🔗 Share this article Soil in need of some love? Plant green manure in your garden and you’ll improve your yields. I recently found a half-empty bottle of an energy drink placed in the euphorbia trough by one of the scaffolders. An architect friend commented, “Are you sure that’s Lucozade?” giving me a new perspective. All this is to say, the garden is a bit of a mess. But there’s a lot to be said for negligence; after returning from holiday, I spotted a sunflower sprouting in the back corner. Now, however, some necessary firefighting is underway. Being six months pregnant, I’ve enlisted a local gardener to remove troublesome weeds like a prickly weed and robinia saplings from the neighbour’s tree, while leaving the good stuff. Then, in the open patches, I’ll be sowing green manure. Green manure are superheroes when it comes to boosting soil quality. My gardening friend Claire has written about green manure, as they play a key role in seasonal planting for edible gardens. However, the only things I’m harvesting from my garden right now are a few scrumped apples and some woody herbs. My ambitions for the garden are modest and consistent – and enhancing soil health is top of the list. For those wondering, the scaffold is for roof repairs, and the garden boundaries are yet to be fixed, but the neighbours are on board with the plan. Cover crops are like superheroes for your garden’s foundation. Bare soil invites weeds, which is why weeds appear. Yet by sowing vigorous crops, you can control weeds, bring in bees, host pest-eating creatures, and enrich the soil with nutrients. Cover crops may not look exciting – though some, like certain lupin varieties and bird’s foot trefoil, have pretty flowers – but their role is to grow vigorously rather than look decorative. After they’ve grown, you can turn them under, cut them for compost, or let them decompose for earthworms to pull down. Their work happens underground. Now is the ideal time for sowing these cold-season plants. My selection includes forage rye, great for clay soil, a nitrogen-lifter, a weed-suppressor, and field beans. It feels rewarding in planting seeds that won’t stay forever – on the surface, anyway.