Benefits of Using Garden Cover Crop Seeds In Your Home Garden

We are partnering with True Leaf Market Garden Cover Crop Seeds in our garden, and you are going to learn the benefits of using cover crop seeds.

I wrote this gardening sponsored post on behalf of True Leaf Market.

Gardening is a must in our home and a great way to stay active, grow your food, and save money.

No matter your yard or balcony space, it is possible to garden; you just have to want it.

This gardening season, we had to make some changes to our garden, which included increasing our gardening space and dealing with some minor issues due to the lack of space.

But more about this later.

If you are a beginner gardener, know you will learn something significant about gardening and maintaining good soil.

This year we will be using garden cover crops seeds to help us. If you are not familiar with cover crops, keep on reading because this is important and, in my opinion, useful to anyone who gardens at home.

Let's begin!

What are cover crops?

A cover crop is a specific type of plant grown mainly for the benefit of the overall soil instead of the actual crop yield.

What is a good cover crop for a garden?

You can use legumes if you also want to have some crop yield. But if you genuinely want this just for a cover crop, you'll want to use something like annual ryegrass, hairy vetch, buckwheat, red clover, and winter rye.

Benefits of Cover Crops in Your Garden

Cover crops for your garden are like adding a layer of manure or fertilizer when your garden usually is sitting unused.

Unless you're gardening all year round, which many of us aren't, utilizing cover crops helps keep your soil ready and prepared for the growing season.

What are the benefits of using cover crops in home gardens?

A cover crop for your home garden will help you prepare for the growing season. With all of the time that your home garden is lying dormant, you could be preparing the soil for a more bountiful harvest.

For this reason, we are using True Leaf Market Garden Cover Crop Seed Mix because of its benefits.

Planting cover crop seeds in your garden will:

Improve your garden soil
Suppress weeds
Manages soil erosion
Pest control
Promotes biodiversity
Control diseases
Fertilize your soil

Using Cover Crop Seeds in our Garden

As stated above, we increased our gardening space in our medium-size yard to grow more food.

Our yard is not all flat land, so we are taking care of an issue. We do use containers as well, and every year varies. Due to the pandemic, we have decided to grow more, but we have come to an obstacle.

Due to a large amount of rainfall, part of our garden suffers from minor erosion.

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To prevent erosion and prepare the soil for the next season, we use cover crop seeds to help.

We have about 35 feet of gardening space in this area of our property, and we will be OK with having an area dedicated to cover crops.

Using cover crop seeds will help the soil and reduce the erosion in our garden.

Crop seeds are a great benefit and one we recommend home gardeners to use this, including raised garden beds!

After you finish your garden season, plant some cover crops to help nourish the soil.

We have worked and weeded and have started to get the ground ready. The photo above is where we have planted our cover seeds.

Next, we are building a small raised bed on top of the small “hill” for the kids to plant their plants.

We bought our local hardware store this small raised bed that requires no tools.

As a mom of special needs kiddo, this was a fun project to do with the boys. This will be their planting area, and they decided this will be our Pizza garden for this season.

Once the temperatures are warm in our area to plant, we will transplant our plants to this raised bed.

And that's how we are getting ready for the gardening season in our home.

Learn more about cover crops below.

What cover crops can you grow from seeds?

Cover crops that you can grow from seeds include the ones listed above: ryegrass, hairy vetch, buckwheat, red clover, and winter rye.

Just be mindful that if you are planting annual ryegrass, you can seed it with your vegetables or wait until after you've harvested.

If you are planting ryegrass, you'll also need to grow a legume to increase the nitrogen in the soil.

You can grow in late summer or early fall if you are planting hairy vetch, a legume crop.

Hairy vetch is commonly used in vegetable gardens and is very resilient and versatile.

If you want a hand with weed control, you'll want to grow buckwheat. It is sensitive to cold, so it's great for planting anytime between late May and late August.

Red clover is your choice if you want a powerhouse cover crop. This legume provides you with plenty of nitrogen to benefit your garden soil.

You can plant this right alongside your rows of growing vegetables anytime from spring to early autumn.

In the True Leaf Market Garden Cover Crop Seed Mix, you'll find a variety of versatile and easy to plant crops to help get your backyard garden to its fullest potential.