A very bad idea

I love a good garden experiment, but I’m going to declare my forays into ground covers a solid FAIL.

The idea behind ground cover is you plant a temporary crop in between growing seasons to add nitrogen and make air space with its roots.

The daikon radish beds weren’t too bad. The radishes grew quick and thick and died off as soon as cold weather hit. The test bed was pretty easy to clean up

But the winter wheat beds grew a LOT and then kept growing, aided by the mildest winter ever. I tried covering the bed with black plastic to kill off the plants in March, but all it did was leave a yellowed, soggy, rotting thick mess. I hand dug it all out, losing several inches of soil in the process. (Well, not really “lost”, just sent to the compost, so I guess we will get it back in a year.) By the time I was done, any potential benefits were completely lost.

So nice try with the great ground cover experiment, but let’s not do this again. At the end of this season I will still do a great job of cleaning up each bed, but then I will just pop some compost on top and cover it with some landscape fabric and call it a day!