Spring Gardening Tips: Cover Cropping

You need to cover it, whether it's with mulch or we like to use winter rye. So this ground here is in severe danger of baking and drying up before anything meaningful grows on it. So what I'm going to do is give it a nice gentle sprinkling of this winter rye. The reason I like winter rye so much is that it germinates anytime you can get this to germinate in December or it will germinate here in April. And I'm sprinkling it in like a heavy salt, just to give the ground the coverage. Now you might think this is just an insignificant treatment but the next time it rains or we get some moisture, you'll see a purple bed of little sprouts coming up and they will knit this ground together and not only keep it from drying out, but make it available should we try to grow something. And as ever don't forget to mulch in your cover , mulch in your fertilizer or your cover seed with some nice dusty mulch. Helps to sock it in there and keep it stable for the rains to come.