🔗 Share this article Want to give your soil some TLC? Plant cover crops in your garden and you’ll enrich your soil. I recently found a partially finished bottle of Lucozade placed in the euphorbia trough by one of the scaffolders. A visiting architect joked, “Are you sure that’s Lucozade?” which made me see it differently. All this is to say, the garden is a bit of a mess. But there’s a lot to be said for negligence; coming back from a trip, I spotted a sunflower sprouting in the back corner. Now, however, some urgent tidying is underway. As I’m expecting a baby, I’ve hired a local gardener to remove troublesome weeds like a prickly weed and robinia saplings from the neighbour’s tree, but keeping desirable plants. Next, in the open patches, I’ll be sowing cover crops. Cover crops act like heroes when it comes to boosting soil quality. My gardening friend Claire has written about cover crops, as they play a key role in seasonal planting for edible gardens. However, the only things I’m harvesting from my garden right now are a few foraged apples and some hardy herbs. My garden goals are modest and consistent – and enhancing soil health is my main priority. To update concerned readers, the scaffold is for roof repairs, and the garden boundaries are still wobbly, but the neighbours are on board with the plan. 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, bring in bees, host pest-eating creatures, and enrich the soil with nutrients. Cover crops aren’t always showy – though some, like certain lupin varieties and a flowering legume, have pretty flowers – but their role is to thrive rather than look decorative. Once established, you can turn them under, cut them for compost, or leave them on the surface for worms to pull down. Their work happens underground. Now is the ideal time for sowing these overwintering crops. I’ve chosen rye grass, which breaks up heavy earth, Italian ryegrass, vetch, and field beans. There’s satisfaction in planting seeds that won’t stay forever – on the surface, anyway.