The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Easy soil building with cover crops

Oat cover crop

How easy can it be to build your soil?  This patch of oats proves that two minutes of planting in August can produce quite a bit of biomass.

Forest garden in summerYou may recall that our forest garden had grown up in a truly distressing fashion this summer.  After Mark whacked all of the weeds down with his weed eater, there was a lot of soil that had been shaded bare by the huge wingstem and other weeds.  I tossed handfuls of oats on the ground and ignored them, figuring they'd either come up or get eaten by birds.

I forgot to tell Mark about my experiment, so he mowed through some of the cover crops, but the patches he missed grew up quite nicely.  They kept down any late summer weeds and will probably provide semi-bare patches with a light coating of mulch come spring.  The soil won't be weed-free and rich enough to plant vegetables directly into but will probably be bare enough to plant a summer round of cover crops in the same quick and dirty fashion.  Those two minutes of gardening really paid off!

Our chicken waterer never spills or fills with POOP.


Anna Hess's books
Want more in-depth information? Browse through our books.

Or explore more posts by date or by subject.

About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed, or simply check the box beside "email replies to me" while writing your comment.






profile counter myspace



Powered by Branchable Wiki Hosting.

Required disclosures:

As an Amazon Associate, I earn a few pennies every time you buy something using one of my affiliate links. Don't worry, though --- I only recommend products I thoroughly stand behind!

Also, this site has Google ads on it. Third party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user's prior visits to a website. Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to users based on their visit to various sites. You can opt out of personalized advertising by visiting this site.