🔗 Share this article Soil in need of some love? Plant cover crops in your garden and you’ll improve your yields. I recently found a half-empty bottle of Lucozade placed in the euphorbia trough by one of the scaffolders. An architect friend joked, “Are you sure that’s Lucozade?” which made me see it differently. All this is to say, the garden is in disarray. Sometimes neglect has its perks; after returning from holiday, I spotted a sunflower sprouting in the back corner. Now, however, some urgent tidying is underway. Being six months pregnant, I’ve hired a local gardener to tackle troublesome weeds like a prickly weed and robinia saplings from the neighbour’s tree, but keeping desirable plants. Then, in the open patches, I’ll be sowing cover crops. Green manure are superheroes when it comes to boosting soil quality. A fellow garden writer has previously discussed cover crops, as they play a key role in crop rotation for vegetable plots. However, the only things I’m harvesting from my garden right now are a few scrumped apples and some woody herbs. My ambitions for the garden are modest and consistent – and improving the soil is top of the list. To update concerned readers, the scaffold is for roof repairs, and the fences are still wobbly, but the neighbours agree with replacing them. Cover crops are like superheroes for soil health. Bare soil invites weeds, which is why unwanted plants pop up. But by sowing vigorous crops, you can suppress weeds, attract pollinators, shelter beneficial insects, and fix nitrogen. Green manure plants may not look exciting – though some, like certain lupin varieties and a flowering legume, have lovely blooms – but their role is to grow vigorously rather than look decorative. After they’ve grown, you can turn them under, cut them for compost, or let them decompose for earthworms to pull down. The real magic happens below the surface. Now is the ideal time for sowing these cold-season plants. My selection includes rye grass, great for clay soil, a nitrogen-lifter, a weed-suppressor, and field beans. There’s satisfaction in planting seeds that won’t stay forever – on the surface, anyway.