How To Make Any Soil Amazing With Cover Crops Grow Your Own Fertility! JM Fortier

The farms that have the most beautiful crops and the most beautiful soils are the farms that have cover crop systems embedded into how they grow. Ideally, you'll have one third of the garden in cover crop at all times. Contrary to just feeding the soil with fertilizers, you're also building deep, massive root systems. It's biomass for the subsoil. When you put your hand into it, you can feel that it has something more. Those roots, they play a key function in the system because they're doing so many things that we don't even understand. Your soil is alive and your soil is chewing on this carbon, on this organic matter that you're adding. If the rototiller is what you have, that's a good tool also. I would prefer to have cover crops tilled in by a rototiller than not have cover crops at all. Welcome to the Market Gardener podcast, where we believe that small-scale farming is changing the world. Join us for insightful conversations with people who are working to build a better future. A future with less mass production and more production by the masses. The revolution is in the field. Let's get digging. This episode is brought to you by Dubois Agrenovation, my go-to store for all my market gardening needs. Whether it's irrigation systems, tools, harvest supplies, insect nets, Dubois has you covered, friends. I've been working with Dubois ever since I met Jeannette, the owner, probably 25 years ago. She's been around market gardeners her whole life, and she was the one that helped me out when I started my book, The Market Gardener, many, many years ago. Recently, they've been my partners in setting up the irrigation systems here at The Old Mill, but also at FQT Farm, at La Grelinette, and all my other projects. I've always done my irrigation with Dubois. Listeners of the podcast enjoy a 10% discount on select products by choosing the promo code masterclass-jeanmartinfortier. Go check out Dubois at duboisag.com. Thank you, Dubois, for everything you do for the market gardening community. You guys rock. And we're on. We're live. All right. Hi, everyone. I hope you guys are doing well. What? How fantastic is it to be able to talk to you all? I'm getting so much positive response and reviews about the podcast, and everyone always says the same thing. Chris, he's so amazing. Chris is so amazing. Chris is amazing. And hanging out with him on a personal level is even more fun because he's just a thoughtful super guy. We're enjoying the hockey playoffs right now, the Stanley Cup playoffs. It's just amazing. The Canadians are in the semifinals. We're happy. And today, we are talking together about what I would argue is the secret weapon of organic farming. The premise of this podcast is that small-scale farming is a viable option to the food system that we want to have and we want to see built. Small localized farms, feeding communities, and the idea, the big idea is that we need to multiply these small farms so that, A, they occupy the territory and they're present and they're there, but, B, they're also fueling the local economy. They're feeding people and they're just cycling dollars in these communities instead of having all this money exported elsewhere. And we have to say that this idea might be novel. I don't think it is, but it's definitely not adopted by many thinkers so far. We're pioneering this and the example is in the field, always, all these farms, all of you all that are doing the work. It's so important and I'm just hopeful and happy that we're giving a voice to this movement and we're talking about all these small farms and all the stories that are behind the people that are changing agriculture one farm at a time. That's the premise. And so we, Chris and I, we mostly meet people that share their stories and we rarely go in depth with techniques and strategies and game plans or whatever about organic farming per se, about market gardening per se. But today, Chris is not with me, so this is a solo episode and we're flipping the script a little bit where I'm going to be talking about cover crops and green manure and why they're important in an organic farming system and why in market gardening they're absolutely fundamental and they're essential. And from my perspective, because I visit a lot of farms throughout a year, it's often enough one of the key strategies that I think is underutilized. I don't see complex cover crop programs on many small productive market gardens. There's a couple of reasons for that. Probably because some of the farms that I visit, they're in their early stages, first few years, and they're establishing markets, they're establishing their production cycles, their game plans is still evolving. But as soon as you hit year four, five, six, and definitely if you want to be in the game for a long time, there's two key strategies that in my opinion, they're absolutely fundamental and they need to be not just present, but they need to be thoroughly thought about into the system of the farm. The first one is having a crop rotation plan. Making sure that all your beds are grouped in field blocks and that all field blocks are a botanical family and nested in a rotation. That's something that I also feel is underused and underdeveloped. Growers should be thinking in long-term planning about having these rotations. I'm not going to touch on that today. It could be for another episode. But the other really important fundamental is cover crops. I can't say it enough from my perspective and with my experience, the farms that have the most beautiful crops and the most beautiful soils are the farms that have deeply embedded cover crop systems ran through the farm. Embedded into how they grow, there's cover crops that are before crops, after crops, in season, full season with certain blocks, depending on the program, but the cover crops