cardboard with leaf mold on top 30 days prior to direct seed in to clover. Works 100 % better.

[bonniepoole]

Elaine Ingham (Soil Food Web) talks about specific perennial cover crops for different veggies. Creeping thyme for brassicas, clover for tomatoes, potatoes, and celery, dichondra for other veggies. In her videos she speaks in general principles and avoids specifics but this is what I gleaned from her online lectures. Another source tried Crotalaria juncea for zucchini with good results. A nitrogen fixing cover (like clover) would promote green growth but not fruiting; phosphorous needed for flowering and fruiting can be increased with a radish cover crop.

[stonedapefarmer]

Re: breeding competitive crops - Joseph Lofthouse has done this. He weeds once, right at planting time, and selects the plants that can outcompete the weeds. I'm now working on doing the same here.

[teatimetraveller]

In the uk its common to undersow or relay, cover crops into squash and brassicas. The timing is important. Too early and the clover becomes dominant and it effects the yield. Too late and the crop over shadows and prevents establishment. Once the crops have been harvested the clover is left as a ley for the winter or the following year or 2, acting as the fertility building phase of the rotation. Doesn't really work with no dig/ intensive management but you could leave it over the winter and tarp it off for the following crop. White/ red clover tends to fix most n in the 2nd growing season but it would still have a big impact if its just a winter cover. Some folk also do the same with yellow trefoil under tomato/ cucumber in tunnels.

[donready]

The notill cover crop innovators may have a solution called biostriptill. For corn, prepare the early fall before by planting alternating strips 15" wide. One strip cereal rye or a perennial like white clover. The other strip is for winterkilled covers, usually tillage radish and peas. The corn is planted notill into the dead strips in the spring. In corn, the rye is killed after planting to make a mulch but you could mow it in your wider rows or crimp it, even better.

[voluntaryist]

After 30 years of composting for mulching my annuals I stumbled on a quicker, easier, richer mulch: SHREDDED LEAVES. My neighbors trees dropped too many leaves for her to manage in the fall so I volunteered to "clean up". I bought an electric leaf vac/shredder, 15-1. It came with a canvas bag which I slung over my shoulder, requiring frequent stops to empty. (This would have gone much quicker if I had help from someone pushing a large cart to trap the mulch.) I put the mulch in my 140 sq. foot, raised bed. It slowly, over a few winter months, broke down, leaving dark soil. I will NEVER compost again. Remember: Keep a cover crop, even if it's just weeds. Why? Building soil is done by ROOTS IN THE GROUND. Observe nature, learn, follow. Don't make work by fighting nature or following traditional farming/gardening, e.g., turning over the soil. Does nature plow? Hell no!

[timschulte]

I found that taking a 6" wide strip of cardboard that is 36" long and stapling it to form it into a circle that makes a 6" raised bed that is 12" acrossed, then filling that up with compost does a pretty good job of keeping the live mulch at bay long enough for the plants to get a foothold. I don't have a video of it, but I might be able to find a picture I could send your way :) I got the idea from someone that I saw that was taking small boxes, and folding in the tops and bottoms, then filling with compost/soil to make cheap raised beds.

[williamvanbeek]

Great video. We use cereal rye as part of the fall covercrop mix for beds that are going into pepper, tomato, etc. Being in Zone 4/5 we let the rye grow up until mid May then mow out only the 18" spots where plants will go in and then cover in black plastic covers. This allows 2 weeks to warm the soil and allows the rye to get into a milk/dough stage before we terminate the remaining rye. End result is warm soil to plant in and a rye crop that almost fully (95%+) terminates with the final mowing. Not perennial but it does keep a living root growing much, much longer.

[gabrielhickman]

Using clover as a live mulch was going to be my plan this year. I’m glad I watched this. I may try some mixed techniques you talked about. Using cardboard around my crops, maybe mulch a foot around them. Anyways, thanks for the video man, really helped

[MrWoodsli]

One thing i could add that is talked about in the soil food web course is to pick cover crop plants that are really low growing. Then they won't compete for light with the crop or need to be mowed. It makes since that most people try this with clovers and other common cover crops but there's many more plant mixes to try out that aren't normally considered cover crops. Grasses aren't going to work in a system like. I haven't tried any of this yet. I just wanted to share what has been talked about a lot in the soil food web course.

[Bluexin_]

Dr. Elaine Ingham recommends low running perennials like creeping thyme, which tend to make a longer root not branching out as much to leave ample space for the cash crop

[certifiedhoarder]

I wonder if placing a half or third of a strawbale ontop the clover a few weeks before transplanting each squash in couldve helped smother it and foster the decomposers needed to prevent its competition.

