The Visual Appeal of Cover Crops

     Cover crops are helpful in the garden for a variety of reasons: they add nutrients, break up compacted soil, add organic matter, and keep weeds at bay.  However, for vegetable gardeners who started their gardening lives as landscape gardeners, they serve an even more important role: they keep gardens looking lush.  A cover crop planted as soon as each vegetable is harvested helps avoid vast brown areas in the garden as the season draws to an end, extending it's summer beauty into fall.  Gardens that would otherwise look dull and depressing display color, texture, and fresh spring colors.  The different cover crop heights, due to planting that takes place over a period of a month or so, add appealing height variations.  The fresh green growth contrasts with the darker pepper, cabbage, and leek plants.  It doesn't hurt to let the nasturtiums, marigolds, and cosmos, planted earlier for pest control, grow wild throughout the cover crops, adding splashes of yellows, oranges and lavender.  In the fall, as cover crops do the hard labor of preparing the garden for spring planting, they also transform vegetable gardens from late season eyesores into landscape assets.