are there. There's so many reasons why cover crops are important. First, especially in the winter, it's just occupying the fields and it's not leaving them bare. So as soon as you can plant in the fall, rye or hairy vetch, these are two good examples, just to make sure that the soil is covered so it's not bare and it's not being leached by rain or by cold or by snow in the spring. So just covering the soil is such an essential. And, you know, the best cover crops aren't always going to be 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 feet high. In the winter, just having 1 inch, 2 inch just to cover the soil makes a big, big difference. So that's one key function of cover crops. The other one is obviously adding not just organic matter with having carbon there, but also adding nitrogen. So that's the difference between a cover crop and a green manure. Cover crop is seeds that you plant to just kind of occupy the soil, build roots, build biomass. But a green manure is a legume that you plant and that's going to feed nitrogen to the soil. So it's an active fertilizer. And in your fertility program, that green manure can count as just as much as if you're adding compost or if you're adding soluble fertilizers. You can measure it too. So green manure, the legumes that you plant, they're really good because contrary to just feeding the soil with fertilizers, chicken manure, alfalfa meal, even compost, the difference is that you're also building deep, massive root systems. It's biomass for the subsoil. And those roots, they play a key function in the system because they're doing so many things that we don't even understand. But root systems, they connect with soil particles, they connect with soil chemistry, and they make the soil ecology happen. It's really what growers should understand. And in the most simple, basic terms, is that roots in the soil is the key ingredient for having any soil ecology happen. So roots, roots, roots. Without roots, you have bare soil, you don't have ecology, you don't have a lot of life in your soil. So roots are there. And because we're top dressing a lot in market gardening, we're putting compost and all these different fertilizers, it's rare that we incorporate them really deep into the soil. Most of us don't plow. Probably most of us work on a permanent bed system. If you don't, I'm thinking that you should. It's just so much more effective in many ways. It's so much better for soil structure and to avoid compaction in the first place. But how do you make sure that you have a deep rooting system when you're flipping beds? So that's really what the trick is in market gardening, is to have all of that happen in a system. So you'll have crops that are there 30, 50, 60, 80 days, and you're flipping beds. That's the game of market gardening. You want to have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 crops per year per bed. But you can definitely see cover crops as being one of these crops. So you can plant a mix of hairy vetch and ryegrass in the fall, and that counts for a cycle. And if you plant it, let's say, in our climate here in the northeast, you plant it in November, you leave these seeds into the soil, you bury them, and then you'll have some growth perhaps before or some germination before Christmas. And then as soon as spring kicks in, March, April, May, it's going to grow, and it's going to grow fast. And then you can have a really good plant base. You can have a lot of carbon grown on site. You can have all these legumes growing nitrogen into the soil also by June. And then you're ready to put new crops in June into the subsequent green manure that's been there. Going from November, you're planting them. June, you're incorporating them into the soil. I'll talk about that in a little while. And then, you know, you have a crop for the season. It could be broccolis. It could be naba cabbage. It could be so many things. Whatever. It doesn't really matter. And then, you know, you can have another cycle of another crop in the fall. The beauty of this is that that bed or that field block that was the sequence for that year, the script can be reversed for the next year. Instead of having, you know, an early, early, early season cover crop planted in the fall, you could have an early, early, early crop planted in the market garden. Like it could be radishes. It could be salad mix. It could be all, you know, whatever, a cash crop as soon as March. And then when that crop's done, you could have a longer season cover crop going all the way to the fall. And in the fall, it's replaced by another cash crop. This episode is brought to you by Eco-Cert Canada. Through certification, consulting and training, Eco-Cert helps growers to adopt better practices that are both environmentally friendly and socially responsible. This is the agency that I've been using for all these years at my farms, and it's the one that I like and recommend the most. Whether you're looking to highlight your ecological practices through certification or take your sustainability to the next level with consulting, Eco-Cert Canada is your partner in building a greener future. Eco-Cert can also help you increase cover crops, diversifying your crop selection, or implementing advanced fertilization plans. These guys know how to do this, and they can really help you do it. To learn more, visit Eco-Cert.com and see how they can help you. So that's really the trick. And when a farm becomes more established and you have a really righteous crop planning program, you'll have these cover crops that are there cycling with the crop rotation program. So everything is going to be pre-established. What was there in this crop will be there next year, moved on to another cover crop. And then, ideally, the key is that you'll have one third of the garden in cover crop at all times. This is from my recommendation, from what I've seen and