Homegrown Humus: Cover Crops in a No-Till Garden (Permaculture Gardener)

I received a free electronic copy of this excellent self-help book from DigitalBookSpot, Anna Hess, and Wetknee Publishing. Thank you all for sharing your hard work with me. I have read this work of my own volition and this review reflects my honest opinion of Homegrown Humus: Cover Crops in a No-Till Garden.This is an excellent book, sharing the basics of, firstly the concept of No-Till gardening, and then to the use of humus crops to add nutrients to your soil in off-crop seasons.High Plains Desert dwellers such as myself have a LOT of need for mulch and humus. our topsoil is windblown three months out of the year, the layer is thin and the rocks are plentiful and close to the surface. It's really hard to grow anything without de-stoning, tilling, mulching and fertilizing, but once you have dug into the soil there are a million years worth of weed seeds waiting to pop to the top. A large part of my garden is already tilled and mulched last fall and the dollar weed and mustard forest pulled last week.Before I till and plant the old garden, I plan to scratch in some cover crop seed to the land I will be adding to my garden area this year. I am planting it today with oats - seed I had on hand, and we will see how it goes. I have spent two months pulling mustard from every flower bed and garden spot I have, the alley, and the grass. Our nearby mountains are prone to the odd prairie fire (thank goodness there are no trees on my side of the Sacramentos or the San Andres) and the second the fire dies down the forestry department is flying over, seeding the new burn areas with mustard. They grow so fast and so profusely that I can never get them all before they re-seed, and if you just cut them off they grow massive roots that won't pull. Oats should be an easier pull and the seeds aren't minuscule.I am grateful for all the hints and tips, and the complete instructions available in this excellent guide. Thank you again, Anna Hess!

I would like to grow a small backyard vegetable garden. I've looked at and discarded essential aspects of both Bartholomew's square-foot method (too many inputs; too expensive; only 6 inches???) and Jeavons' bio-intensive method (double-digging my blackland clay would be too much effort and would not benefit the soil). I've finally settled on no-till, ideally using home-grown cover crops instead of acquiring expensive compost and mulch with unknown provenance from the city or retailers.With its very specific focus on no-till cover crops for small (including backyard) scale gardens, and practical, experience-based reviews of 12 different cover crops, this book looked like exactly what I needed. (I should also mention that the author's context is zone 6 Virginia clay, which is close enough to my context of zone 8a Texas clay to be relevant, with qualifications.) While it was indeed helpful, I still have some large gaps to address before I can get started.What I like very much about the book is the detailed experience-based knowledge the author shares about each of the cover crops she's tried, and especially, the drawbacks she's encountered. But I feel like the author has a lot more to say. For example, her blog entry on buckwheat begins, "Our buckwheat experiment is not what I would call a success", and explains why. Yet the book gives it her highest recommendation, omitting her problems with buckwheat in heavy clay. When read carefully with this in mind, it appears that she is only recommending buckwheat for "the vegetable garden", which in her case is probably already more loam than clay.The book's sweet potato recommendation is an example of out-of-the-box thinking (no one else seems to consider it a cover crop), which I respect. But the author does not (IMO) adequately explain why she considers it a cover crop, or differentiate the role it plays. In fact, buckwheat, sweet potato, and radish each play different roles as cover crops, a concept which seems essential to the topic but can only be inferred from the book.The largest omission, from my point of view, is the lack of a plan. How, exactly, would the author use cover crops as part of a strategy to transform her clay soil into soil suitable for a garden, and thus, actually develop "Homegrown Humus"? I had hoped the chapter titled "The cover crop year" would at least get me in the ballpark, instead of essentially just suggesting that cover crops be planted into "summer gaps" and "winter gaps".Good information on no-till, minimal input gardening is hard to come by. I am grateful for this book--it will save me several years of experimentation. I would love to see a more comprehensive update.

It can be difficult to find information on cover crops that focuses on not tilling your soil, which is something I'm not willing nor interested in doing for our first garden on our new farm. We have heavy clay content in our rocky soil, and I discovered right away with a small test garden that digging to incorporate organic matter and nutrients was laborious and inefficient (not to mention, back breaking). Nearby neighbors have tractors and tilled gardens, and I'm sure I could sweet talk one into plowing up a garden spot for us, but I don't want to rely on that and am trying to focus on permaculture practices instead. That being said, I need a way to bring organic matter in other than simply trucking in pre-blended soil for my raised beds from the closest source, which is over an hour away and can also get very expensive. Homegrown Humus addresses this need perfectly and gave me both the background information I craved to understand how cover crops work as well as ideas and solid information on actual implementation. The author writes in both an easy and fun to understand style that will wet your appetite for her other excellent e-books that address a variety of permaculture and homesteading related projects. Very pleased with this selection and will be referring back to it as needed during the upcoming gardening season.