Roots get the soil party started!

October in our vegetable gardens can be something of an ecological explosion. The greenery on our deciduous friends explodes across the landscape, the little seedlings we are coddling on our kitchen tables start growing up way too fast, and the weeds become so lush that we can almost see them getting taller in real time. Everything basks in the sunshine. We bask in the sunshine, and there is so much gardening fun to be had.

In the soil, microbe populations explode as well — the temperatures go up and new plant roots go down. Did you know that soil microbes have a cheeky swap system set up with plant roots? The microorganisms release tasty mineral compounds from the soil for the plant to use, in exchange for sugars excreted from living roots. It’s a good deal for all involved, and something we gardeners can encourage. Vegetables grown in soil with a thriving microorganism population are able to uptake more nutrients, and provide us with tastier, more nutritious fresh food. 

So, to level up your growing game this season, try feeding your soil with living roots. Areas of soil that aren’t being used for veggies yet can be sown with cover crops, which keep the soil biome fed and happy until you’re ready to plant something else in that spot. Cover crops don’t have to be a complicated mix of species either. Any seed you’ve got handy can be sprinkled around as a place holder – peas, beans, radishes, spinach… The type of seed doesn’t matter too much. Those old brassica seeds you’ve had laying around since 2019? They’ll do the job. 

They don’t even have to reach maturity – you can chop up the cover crop with a spade or hoe to terminate them whenever the space is needed again. Roots of living plants of any age will feed your soil and maintain the microbe population, so that your kitchen table seedlings have an already-thriving soil community to party with when they get planted out.

And then there’s the October weed explosion. It wouldn’t be a mid-spring gardening chat without mentioning weeds, would it? The good news is that yes, weeds do count as a cover crop! The bad news is: not all weeds. So, if you’ve got an as-yet-unused section of veggie bed that is sporting an embarrassingly lush flush of weed growth, let’s take a closer look before we decide what to do with it. Are the weeds an annual? i.e. have they popped up in your bed recently as new seedlings from weed seed that lay dormant over winter? If so, great! They count as a cover crop and you can pat yourself on the back for being such an excellent soil-microbe custodian.

You can leave them there until they show signs of flowering. As soon as they show signs of flowering, chop them up and/or smother them with cardboard and mulch. We don’t want to give them a chance to make more weed seed. Now, if your lush weed patch contains perennial weeds such as twitch grass, onion weed or anything else rhizomatous — it does not count as a friendly cover crop. Perennial weeds do not play nice in a veggie garden, and are not easily terminated. To use the soil there for planting out vegetables, you will need to pull or dig them out as best you can, and then smother the area with cardboard and mulch. Your veggie seedlings can be planted into the soil beneath through individual holes in the mulch/cardboard layer. This should give your veggies a jump on the weeds.

I’m out of space; happy gardening everyone!