understood, is really the golden ratio. At least having one third of the farm in cover crop at any given time. And that moves through the season. So, successions, adding the cover crops in them, why they're important, they're adding nitrogen, they're adding biomass into the subsoil with their roots. But for some miraculous reason, I don't know, it's just like a great soil conditioner. There's something about it. Perhaps it's because when you mow them down, there's also carbon that's going into the soil. But you look at soil that has had cover crops for 8 to 12 weeks, when you put your hand into it, you can feel that it has something more than if it would just be compost or, obviously, fertilizers. It's a great soil structurer. It's a great soil conditioner. It's a great way to flatten out the weed-seed cycles because you're disrupting them, because you're putting something that could be there for a longer period of time. And so, for all these good reasons, it's just amazing. And it makes the farm more resilient. It's adding more biology into the soil, into the cycling, and it makes you a better grower. And it makes your farm just more sustainable. So, there's a lot of good reasons to do cover crops. And then the question is, well, how do you get rid of them? How do you incorporate them into the soil? And in the early stages of my career, that was a question that needed to be answered because it wasn't obvious. Early on, we decided from the get-go to work in a permanent bed system. We wanted to not have a tractor, so we don't have a plow. We don't have discs. And it's just not so easy to come into a field and just kind of plow everything, disc everything in, which on a bigger, more mechanized farm is what you do to deal with the cover crops. So, you mow, you disc, you plow, and you disc again. And then soils are ready to go, and the cover crops are incorporated into the first few 10 inches of the soil. And that's perfect. In market gardening, on a permanent bed system, the way we've come to deal with cover crops is pretty simple. First, we mow them down. So, that's the number one thing. So, we'll use a flail mower, a really powerful tool, fits super well on a BCS or on a small compact tractor. But flail mowers, they're different than lawn mowers, okay? So, the knives are on a different axis, and it's just chopping down the material into small pieces. And what you're left with is an amazing mulch. So, you'll have stems that are really thick and 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 feet high, and then when you mow them with the flail mower, they're all chopped into this finer pieces. So, you're left with a beautiful mulch. So, that's the first step. And that tool, I would say, flail mower is an absolute essential if you're dealing or wanting to do cover crops on the farm. So, that's a tool that you need in your toolbox. So, it's mowed. You leave it to dry for a few days. It needs to be just, you know, it needs to be just starting to dry up. So, we leave it for a few days. And then, what we'll do is that we will raise our beds. So, we have another tool in our toolbox. It's connected to the BCS. It's called the rotary plow. And the rotary plow is just like this little device. It's like a little spade that takes the soil from the aisles and shoots it onto the bed. So, it's kind of, it scoops the soil onto the bed. So, that's how we raise our beds in the fall and in the early spring when we need to have raised beds higher because we want warmer soils. So, we'll raise our beds and that effectively buries the cover crop. Okay. So, we mowed it. We have a beautiful crop residue. Now, we're coming in with our rotary plow and then we're shooting soil onto the cover crop. So, we're effectively burying it. Now, what we'll do after that, we'll tarp it for a couple of weeks, two, three weeks, depending on what time of year we're at. If it's really, really early in the season, it might take more time. If it's warm and it's in season, tarping for a week or two is going to be enough. And man, it's amazing. When you remove the tarp, that thick cover crop that was there. Imagine, okay, so we're seeding a mix of all these different varieties. It could be wheat. It could be vetch. It could be cow peas. It could be a mix of all of these. And it's thick and it's four, five, six feet high. It's like a thick, thick crop. And then we're mowing all of this in one pass. We get two, three inch of really nice mulch, green. We're leaving it to dry for a day or two. Then we bury it and then we tarp it. And it's amazing because all that mass, all that material that's there, you'll come back and you'll put your hand into the ground. And it's amazing how it's all being digested really fast because your soil is alive and your soil is chewing on this carbon, on this organic matter that you're adding. And like I talked about, what we don't see in that process is the root system that's being also chewed up and decomposed by all the microorganisms that are in the soil. So that amazing organic matter that you're adding in the top few inches is super. But you're also having these roots that are feeding the subsoil microorganisms. So it's a double wham. And it's really the way you need to think about cover crops and green manure. It's like you're feeding the soil. You're feeding all the macro and microorganisms that need that organic matter to cycle the nutrients in your soil. So it's amazing. And with that technique, it's fairly easy to deal with cover crops. You just need to plan for them in your crop planning cycle. So there's really no reasons not to rely on them. And you'll see the difference. If you're not convinced, what I would recommend to anyone, and that's how I got really interested in cover crops, I started to do field tests. So I would have, let's say we're doing two beds of broccoli. Broccoli, they're heavy feeders. The more the soil has been nurtured and amended with organic matter, cover crops, compost, both, it just gives the best results ever. So try. Try one bed with a cover crop sequence and try another bed without one. And you'll see the difference. The broccolis will be so much better. You'll deploy their leaf structures faster. That's going to build their solar panels. And then they'll just grow these amazing heads. So cover crops, adding legumes, just makes crops better. And again, it's making sure, it's your insurance as a grower, that you're not over depleting your soil because absolutely, for sure, you're building some better soils by using them. This episode is brought to you by Gloco, a Quebec-based family business that has been promoting biodiversity for over a hundred years. You've probably seen me using Bionic and Herbionic fertilizers because those are the ones that I love and recommend. 