Picnic Day: Cover Crops Nourish Our Food and Our Land

Cover crops provide a variety of benefits. Keeping living plants in the soil year-round improves soil structure and nutrients, stimulates soil organisms and provides homes and food for pollinators and helpful insects such as ladybugs.

In the lab of Amélie Gaudin, we are excited to share during Picnic Day how cover crops nourish the land we grow our food on. In the seed packets you receive from us, the species of cover crops included are: 

Oat, barley, wheat, fava bean, spring pea, vetch, yellow mustard, black mustard and canola.

How to plant:

• Plant your cover crop seeds in October or November before the first rainfall.
• Broadcast them evenly over an area of prepared soil, covering about 30-40% of the soil surface.
• If rain is not expected soon after planting, water the area to help seeds germinate.
• Cover crops will sprout within 1-2 weeks, typically reaching peak growth at about three months.
• They will continue growing and can be cut down in early spring when you are ready to plant, then left as mulch or mixed into the soil.

On agricultural lands, cover crops are typically grown in “off-seasons” of harvested crops, when food crops are not being cultivated – often in the cool winter months.

Cover crops are a part of our larger research in which we explore how diversification and healthy soil ecosystems can help farmers meet their sustainability and resilience goals.

The aim of our research is to help develop agricultural ecosystems that support biodiversity and ecosystem services as a basis for improvement. We bring together concepts and methods from various disciplines to study how diversification strategies – including cover crops, crop rotation complexity and livestock integration – can help ecosystems under stress and after stress. We also study how root systems fit into this process.

Learn more here about how we build sustainability and resilience from the ground up.