Building Your Soil Over the Winter—Two Cheap Methods with Cover Crops + Leaves

VERY BAD METHOD AND LABOUR INTENSIVE: if you don't shred the leaves, they will create a crust that won't let water percolate. Educated gardeners know that.

Great content.

Really good video. It's given me a lot to think about regarding some areas in the back of my property where I want to put flower beds but the soil is hard and clay based. I'd rather transform the soil naturally than bring truckloads of soil to the back. Subscribed. 🙂

So in the spring do you till it all in ? Or rake it off and put to compost?

Wonderful vid! Very helpful. Thank you 🩷

"you wouldn't have fall leaves" … We head over 30 bags of leaves from last fall😭 it's never ending.

When planted, what date now?

Can you mow the cover crop then let it grow again mow and terminate the second time to bulk up?

This is amazing.

I love the cover crop technique. However, are you worried about soil compaction when you are stepping on the beds? 🤔 I have always heard not to step on your beds for this reason.

Fantastic. Such good information. Please consider removing the background music, it only distracts from all the great things you are saying.

How do you this if Iam working with 6.plus acres

that is a very good plan to amend the soil will be trying that this next year. I am expanding my garden by another 20 X 20 did the cover crop but let it go all season now building it up with shredded leaves and compost.

great idea i´m starting this year.big kiss to Amerika from Slovakia😍

This is a great way to build soil! Love it! Walmart had the paper bags on clearance for 75 cents. What is your opinion on beneficial fungi and bacteria application before applying the leaf layer?

Hi.. Just found your channel.. Where do you get the seeds for your cover crop from.? Bought separately or as a mix? Ty

it really looks brilliant, but I'm wondering what time of year are you planting the cover crop that you wind up "terminating"? You seem to have a very impressive growth, but you seem to have filled all your beds, so , of course, I'm wondering where you grow YOUR garden crops.

Can you use your grass from the summer cuts?

This was like listening to myself, but then in English. 🙂 I've been gradually transforming a piece of horsemeadow into a 1,000m2 vegetable garden en this (also including composted horsemanure) is exactly how I do it. Greetings from The Netherlands.

Genius! You did a great job; that was lots of work! I appreciate you sharing this method with us. I am going to try it!

This is wonderful

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You might have, as we do here in Arkansas, a municipal composting facility, where you can get free composted leave mulch. I top my winter garden with that over my cover crop of rye grass, turnips. That leaf compost is really amazing. Last year I had 6’ tall beefsteak tomatoes with up to 50 fruits in each plant. Never seen anything like it. The great thing about the turnips is that I feed some of them to the chickens and put them near my deer stand as bait.

Hello, maybe your garden needs a new smart irrigation controller? I would like to sponsor you one, which can help you manage watering more easily and smarter.

Thanks for sharing your process!

Thank you for the video, it is so helpful to see your process. Did you chop up the leaves you used on the first beds, where you were covering the cover crops? What will you do in the spring, pull off the leaves, or will you till them into the soil? Thank you!

Living and gardening in central Kansas is very challenging! Long hot dry periods are difficult to manage, with soil turning so hard that it’s very close to impossible to grow anything. Moisture definitely a game changer for any soil. I’ve been turning my soil with a potato fork incorporating compost biochar mix. Covering the soil with anything organic is a necessary to produce. This year (2024) has been astonishing, results of my labor are incredible. My plot 20’X20’ has yielded so much tomatoes, potatoes, onions and garlic that will be close to enough until next crop. Mother Nature is so rewarding when you give her a helping hand!

In spring to expand my garden and create soil in a terrible yard with hard red dirt an inch or two beneath the grass I put down brown cardboard, cover with a mix of green grass clippings, leaf mold and chopped leaves about 4 inches deep, then I add about 3 inches of sandy/silty soil from a wash on top and immediately plant some type of beans and maybe sprinkle some mustard seeds on it too a jab a tomato cutting in it. The growing roots, earthworms and fungi turn it into rich black soil and improve the dirt under it if you keep mulching it with grass clippings/leaves and build the soil up constantly.

Cardboard works great to wipe out grass and improve the bad soil underneath it even if you only cover it with a couple of inches of grass clippings if you keep it moist. I do no-till gardening here and build up the soil and keep adding to it instead of tilling because phone and water lines are somewhere in the yard. I keep my growing areas covered in chopped leaves and grass clippings and use this to mulch around the growing plants so there are very few weeds even here in subtropical Louisiana.