100% certified organic. These products are made from marine and forest residues from the Cotonou region. Bionic and Herbionic products are available in over 250 garden centers across Quebec. They're truly great products. To learn more, you can visit their website at gloco.ca. Thank you, Gloco, for being part of the small-scale farming movement. It's people like you who are advancing not only small-scale agriculture, but also biodiversity. And now let's get back to the episode. So, so far in the system and the techniques that I've described, the only thing that you really need is, A, a flail mower, which is, in my opinion, an absolute must. And, B, a way to bury them and to incorporate them into the first few inches of the soil. And again, like, a rotary plow works well because then you're not impacting the top layers. You're not inverting them with a rotor tiller. But hey, guess what? If the rotor tiller is what you have, that's a good tool also. I would prefer to have cover crops tilled in by a rotor tiller than not have cover crops at all. And, you know, that's how you do it in market gardening. If you're on a bigger farm with tractors and it's more mechanized, then you can definitely imagine yourself having fields or field blocks grown in cover crops, one crop planted before or after, and getting the benefits of these roots and those legumes that are growing nitrogen for you. And there's, you know, it's easier to deal with cover crops once you have a tractor. If you're in a garden, then, you know, whatever. The tools that I've described can be replaced by a weed whacker to cut the cover crops into small pieces. Then you can bury them with a shovel. Then you can tarp and, you know, it's going to work. The last piece of the puzzle that I would add to this conversation is, you know, if you really want to take it a bit further, there's a few things that you can do to make your cover crops even thicker or even more abundant. So the question is how to grow amazing cover crops. Well, one of the things that I do now is I'll broad fork before I put my cover crop seeds into the ground. And the reason why I do that is, you know, broad forking allows you to guarantee that you'll have deep loose soils so the root systems can really shoot down. And by broad forking, that's exactly what I'm doing. I'm guaranteeing that my cover crop will have really deep penetration with the roots. They'll be able to go deeper into the soil and they're going to give the whole soil ecology just more profile to work on. So I broad fork and then sometimes I'll inoculate my seeds with my chorizes. So that's another strategy. You know, we know that legumes, they'll fix nitrogen, but they do that because there's a bacteria that's in the soil or in the seeds that can do that. So sometimes I'll just make sure that we have that and I'll add that bacteria into my seeds. It's a little powder that you can purchase. Johnny's Selected Seeds has some really good inoculum. Other companies have them also. But I'll make sure that my seeds and my planting has that inoculum in it, guaranteeing that I'll just have more of these bacterias that are cycling the nitrogen in their growth. So that's something that I also do. And then lastly, sometimes I'll also put manure onto the soil of the cover crops that I'm growing. So in the fall, if I have access to good manure, it doesn't need to be finished compost because that's going to be the overwintering process. But I'll put manure, a layer, it could be an inch, it could be two inch if you have your hands on some really nice material. But I'll be front-loading a lot of organic matter with the compost while I'm planting and seeding my cover crops. And then that's going to be the double benefits of having all this beautiful organic matter. You know, this manure is going to transform the cover crops into just like better crops, more fertilized, thicker, bigger. And then once I'm ready to incorporate all of that, let's say in this early spring, I'm going to have supercharged fertility-packed bed ready to grow amazing crops. It could be tomatoes, it could be eggplants. I usually precede all of my nightshades with this kind of cover crop. And that gives me amazing benefits later on into the season. So this is the way to kind of look at all of this. And again, the question is, you know, why would you not do that? Why would you not use cover crops and green manure to your advantage given that it's so simple? And from my perspective, what I see out there is that the reason why some growers don't invest more in this strategy is because their plan is not well thought out prior to the season. So they're going in, planting what they think they need, and it's not super well structured. And that's an area that could be improved. So if that's your case, that's okay. That happens to all of us, especially in the first few years. We're figuring things out. But as soon as you have some stability in your market, you know what you need to have every week for your different revenue streams. And