Cover Crops in Raised Beds

The growing season might be in full swing, but there are still ways to upgrade your garden game. From keeping out unwanted pests (or pets) to building your own customized trellising and irrigation—it’s time to make your beds work smarter, not harder. We’ve got five ways to customize your planters this summer that will not only make things look fantastic, but will take your growing capabilities to the next level. Whether you choose to tackle them all or just add one to your list of weekend to-dos, I promise it will be a noticeable refresh with rewarding results. 

A colourful carpet of ground cover plants may be a creative, low maintenance alternative to a lawn. Alternatively a pattern of coloured stone or chippings with feature plants in containers may be your preference.

If you are looking for a show stopping display of spring flowers then why not try planting   primary colours of Red, Blue and Yellow in the same bed.

Several companies manufacturers produce raised beds kits for gardens. Marmax products make their raised beds from recycled  High Density Polyethylene (HDPE) and donated this set to the library and learning centre at RHS Harlow Carr when it was new. Hard wearing, long lasting and doing its bit for recycling this use of plastic in the garden is to be admired.

Ground cover plants ‘beat weeds’ and many of the plants recommended below will flower year after year. Plant healthy young plants from pots or modules about 12 inches apart and the fast growing ground cover will produce a dense carpet of colour for many years.

There are several annual plants I would recommend to new gardeners who want to cover an unsightly mess but do not want permanent plants that could impede house maintenance.

Formal gardens generally rely on geometric shapes and repetition and so you may not think about ground cover in these situations. Balance and proportion are also key features of a formal garden and generally have fewer species of plants than may be found in in informal gardens.

Ground cover plants are designed to do what they say in the title. They can cover the ground by design, happy accident or conscious neglect.

Planning to leave the vegetable garden fallow this fall? If you take the time to plant a cover crop instead, you will reap the benefits later. In general, cover crops protect the soil from erosion, suppress weeds, maintain soil moisture, increase organic matter, and recycle nutrients. But for the best success, you must select the correct cover crop species for the job. At this time of year, cool-season annuals work best. These include Austrian winter pea, crimson clover, annual rye, oats, forage radish, and winter wheat.

Cover crops, also known as green manures, are used by gardeners to add organic matter, protect the soil from erosion, suppress weeds, and add nutrients to the soil. Gardeners typically plant legume cover crops help to fix nitrogen in the soil, while non-legumes add biomass, known as organic matter, to the soil. Cover crops can be used in a variety of ways. Most commonly, they are planted following an edible crop or in fallow areas, grown for a period, and then killed and worked into the soil. Cover crops can also be intercropped by planting between rows or around desired plants to provide a living mulch for weed suppression.

During pollinator week (June 20 -24), I spent time hunting for native bees in the South Carolina Botanical Garden. Native bees are powerhouse pollinators and of critical importance to plant life and our food supply. Over 4000 species are native to North America, with perhaps a thousand active in the Southeast, still a rather daunting number! But you must begin somewhere, so I set out with my camera to see who was in the garden!

YOU’D THINK HE WOULD HAVE NOTICED when he lumbered up and out of the little garden pond to his favorite perch, that he had an oak leaf stuck to his back, but no. This bullfrog spent the entire day Friday in undercover guise–as if his dull winter skin color wasn’t camouflage enough.