Buckwheat and hairy vetch are tremendously good for clay soils. They'll both send roots down much deeper than you can till, which will die in the great circle of garden life, leaving both organic matter and most importantly for clay soil--air/water tunnels. Vetch, of course, is a legume and will fix nitrogen as well. It does seem a bit late in zone 5 for planting out hairy vetch. It's not the most winter hardy cover crop. I believe winter rye holds that trophy. If you get a freeze on young vetch, it'll die. I've never done dormant seeding, but that sounds like a better idea to me. I used to basically garden in a vetch field. I'd mow it super short and turn my planting rows, trample and mulch my paths. I didn't really plan it that way, I just hate to till.

Ezzirah, If you are going to switch to no-till gardening, you wouldn't need a tiller and, if you use a tiller, you're really not doing no-till gardening, so I'm not sure how to answer this question. When I did no-till gardening our last three years in Texas, I double dug the soil the first year and amended it, built my raised beds above grade level on the double-dug beds by bringing in a mix that was 50% sandy loam and 50% compost, and did not rototill anything. With a no-till garden that has a cover crop planted in it, you can hand-dig the cover crop, although that partially defeats one of the main tenets of no-till gardening, which is to disturb the soil as little as possible. Or, you can pull out the cover crop and then place it on top of the soil surface so it can decompose, or you can place sheet plastic over the cover crop a couple of weeks before planting time and let the sun bake the cover crop to death. You also could just cut down the cover crop very close to the ground, leave the cut portions on top of the ground to decompose and plant through the stubble. This works better if you are transplanting transplants into the stubble area, or sowing large seeds like beans or corn. It wouldn't work very well with small-seeded crops. I have a rototiller and a small cultivator that is, essentially, a mini-tiller and I generally use them only when breaking ground and adding organic matter the very first year. After that, I just use handtools and try to turn over the soil as little as possible. Dawn

Terra, If you had only loosened the roots and not actually dug them up/turned them over, there's a good chance your cover crop would have resprouted. Since you went back and turned over the bed with a shovel, the cover crops should decompose over the next few weeks. Just watch carefully for resprouting the next couple of weeks. Usually, just disking under the cover crop (with a tractor if you're a farmer and with a rototiller or shovel if you're a gardener) will be enough to halt all growth and start the decomposition process, but there's no guarantee. Sometimes you have to turn over the soil a couple more times to ensure the plants don't resprout and to make sure they are decomposing. I can't help with the availability of Purple Millet seed in Tulsa, but I don't remember seeing it on seed racks anywhere here in southern OK or northcentral Texas. If you grew puple millet last year and let it go to seed, you may get volunteers in that part of your landscape this year. It reseeds in my garden every now and then. I haven't grown any the last few years though. The volunteers aren't quite as purple as the original plant was though. Gardenweb is putting the ads into our posts using the Vibrant ad system. If you go to the main forum page where you can see the listing of the most recent threads posted on this forum, near the top of the page...maybe an inch or two or three from the top of that page, you'll see a message about the ads from the GW administrators. I think it is titled "A message regarding new advertising". Just click on that message and follow their directions to "opt out". Once you "opt out", the system shouldn't embed those ads in anything you post. Dawn

The problem with winter cover crops around here is winter herds of deer. We used to plant winter wheat and rye, vetch etc. But the deer didn't go away when the cc was plowed over, but came back to dine on lettuce, spinach and newly emerged green bean plants. We have a fence but only 4 feet high. After years of no problem with deer, I just last week lost a whole row of lettuce and another bed of radicchio. Next year our garden will get a 7 foot high fence and we may try it again.