you know what quantity of all the different vegetables that you want to harvest for them. It's really, the next step is to plant, is to plan to have, A, a crop plan for the whole season that gives you what to plant where and when. And that gives you the dynamic calendars that you'll need to follow every week. This is like the best thing ever. Heirloom is the crop planning software that I've helped develop here at the Market Gardener Institute. And then I recommend, if you don't know about Heirloom, check it out. It's a million times worth it. But Heirloom allows you to preload, if you want, your whole year. And then you can look at your game plan from a bird's eye view. You'll look at all your fields and all your plantings in one glimpse of an eye and you'll understand what's going on. And you can plan things better out that way. But once you're at that stage, adding the cover crops is the next, it's the next level. You're adding those cover crops and then you're cycling your field blocks or your beds to have a lot of these cover crops that are there. So that one third of the garden at one point in a given year will be under cover crop. And then the next year, it's going to be another third. And the year after, it's going to be another third. So I don't know if that makes sense to you all, what I'm trying to describe here. But that's the kind of resiliency that you need to build into your production plan so that you have some cover crops that are there between cash crops before, after, during the winter. But they're there. And they're building biomass. They're building soil ecology. They're protecting your soil. And they're also diminishing the inputs that you need to buy from outside suppliers. Elliot Coleman just came out with a beautiful book about it, about cover crops, about crop rotation, about building better compost on the farm, on farm fertility. And I don't think it's a coincidence that Elliot, at his age, decides to write a book about that. I think what he was observing was a lot of market gardeners, a lot of growers, they're just thinking cash crop. And they're adding a lot of fertilizers. They're adding a lot of compost. But they're not thinking in terms of deep soil ecology. They're not thinking about the processes that make soil fertile in the long term. And so that's a great read. I definitely recommend it. It's a great book. It's more than a primer, but it's definitely, for people that are new to this, I think they'll get a lot out of it. Obviously, his first book, The New Organic Grower, was my primer. And still today, I think it's an amazing read. And there's other resources out there. SARE, S-A-R-E. They have a lot of beautiful, good books on cover crops, green manure. These are good reads. What kind of mixes? When could you seed? What varieties work well together? All this information you can find through these books or online. But in my opinion, there's the golden rules. So having cover crops that have deep rooting systems and also planting a lot of diversity. You can have four, five, six, seven different varieties of seeds growing side by side. And I plant really densely. So I'll use the recommendations that you'll read on the seed packages. So I'll do double or triple that because I want to cover as much soil as possible. And I don't want to have weeds that are competing with the cover crops. So I'll put a lot of density and a lot of diversity. And I'll time that so that at week 8, 10, 12, just before the cover crops are flowering, the different species that I've planted, I'll mow them. I'll leave them for a few days and then I'll bury them and then I'll tarp them. And to do a really good job, I'll be planting. I'll be using a broad fork, making sure that the soil is loose and deep before. Because what I'm getting really excited about is growing these amazing, amazing cover crops. So I don't know how this feels for you all. I don't know if you're at that stage. I don't know if cover crops are a big part of your fertility program. If it's not, I think that it should be. And you should investigate that more. You should do your trials, perhaps this year. Find the equipment that you need to do them. But in all scenarios, cover crops are part of a living, functional, deep soil ecology. And they're a key ingredient for the longevity of your farm. So make sure that you go investigate them. Make sure that you are geeking out on cover crops. There's a million ways to do it. I shared with you today my practice with cover crops and why it's important. And I'm inviting you all to think about cover crops. We should all have these amazing t-shirts that says we grow cover crop. F*** yeah. So that's it for this week. I'm wishing you all so much success in your agrarian adventures. And we'll be talking about another subject sometime soon. All right, Jay I'm out. Hope you're enjoying the podcast. These are important conversations and we're really excited to have them and to share them with everyone. Don't forget to subscribe to it. Download the episodes and please rate them. Makes a difference for us. We want to know what you think about these conversations. They're important. Check out the work that we do at the Market Gardener Institute. You can check out our website themarketgardener.com Our mission is to multiply the number of small ecological farms around the world. And we do this by offering training online courses to new aspiring farmers but also to seasoned growers. We're helping them take it to the next level. So you can check out the work that we do. You can follow us on social media. You can sign up to our newsletter to get a lot of freebies about gardening, farming but also about how small-scale farming is changing the world. And that's really what we're all about. And that's really what this is all about. So again, thank you for tuning in. Super excited that you guys are on board. We are changing the world.