Fall always seems to arrive with a full calendar.
School is back in session. Sports and activities pick up. Work gets busy. Weekends fill. Travel sneaks onto the schedule. The holidays are suddenly not very far away. The days get shorter, the weather starts changing, and somehow everything feels like it needs to happen at once.
And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I am still thinking about my garden.
I know I want to put organic matter back into the soil. I know how important that is. But when I think about buying mulch or compost, hauling it home, unloading it, moving it where it needs to go and spreading it out, it starts to feel like one more project squeezed into an already full season.
That is what got me thinking.
Why haul organic matter into the garden when I can grow it there instead?
Let the Garden Grow Some of Its Own
That is one of the things I have come to appreciate most about cover crops.
I can take a relatively small amount of seed, scatter it over an empty bed and let the plants grow the material I eventually want to return to the soil.
The top growth gives me leaves and stems.
The roots are growing below the surface at the same time, moving through the soil and leaving plant material behind there too.
Instead of bringing in something bulky from somewhere else, I can let sunlight, water and time grow it right where I need it.
For this season of life, that just makes sense to me.
There Is a Cost to Hauling Things In
It isn't only the time.
Anything we bring into the garden has a cost.
There is the mulch or compost itself. Sometimes there is delivery. If we pick it up ourselves, there is fuel, a truck or trailer, and the time it takes to get it home. Then it still has to be moved and spread.
Cover crop seed approaches the same goal differently.
Instead of buying the finished plant material, I am buying the seed that can produce that material right in the garden.
The garden does the growing.
And Yes, There Is Still Spring Work
I don't want to make this sound easier than it really is.
Growing a cover crop does not mean there is nothing to do later.
If I bring organic material into the garden and plan to incorporate it, there is still spring work involved.
If I grow a cover crop, I will still need to cut it down and work that plant material into the soil when I am ready to plant.
Either way, there is a spring job.
The difference is how the organic matter got there.
With one method, I bought it, hauled it, unloaded it and spread it.
With the other, I planted seed and let it grow.
Sometimes Simple Wins
I don't think any of us are looking for more things to add to fall.
This season already asks a lot of us.
So when I can take one bulky, time-consuming job and replace it with something as simple as planting seed, I notice.
Cover crops do not eliminate the work of caring for soil.
They simply change where some of that work happens.
Instead of hauling organic matter into the garden, I can grow it right where I need it.
And in a season when everything else already feels full, that feels like a pretty good trade.
Farm Wisdom
Sometimes the easiest thing to carry into the garden is a handful of seed.