Is that a cover crop in your garden, or are you just happy to see me?

We have written before about the importance of soil quality.  We are of an accord with a local horticulture personality who recently argued that Texas gardeners deserve some kind of medal for their heroic battles with nutrient poor soils; we are equally certain that if we are ever famous for anything, it will be for our advocacy of the universal benefit to be derived from spreading chicken-poop compost on anything you want to grow in the ground.

However, chicken poop and rotting leaves are not the only means of enriching one’s topsoil.  As part of our never ending quest to maximize our efficiency, we have begun researching the most effective possible cover crops for our little patch of heaven, and several candidates display the kinds of qualities we are looking for.

A good cover crop is like anything else – it is only “good” if it does what you want it to do.  We want cover crops to be a lot like everything else we put effort into.  They should do more than one thing.

• A cover crop should be a “green manure”.  A good cover crop ought to affix nutrients, particularly nitrogen, to the soil both to enhance the following crop, and also to prevent nitrate runoff, which is one of the more egregious forms of water pollution from agriculture and home lawn care.
• A cover crop ought to be aesthetically pleasing; a hay field may look attractive to the farmer who knows what he is looking at, but it may look like nothing but tall weeds to his neighbors, or more importantly in an urban setting, to the city code enforcement office.
• A cover crop ought to have some sort of production value – either as food, as herb or supplement, or even as animal feed.
• A cover crop ought to be a “companion plant”, adding proven value to other crops in your garden much like in the “3 Sisters” farming method.
• A cover crop ought to choke out the kinds of weeds which tend to persist from season to season so that, even if they reemerge later to compete with your follow crop, their success rate will be greatly diminished.
• A cover crop ought to blend with the general theme of your garden, providing a kind of segue from one area to the next.  Permaculturalists frequently talk about production values being highest “at the edges”; a cover crop is a way to transition from one edge to the next – from pasture to vineyard or orchard, for example.

We have found several potential covers which we will be testing over the next several planting seasons which fit these criteria to a Texas ‘T’.  Some are commonly used throughout Texas already; others, we hope to be part of making popular, if only for novelty’s sake.

Red clover is something we have been interested in growing for quite some time.  This is actually a fairly common cover crop throughout the northern tier of states, because it is not especially adapted to our hotter climate.  In fact, it is only advisable to grow in Texas in the fall and winter months.  Most cooperatives will stock crimson clover, but not the red, which we believe is a shame. 

Red clover is not all that different from crimson or other clovers in terms of its ability to affix nitrogen – pretty much any clover you plant will be excellent in this regard – however, the red variety has a tremendous advantage over many of its counterparts in its multifunctionality.  As an herbal supplement, red clover is used in the treatment of cancer, showing tremendous potential as a complementary tool in making traditional cancer protocols more effective.  Drinking an effusion of red clover tea has also been shown to be effective in a number of gynecological regimens, not only for breast cancer treatment, but also for cramping and as an aid in reducing the severity of symptoms resulting from uterine fibroids.  While the best evidence is anecdotal, there is reason to believe red clover even has benefit for some women with fertility problems, as well.

A summer crop we will be experimenting with next year is buckwheat.  Since we have decided to experiment with quinoa and amaranth, we are planning to call this the "year of going grainy"; buckwheat is perhaps most famous as a pancake ingredient, but it is also a useful cover crop.  It has a short growing season, is relatively drought and heat tolerant, and has a propensity to choke out the nutsedges and other noxious weeds which have free reign in most Texas gardens from late June through the end of the summer growing season – a season, we might point out, in which precious little is usually actually growing in a Texas garden.

In fact, in late July, it is a rare thing to find a Texas garden with much more than a few brave pepper plants, maybe a pumpkin vine or two, and a patch of okra.  For a gardener trying to maximize yields, a lot of the spring planting results in dead vines or stalks by the early part of July, and by then it is just too hot to plant anything else.  Buckwheat, however, is our hopeful answer.  If it works, it will solve a serious riddle for us – namely, what to do while waiting for the blast furnace to cool off enough to put our fall salsa plants back into production.

Winter rye is a fairly common cover, particularly for cattle ranchers, because it makes a pretty decent hay crop.  It is also fairly common for cotton or other cash crop farmers in Texas because, especially in areas where winter wheat is not a possibility, winter rye is the best fast-growing plant to choke out competitive weeds between the fall harvest and an early spring planting of a crop like corn or sorghum. 

In our garden, we are not going to use rye very often, but when we do, it will be partly with an eye to weed and pest control, and partly with an eye to having greens available for our chickens in the middle of the winter.  Kale, spinach and cabbage are all in production in the middle of January, but frankly we’d like to save that for ourselves – we appreciate all our hens do for us, but there just isn’t much to be harvested in the dark of winter, and we’d like to put as much of it on our own plates as we can.  Giving rye to the girls is one way to accomplish that.

Finally, we come to a novelty cover crop which we only recently discovered.  During the northern hemisphere winter, an inordinate percentage of our national tomato consumption comes from Florida; this has presented some interesting soil quality challenges in the Sunshine State, which have lately been answered by the use of a unique cover crop native to South America that goes by a variety of names:  “Cow Itch”, “Velvet Bean” or Mucuna pruriens.  The plant is a trailing bean vine, and like most beans, is enormously successful at affixing nitrogen in the soil; it is for this reason that Florida tomato farmers make extensive use of Mucuna pruriens in their year-round production schemes.

The seed-pods are unusual for beans, basically looking like small fuzzy pouches; the fuzz consists of fairly long, wiry hairs which poke fairly sharply, and cause extreme irritation.  Joke shop afficionados will recognize this irritation – the hairs are actually used as a key ingredient in manufactured itching powder formulations.

The beans are relatively small and look for all the world like black beans – turtle beans, as some folk know them.  We have not yet sampled them to see what they taste like, but we are fairly hopeful that, if the taste is not too overwhelming (and no anecdotal evidence so far uncovered has suggested that it will be) we will be able to use them in similar fashion. 

Black beans, for the uninitiated, form the basis for most bean-based recipes in the form of Tex-Mex associated with Austin, our de facto home.  We may be refugees living in College Station, but a corner table at Kerbey Lane or Mother’s Café is really where we would prefer to be, and if you order nachos in either location, they will come with black beans.

A more traditional use for Mucuna pruriens in its native habitat is as a hot beverage; several tribes in the Amazon basin roast the beans much like we roast either coffee or yaupon, and then brew a hot beverage with the ground up beans.

There is no caffeine in Mucuna pruriens, however.  The beverage is imbibed for an entirely different reason.  Mucuna pruriens is shockingly high in L-Dopa; consumption of velvet beans results in a dopamine “high” which elevates mood, as dopamine is the essential building block of that neurotransmitter miracle known as “happiness”, and it also has, um, other elevating effects.  We’ve never really been fans of raw oysters, and now we’ve discovered that we don’t need to be.  Of all purported aphrodisiacs in the literature, Mucuna pruriens is one of the few which has documented clinical studies to back it up; oysters won’t grow in the yard, but velvet beans will.

Of course, rest assured that we will only be growing it to keep the tomatoes happy.  Myrtle’s place is a family establishment, after all.

Happy farming!