This is part of a new series of blog posts for beginner gardeners. These posts may be a little shorter and more specific in nature.

There are two main methods, the first one being cover cropping.

Cover Cropping

The first task is chopping down the old vegetable plants and weeds. (If you haven’t yet planted a garden, you’ll only be dealing with weeds or grasses.) Don’t pull them out, though. If you cut them down to ground level and leave the roots to rot underground, they will add organic material and nutrients to the soil.

Whatever you do, don’t till! Tilling injures all sorts of small creatures living in the ground, such as worms, or evening nesting bumblebees. And when you till, all the carbon that has been sequestered by the microorganisms in the soil will be released.

Some smaller plants can be laid out on the soil, adding more nutrients, but many plants are just too big, like tomato plants. Those can go into the compost pile (chop them up a bit first). Thistles, dandelions, and any other weeds you have, can be snipped off and laid on the soil. If your weeds have gone to seed, don’t leave those in the beds. You can make a big pile of seedy weeds elsewhere, and cover them with a tarp, to rot away until next year, when you’ll find they have become a nutritious soil! If you have plants that are diseased, throw those out. You don’t want those to continue to infect your garden.

Now that you have cleaned off the dying vegetation, cover everything with a layer of mulch and compost.

If you don’t have a finished compost pile, don’t despair. You can buy compost, or you can do what many old gardeners in Europe, where I used to live, do – simply dig some food scraps into the soil. But you don’t need to do this. You can plant a cover crop in the mulch, and it will add nutrients and organic matter to your soil. 

At this point, you may be asking, what is a cover crop?

A cover crop is simply a bunch of plants that you grow once the summer garden plants are done, without the intent of eating them, and their function is to fix nitrogen, add nutrients and organic matter, and break up packed soil. Examples of nitrogen fixers are peas, soybeans, fava beans, clover, and vetch. Examples of crops that break up soil are Daikon Radish, annual grasses, rye, oats, and wheat. All of these will add nutrients and organic matter to the soil.

Before you plant your cover crop, you should first add some mulch.

You will be planting into this. Broadcast your seeds into the mulch, and cover with ¼ to ½ inches of mulch/soil. Unless you live in a desert, you won’t need to water much, maybe just to get your seeds started.

And what can you use as mulch? Why bother with mulch? What if you have very little money to spend on things like mulch and compost, you’ve never planted a garden, and all you have is weedy or bare soil?

Mulching your garden builds up your soil and protects it from harsh weather, both in summer and in winter. 

There is another way to do this, which is low cost, and in truth, the most sustainable.

It involves a combination of using plant material as mulch, and slash mulching. You can go to a local park when the leaves are falling, and gather up some fallen leaves. Take them home, smash them up, and lay them on your soil. If you can, sprinkle a little soil on top of them, so they don’t blow away. If you don’t know of a park nearby, maybe a neighbor has a deciduous tree, and they’d love it if you took away some of the leaves.

When you talk to your neighbor, ask them to leave at least some of the leaves on the ground for small creatures, such as bumble bees, to nest in.

Once you’ve spread a thick layer of leaves and dead weeds that you snipped off onto your garden bed, just leave it at that. In the spring, go have a look, and you’ll be amazed to find that your leaf/weed layer has become soil. You can plant right into this. Next fall, do the same thing. You’ll have extra plant material to add, all the old plants from your summer garden. 

Honestly, mulching with your own weeds, leaves, and old plant material, is the most sustainable way to do it. When you do it this way, you’re preventing material from ending up in the waste stream, saving money, and reducing inputs that travel long distances. Remember that if you buy compost at the garden store, it comes in a plastic bag, and it may have traveled more than a thousand miles. Raking up some of your neighbor’s leaves, on the other hand, costs you nothing, while it makes your neighbor happy. The leaves haven’t traveled some long distance, so no petroleum has been used, and you know whether or not your neighbor uses pesticides. (If she does, maybe you should look for leaves in the garden of another neighbor).

Keeping it local gives you more control. Isn’t it better to know exactly what you’re putting in your garden, and thus in your body?

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