Leave the cover crop during the winter. In spring mulch the cover crops directly and leave the green mulch on top of the soil for 2-3 weeks to dry well. Then incorporate it in to the soil with some cultivator. Simple as that.

Really good stuff — thank you. I see a lot to do with how to manage this on farms but not garden beds.

Thank you for the lesson, an old gardener almost 80 but still learning new tricks. Thank you for the building of soil at the Ocean my beds are raised and I need all the building soil lessons I can get. , Karen

I'm very concerned that covering the soil before it freezes will not kill off the unwanted insects in the soil. Have you had an issue with bugs getting worse year after year? Thanks.

are all your beds only one cinder block, deep?

Bagging leaves is the worst. You need a wheelbarrow

Where did you get and how long did it takeyou to collect allthose leaves?

Funny, I didn't even notice the music

My neighbor has always taken his leaves and mulched them down with hi mower and then put them on his garden area and then tilled them in,in the fall, he always has a great garden ,so this year while i was out picking up leaves with my cyclone rake i would bring him 2 or 3 loads of mulched leaves and grass and he then tilled them into his garden, My wife and I have a spot at the city community garden and our way to giving back to the soil is pretty much the same way as my Neighbor, I used to collect my neighbor's leaves and make a compost pile in my back yard,and that was a lot of hard work turning them by hand,so we have opted to the method that we are doing now, we put the mulched leave/grass that i pick up and put that on the garden area and the til it in,in the fall,once its mulched and tilled in theres no need to cover it,but thats just what we do,I enjoyed video on that kind of composting method,thank you.

Okay, but here is a thought. The natural thaw/melt cycle in winter is beneficial for the soil. It breaks up clumps that might have formed in summer. It breaks up soil on a molecular level. and makes for aeration. If you insulate the soil to prevent freezing, you kinda shoot yourself in the foot here.
Why not do an A/B test? Leave one half open next year and see if there is a difference.

Bcs of this video now I own Women's L.L.Bean Sweater Fleece Full-Zip Jacket ))

What if you are starting from scratch without a cover crop

Yay Pea Vetch Oats!

What about just covering with shredded brown leaves over winter! Does this have benefits?

Thank you for such a clear and informative video, it’s wonderful! 😍

We are slowly creating new beds every year on a north facing slope on an island up here in Orkney, Scotland. We moved here two years ago and are loving it! 🥰

Despite being 59° North, we don’t get very cold winters (rarely below -5°C) and only a few days of snowfall every winter. However, due to the lack of trees growing here (we have two windswept sycamores and a fair few Fuchsia and Escallonia bushes hugging stone walls together with some willow bushes), we don’t tend to have many tree leaves we can collect as the strong winds we get almost all year round blow the leaves off pretty quickly! So we gather those that collect round the house and fill only three or so bin-bags worth of leaves. Still it’s better than nothing!

We kept all our moving boxes and are slowly using them to create no-dig beds on the sloping garden above the house. Thankfully we inherited a full large old compost bin, but have had to spend a fair bit of time picking out the plastic and wire bits. It’s been worth it as we have six great beds which have been pretty productive this year, and we plan on making a few more this winter. We will lay the cardboard down straight onto the grass and then cover with some of the compost, possibly mixed in with some soil this year as our old compost supply is running low and our new compost isn’t ready to use yet.

Thinking we will certainly try growing some cover crops in some of the beds next year to help build up the quantity and quality of the soil in the beds.

Thanks again, now off to look at more of your videos! 😊

I bought a hay field and want to put in an actual vegetable garden. Removing established hay plants is SUCH a labor intensive process, especially since the land itself has a lot of clay and is very nutrient poor after years of hay being harvested and taken away. Can you (or anyone else) tell me how to get rid of the grass/hay so that I can plant a cover crop? I would prefer to not use Roundup, and agricultural vinegar would just make the already acidic soil (pH 5) more hostile to vegetables. Thank you for any advice.

what do you do to keep moles or gophers out of your rich soil once established?

Visited Michigan University some years ago introducing a mulching blade only to be educated that Maple leaves were some of the you could introduce to lawn/ garden. And that University is tops I find out in ag and landscape in the USA. GREAT video madame.

Pretty sure pushing over green vegetation in a uniform direction with a board on a rope is exactly how crop circles are made, too. 😂