[tolbaszy]

Great video! I have been using an old steel wagon tire, about 4 feet diameter, to form crop circles. I set the rim where I intend to plant, work the area with a fork, mostly loosening the soil, remove sod and weeds, then add compost and other amendments. I direct seed or transplant in this "bed". I mulch the area between circles, with wood chips over cardboard, or I mow where mature plants will grow above weed pressure. While this method does not work for fancy seeding devices, it is easy to broadcast seed and control weeds in the concentrated patch. Irrigation is easier. My garlic was the best ever. Sweet corn and sunflowers grown this way seem to endure high winds better. Squash get a good start and easily compete with the fringe weeds when they begin to vine.

[JoshGnome]

I appreciate you sharing your results on this!
I'm wondering if allowing the clover/perennial a year or more to establish before transplanting into it would yield better results. My thought is that once the cover has established, died back, regrown, been mowed, regrown, etc, the soil will be full of a slow release of decaying matter and nutrients, but those nutrients wouldn't be available for a year or longer.

[thAndYorkAve]

From my experience with head to head trials, I have gotten similar results. Certain crops falter while others crops do well when planted amongst cover crops. Excellent analysis.

[TheVigilantStewards]

Thoughts that I'd like comment on:

- When I started a cheap food forest in my backyard I focused on starting with slowing and spreading the water. I noticed that none of my watermelons, grapes, kales, or anything really did that well ever. The soil isn't great, but it was an experiment to see how affordably I could do something over time. Nothing established and what did had little fruit, and it was just kind of an anticlimactic resolution. The only thing that did well was the peach tree.

- I really like the idea of using cover crops as a living skin instead of just chips, it's also easier to get ahold of for larger areas than chips or straw. it seems like annual might be easier though because you can come through with chickens and graze it all the way down before planting, putting that biomass into fertility.

- obviously, having a perennial crop would be excellent if you could leave it there and reap benefits, but the question is how do we achieve those benefits? Could a perennial system be grazed down enough to allow planting but not enough to get rid of the perennial crop? Perennials don't have the benefit of being able to kill off the crop before it goes to seed in this sense because the goal is to have a long term soil cover solution.

- I would say see what wildly grows there also over time and let that establish, but I haven't had much success planting into grass myself... also not in great soil. I do agree you really need at least a foot of buffer a couple of weeks before hand to allow anything you plant to do well.

My goal would be find a way to achieve the promised results with the automation from moving animals on it to where it's sustainable at home and building fertility. The downside of doing it the easy way with annuals is you have to buy the seed. You can get around that with perennials but how do you get them to come back or to give way enough to the crops.... and like you said which crops do well with that?

Does Geoff Lawton not have an answer for this? Perhaps the best solution is to have perennial cover crop all the way around the garden in a ratio of 4:1 cover crop to garden where the cover crop is what you scythe down to get compost material and mulch. To keep everything vitally living you would just need to keep compost and worm tea etc on the land and if you have biochar in the soil, I doubt a few weeks of having died off root systems would make all the bacteria and fungi disappear. To me integrating the permaculture food forestry ideas into home gardening or market gardening has been a challenge as well.

Cover crops have the most promises of everything mulch related, and if you can get it perennial and regulated that would be kind of an ultimate set up right?

So far, cardboard with straw on top of it for me has been what I've done if I don't have old wood chips... those two have turned out best for me so far.

Edited thought: If you had a larger home space, you could section off areas to rotate onto so you let the perennials go for a couple of seasons and then graze them down like you would an annual... instead of dealing with annuals for a season it's more like a few years of a cycle with perennials. Perhaps you could go through the effort to set up the fences in strips so when you are done with the crop they come back in from the sides and repopulate?

[curiouscat]

I agree 100% with everything you've talked about here. I only have a 2000 sq ft subsistence backyard garden and have tried several variations of intercropping and letting clover grow in the garden. Overall it's more work, timing is critical to get the new plants tall enough not to be shaded by clover which can grow to 12" during the summer. And you're probably right about how this can work for certain crops but I've settled in with growing clover and plantain and comfrey on the paths and perimeter and just doing periodic mow/chop & drop. (less weed management in the paths). Thanks for another great video - you're always so interesting :)

[zachlloyd]

I think it would work better with shorter covers, like Dichondra Repens. I also think it would work better in a 'till' situation, where you cut out and remove the cover in a radius, manually or like with a large hole saw lol. I just built my raised beds and plan on trying some of these perennial covers. I agree 100% that it would work better for backyard gardening than for market gardening. Lots of good points you made in the video and glad you aren't nixing it completely.

[zmavrick]

In my 2020 garden I tarped the area I planted my tomatoes and peppers in due to weed pressure, transplanted end of May then let a poor stand of white clover return. I had the healthiest and most productive plants I have ever grown. The tomatoes were of several varieties from cherries to beefsteak. The most amazing thing to me (and because I think they were so healthy) was they lasted through several light frosts before a freeze took them out. I picked my last ripe tomatoes the first week in November. Unheard of for open garden tomatoes in Iowa. I don't think this would work for a market garden as I did it, because I still had to weed the pathways and just left the clover. Weed pressure here is due to blown in seed, which I have proven with remay covered beds having little weed problems.