I like to plant soybeans for a cover crop. Being a legume, they add nitrogen to the soil, and when they are planted fairly thick, they have a tremendous amount of foliage. In the spring I prepare the soil with my Troybilt tiller, then broadcast the beans and till them in. In the fall when I can see the leaves are just starting to die, I mow them down and till the mulch into the soil.

The above posters are right: it's really, REALLY hard to replace all the nutrition you take off the soil via vegetables/fruit, and replace it in equal measures. Remineralizing is important, most people don't know how much. Cover crops can replace a certain %, and compost can help, too. But there's no easy fix. Either do your homework by reading about cover crops, or contact your local Cooperative Extension Service/Master Gardener and ask some questions: What cover crops grow best there (winter? spring? summer? fall?)? Do you get enough cold there in winter to kill off any of them? Are there some that will grow through winter? Which ones are easiest to knock down or to till in? What do each of them provide: nitrogen? bulk organic matter? root mass? top growth? Emphasize you grow organic, or they may fail to tell you that a certain plant is usually killed by herbicides by the chemical farmers, and then you're stuck trying to manually kill or till a heavy root system. How large are your beds, and how many do you have? One trick I learned kind of accidentally: I had several beds that turned into masses of weeds when I was sick for a month. I had acquired a stack of heavy cardboard by luck. My angel neighbor weedwhacked my beds. While I was still recuperating, I would drag maybe one sheet of cardboard a day to my beds and cover them, putting some rocks on top to hold the cardboard down. The cardboard partially deteriorated over the winter, but by spring, the beds were mostly BEAUTIFUL, with just a few weeds. The worms and creatures had been digging around under the shelter of the cardboard most of the winter, the weeds had disappeared, the soil was soft and dark. All I had to do was pull the few weeds, rake some organic fertilizer into the top few inches, sow my seeds. Easy! So then I thought, why not do this with a cover crop? Sow the beds, let the crop grow, then whack them down in place (leave the tops on the beds), and cover them. With some of the more brittle cover crops (like buckwheat), you could probably just stomp them flat and cover them. Get on your local FreeCycle and see if anyone has cardboard they want to unload. Old sheets of plywood works well, too, and it doesn't rot as fast. If the plywood has a few fist-sized holes in it, just slip double or triple thicknesses of cardboard under them. Lift and stack them against a back wall during the growing season. Or use black plastic, held down with rocks or bricks. Sue

Wayne: I'm thinking, after further research that, the "tillage radishes" came about from a cooperative effort of the U of MD and a private entity, the result is the private operator was able to have a patented line of seed and named it, "tillage radishes". It seems from some further reading that other than the patented tillage radishes, radish types tend to be named in a loose, generic way like, "forage radishes". At any rate, it isn't too uncommon for products to come to market via private/university cooperative efforts, if memory serves me correctly, Surround and Bt came about this way. After I finished my last post yesterday I did a couple of hours of researching and realized I was pretty darned uninformed about the turnip cover crop idea, the research also led me into a tangent on mustards and brassicas which is just as interesting. Much to learn, to say the least but fascinating to consider incorporating into my little slice of heaven. This link is from KS State and is a pretty long review of information on cover cropping with brassicas and mustards, enjoy. Here is a link that might be useful: The link

I use cattle fava in mid season, both as food (greens) and as a cover crop. In spring, what I don't eat I scythe. They grow vigorously, break soil, and decay fast. Generally a better nitrogen fixer and soil amender than most other cover crops, though fava is reputed to be the pulse with the highest N-fixing. The similarity between fava and soybeans is in N-fixing, biomass production, and strong, soil-breaking roots. Favas here die both in winter (by freeze) and summer (by scything, but also by something called chocolate disease, with minimal seeding). The seed is a lot more expensive than clover.