Cover Crops & Good Gardening Videos

Help for Home Gardener from the Help Desk
of the UC Master Gardener Program of Contra Costa

For this posting we cover two activities that hopefully could be of interest to you.

Cover Crops
Planting a cover crop is highly recommended, especially for over wintering vegetable gardens. “They protect the soil, feed microbes, build soil structure, add root channels, and support beneficial insects.” That quote comes from a December 21^st publication (attached) of Washington State University's Andrew McGuire where he summarizes recent studies which show that single species of cover crops out perform multi-species cover crops. It seems that contrary to the notion that having a “polyculture” (lots of different species) of seed for your cover crop, the use of monoculture (one species) of seed is actually better. Quoting from his paper:

“Cover crops are great. If I thought I could get away with it, I would just grow cover crops in my garden. They protect the soil, feed microbes, build soil structure, add root channels, and support beneficial insects. I think they look cool too. When cover crop mixtures got popular a few years ago, I got excited and grew a 17 species mix. It looked really cool, I mean, diverse, with all sorts of seeds that became all sorts of plants. I took pictures, showed my kids, and even had a neighborhood open garden event! (Well, maybe not that last one) Then I grew some vegetables after the cover crop. They did OK. Just OK. I wanted it to be the best tomato/squash/cucumber/lettuce crop ever, but I could not tell the difference between these vegetables and those I had grown after many previous un-biodiverse cover crops. Recent research results may explain this.

 Research thus far has consistently found that cover crop polycultures are not necessarily better than cover crop monocultures. This is now reaffirmed by a large study, done in Pennsylvania, published this year (Finney et al. 2016).”

So now you know… your cover crop can just be a single seed for the garden. Read the paper (4 pages) for more ideas on what you should be doing to get a great cover crop. 

Good Gardening Videos

If you are hungry for some visual gardening in the middle of some rainy, dreary non-gardening day this winter, we recommend considering a relatively new web site, goodgardeningvideos.org. While many videos show up on YouTube and various other gardening organizations (e.g., Cooperative Extensions), the people behind GoodGardeningVideos, you'll recognize many of them, is curating gardening videos for quality and accuracy. Try it; you'll like it. Just remember we live in California, and some of the areas where the videos come from are already deep in snow… and probably won't be putting out their tomatoes in late April either. Their current interest is seed starting. We can do that. Only about 60 days till tomato seed starting time.

Help Desk of the UC Master Gardener Program of Contra Costa County (SIM)

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Note: The  UC Master Gardeners Program of Contra Costa's Help Desk is available year-round to answer your gardening questions.  Except for a few holidays, we're open every week, Monday through Thursday for walk-ins from 9:00 am to Noon at 75 Santa Barbara Road, 2d Floor, Pleasant Hill, CA  94523. We can also be reached via telephone:  (925) 646-6586, email: ccmg@ucanr.edu, or on the web at http://ccmg.ucanr.edu/Ask_Us/ MGCC Blogs can be found at http://ccmg.ucanr.edu/HortCoCo/ You can also subscribe to the Blog  (//ucanr.edu/blogs/CCMGBlog/).