Naturally Bug-Free (12 page)

rotation
: growing different types of vegetables in different parts of the garden each year. See
The Weekend Homesteader
for more information. Garden rotation can lower pest and disease levels.

row cover
: a thin fabric laid over garden plants that lets air, light, and water through. Row covers keep pests out and can help protect plants from frost.

solitary bees
: bees that don't live in social colonies. Honeybees are
not
a solitary bee.

spinosad
: an insecticide based on the bacterium
Saccharopolyspora spinosa
. Spinosad is a broad-spectrum insecticide that will kill most insects on contact.

sticky trap
: a method of capturing pest insects by attracting them to a certain color. Stick traps kill insects by gluing them to the surface of the sticky trap, similar to the way fly paper works.

stubble
: the roots and lower stems left behind in a field when a crop is mowed down.

till
: to churn up the earth, usually with a plow or rototiller.

topdress
: to add compost to the surface of soil.

weedy edge
: part of the garden left alone to revert to wild plants.

About the author

Anna Hess lives with her husband Mark Hamilton (plus two spoiled cats, a hard-working dog, and a varying number of chickens) on 58 acres of swamp and wooded hillsides in the mountains of southwest Virginia. The duo spends most of their time homesteading—Anna likes to putter around the garden while Mark uses his inventive streak to build chicken coops and deer deterrents out of a handful of screws and whatever is lying around in the barn. They make a living selling POOP-free chicken waterers (www.AvianAquaMiser.com) and blogging about their adventures (www.WaldenEffect.org).

The Permaculture Gardener series, of which this book is the second volume, provides tips for growing fruits and vegetables in partnership with the natural world. Flip to the end of this ebook for an excerpt from
Homegrown Humus: Cover Crops in a No-till Garden
, the first book in the series.

Another popular series is Modern Simplicity, which suggests ways to incorporate appropriate technology into your life so you have time to pursue your passions. Learn to create an online business homestead-style, dumpster-dive your living accommodations, turn a junked fridge into a root cellar, build a low-cost sunroom add-on, then enjoy the tale of how two homesteaders fell in love with each other and with a farm.

Anna's most recent book is a work of fiction
, Watermelon Summer
, which details another young woman's journey to an Appalachian farm. The Permaculture Chicken and Working Chicken series are devoted to making backyard chicken-keeping cheap, sustainable, less smelly, and more fun. Finally, Anna's popular
Weekend Homesteader
series provides one fun and easy project for each week of the year to guide beginners onto the path of self-sufficiency. A full-color paperback version of
The Weekend Homesteader
was published by Skyhorse Publishing in fall 2012, and each month can also be bought separately as a 99 cent ebook.

All of Anna's ebooks are available at www.Amazon.com. Visit www.Wetknee.com to learn about future books, and download a free copy of
Best Books for Homesteaders
when you sign up for our email list. Finally, I'd be eternally grateful if you take a minute to leave a review on Amazon, Goodreads, or on your blog as well—your reviews help others decide whether to take a chance on my work. Thank you!

Homegrown Humus

Don't miss book one in the series, the beginning of which is excerpted below:

Fall oats make an attractive and vigorous soil cover that naturally dies over the winter in zone 6 and colder.

During the last four years that I've experimented with growing cover crops, my garden soil has turned darker and yields of many vegetables have increased dramatically. Both my own honeybees and wild pollinator populations have been boosted by the copious nectar produced by buckwheat plantings, and my chickens have enjoyed the winter greenery from oilseed radish leaves. Plus, having cover crops on the ground during the winter prevents erosion, keeps soil microorganisms humming along, and just makes the garden a more interesting place to be. Nowadays, I can't imagine doing without my beds of buckwheat, radishes, and oats.

Buckwheat not only improves your soil, it also feeds honeybees and native pollinators.

Planting cover crops is a quick-and-easy afterthought in my current garden, but it wasn't always that way. I experienced a steep learning curve when I first began growing cover crops in my chemical-free, no-till garden. Most information on growing cover crops is written for people who plow their soil every year and are willing to spray herbicides, and I had some spectacular failures while selecting the cover crop species that would do well without these disturbances.

Chances are you'll have to experiment as well. The further you live from my zone-6, southwest-Virginia garden, or the more your gardening techniques differ from my own, the more of a commitment you'll need to make to figuring out the best way to slide cover crops into your fallow periods. Luckily, experimentation is half the fun, and my experiences should at least help you set off in the right direction, inspiring you to give cover crops a try.

Choosing the right cover crop

What is a cover crop?

Cover crops are plants purposely sown in the garden to improve the soil's fertility, to fight weeds, to prevent erosion, and to keep the ecosystem in balance. These crops are sometimes known as "green manure," especially if the plants are tilled into the soil. Here, I'll be considering cover crops that can be managed without tilling in.

The list of plants that have been used as cover crops is quite extensive, and even includes common vegetables and flowers like kale and sunflowers. If you want to expand your experiments beyond the species in this book, two good sources of cover crop information include
Managing Cover Crops Profitably
—an extensive document available free at www.sare.org—and Northern Great Plains Research Laboratory's
Cover Crop Chart
—a simpler document that provides more breadth but less depth and that is available for free download at www.ars.usda.gov/SP2UserFiles/Place/54450000/CCC/CCC_v13_5_2012.pdf. Between those two documents and this book, you should definitely find at least a few plants that match up well with your garden.

Types of cover crops

When choosing cover crops, it's handy to look at broad categories to find out which one (or ones) best fit your needs. The first distinction to consider is whether your plants are annuals (meaning they'll go to seed and die in less than a year) or perennials (meaning they will live for many years). Perennial cover crops have a place in pastures or tilled-garden settings, but, for our purposes, you'll be better off sticking to annuals.

Legumes grow bumps on their roots, known as nodules, to house bacteria. The bacteria grab nitrogen out of the air that plants can't usually take in, and in exchange, the plants feed their little friends sugars harvested from the energy of the sun.

It's also helpful to break cover crops down into two other categories—legumes and non-legumes. Legumes are members of the bean family, and cover-crop legumes include clovers, cowpeas, field peas, vetch, and medics. Legumes differ from most other kinds of plants because they've teamed up with soil bacteria to enable them to pull nitrogen out of the air. As a result, legumes are able to grow in soil that hasn't been recently dosed with manure, compost, or other nitrogen fertilizers, and (when managed correctly) legume cover crops can reduce your need to apply compost to the soil.

Most cover crops are allowed to grow until they reach full bloom, then are killed.

Non-legumes include all other types of cover crops, notably grains and crucifers (the latter of which are members of the same family as cabbage and mustard). While legumes can make their own nitrogen and act as quick fertilizers for the soil, non-legumes create more organic matter and enrich the soil longer-term.

I'll explain more about how to maximize the amount of organic matter you get from your cover crops in a later section, but for now, it's worth considering why you want to grow cover crops. Are you trying to replace the compost or manure used to fertilize your garden annually? If so, go for legumes. On the other hand, if you're like me and are trying to improve the quality of your garden soil, you'll want to stick to grains and crucifers.

Growing your own organic matter