I've been trying lots of cover crops this year, and even though the results aren't in, I thought I'd write a midterm sum up.  The image above is from the forest garden, where I planted sunn hemp (the tall things in the foreground), sunflowers, and sweet potatoes as cover crops in the last few weeks.

The sunn hemp is growing great in good soil, but is struggling (as most things do) in poor soil with high groundwater.  The sweet potatoes seem to be doing well everywhere, and have the major bonus that I can plant a single set and then expect it to grow exponentially despite the troublesome trio of chicks who have been roaming the garden lately.  The sunflower seeds, I'm sad to say, all went down those chicks' gullets.  (More on the drama of the chicks coming up over on our chicken blog.)

Even though I put it in as a vegetable, I'm now considering this perennial cucumber (sent to us by a kind reader) to be a cover crop.  Despite its name, the plant has yet to fruit for us, probably because it doesn't like living in the land of all rain and no sun.  I won't repeat this experiment since it's not worth keeping a cutting over the winter just for biomass production, but the cucumber does seem to be covering bare soil well (and also growing up into my trees).

Although not a cover crop, I thought I'd show you my comfrey bed, turned flower garden.  Last winter, I ripped out every single plant and root I could find to transplant to a chicken pasture, but of course the comfrey came back with a vengeance from the root fragments left behind.  I ripped the new plants back to the ground once this spring and planted annual flowers in the gaps, then ripped the comfrey back again to give those flowers a chance to bloom.  Looks like I'm due for another ripping job.  The nearby plum trees are enjoying their monthly doses of comfrey mulch.

In the main vegetable garden, I'm playing it safe and just filling gaps with my trusty standby --- buckwheat.  The bees (wild and cultivated) adore the flowers, and it's always a joy to pull up buckwheat just before planting time.  I end up with free mulch to cover perhaps a quarter of the bed, along with nearly weed-free ground for my seedlings to enjoy.  While the other cover crops mentioned in this post are experimental play, the buckwheat is tried and true.