Gabe Brown is north of Bismarck ND. Average 15in precip a year and most of that is snowfall. I think his example would be spot on for you guys.
In ohio here is much more precip, my problem with times of no rain is more so the clay soil drying up to cement and cracking.
Yes, I agree on these basics: Carbon versus Nitrogen
My “winter” cover crops today based on a 50/50 ratio: 50% of cereals (oat, rye), 50% of legumes (faba bean, vetch, pea)
Sorry I didn’t and won’t have time to tell more about this approach. Yes please listen to Gabe Brown (or to Ver de Terre Production for the French speaking people) to learn more on this topic
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This 50/50 ratio is based on a preliminary assesment of the fertility: extremely low, with nearly no life in the soil, no water kept in the summer (mainly sand with some silt and no clay at all) , and no carbon left in the soil too…
So I will go from this 50/50 ratio to a 90/10 C/N within the next few years, as others in my place have done, coming from this very low fertility point: as fertility enhances you can and will need to put more cereals in the mix, soil biology will recover progressively
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Decided to cut down my ‘cover crop’ rye , two third of it was grass anyway. My eye is not trained yet to distinguish between grasses and céréales when it’s young.
Going to seed dry land pumpkin seed in there, but was sweating already after seising this bit.
It’s a bit cold, but very wet. The seeds will works their way in towards the soil or not?? I’ll see. It’s only a small plot.
Having coffee, then upto this one… A two meter strip where the farmer dumped clay a couple of years ago. All the way to the tractor…
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I don’t know about specifics. I see plants as cycling resources, in your case with water, while the plant is alive it will hold water in place, using the water in a localised cycle. With bare soil evaporation will happen on a much larger scale, and you might be lucky to get that water back.
After Geoffrey, I don’t know much about that (winter cover crops that help holding water for the summer season) personnally, but it is a great question. Personnally I have been focusing lastly on finding suitable summer cover crops for maintaining, sustaining microbial life. So I am making new trials with different strains of eleusine coracana (wonderful root structures in collaboration with many bacterias, drought resistant, and… nitrogen fixing!), some chias (very impressive last year), quite a few millets including fonios, many legumes of all kinds, including lupins, mung beans, etc all supposedly great at maintaining soil microbial life.
Going down that rabbit hole, I have learned that some don’t collaborate with microbes (amarantaceae, chenopodiaceae including quinoas, polygonaceae mainly buckwheat). And it is kind of easy to understand as these are more plant of a pioneering stage, when nature does everything to prevent from nitrogen and other elements leeching, and also when soils “wants” carbon first thing… Later on, microbial activity comes back (thanks to carbon content), and other more ““collaborative plants””. François Hirissou talks about that here. In french, sorry.
If I had little water in the summer I would try to work with a winter cover crop that is both early flowering AND known to be very connected with the soil food web, and best to me in that regards, and in my place, is faba beans. So you crush it when it flowers, and because it is early flowering it will not have exhausted the water amount in the soil plus it has maintained the soil food web in relatively good shape. As these are the main factor regarding plant nutrition (if we don’t bring insane amounts of inputs, plants feed themselves through their friends : bacterias and fungis, see GTS course with J.Whyte or other contents related) I believe that would be the best strategy regarding this lack of water: thinking regeneration of soil microbial activity first thing.
And in that process yes no bare soil if possible, and as much as possible permanently living plants, living roots. Then we find middle grounds between these idealistic perspectives and what is happening in reality ;-)… Just tilled a few hundred square meters actually… and will put plastic tarps for some projects… 
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Excellent point about water! Living leaves and stems are probably much a better store of water than the soil itself, especially when the soil is sand.
I hadn’t thought of it in quite those terms, and now that you point it out, it seems obviously right. The real question is, can that water be accessed by the gardener? The only way I can think of to make it available to other plants would be to chop off leaves and immediately bury them in the soil. What do you think?
P.S. Obviously living leaves can make a good mulch to keep the soil cooler, so less water evaporates from that, but that’s a different thing than actually accessing the water in those leaves for other plants to use.
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Thomas, you seem really quite knowledgeable, and I don’t really know where to start with all of this! Haha. The problem is for me that there seems to be many systems at play with their own complex set of functions, and it’s almost how do you figure out which system is relevant to your needs as a gardener.
I’m going to bite, you mentioned something about the pioneering stage (sorry I’m on my phone so can’t see exactly what you said). How would nitrogen use differ for pioneer plants Vs in an established grass meadow for example. I’m guessing this is basically low fertility and stability. (I’ll probably edit more in as my thoughts formulate haha)
Edit: I guess a lot of if, especially in the pioneering stage will depend on the specific plants. Whether they are better at fixing nitrogen (legumes) or extracting nitrogen. Once out of the pioneering stage and into a balanced plant ecosystem, you should then have enough plant diversity and soil microbial activity to nicely balance the nitrogen cycle. (Although the endophyte course has been really bugging me because it’s given me so many questions that I haven’t been able to research yet)!
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Got it ;-).
Beware of knowledgeable people. 
I meant that in an established meadow there is always recycling of nutrients, and that in disturbed soil (tilled or so) mother nature always brings plants that prevent from leeching.
For example in France, from the mediterraneen sea to the borders of belgium, germany you will always find an assortment of three species sprouting in diturbed soils: amaranths, chenopodes, and panicums.
I don’t know how it is in other places but in here we have a huge specialist of plant bio-indication, named Gérard Ducerf, who made an encyclopedia of plant bio-indication in three volumes… All he says and all he wrotes is about conditions of sprouting: why do I see a dominance of some plants on my soil? What does it indicate?
For example in the land I have just ploughed, it was mostly achillea millefolium. This soil has been heavily tilled from 2000 to about 2012, draining all fertility compounds, litterllay crushing the soil food web, on a soil itself being marginal, sandy, acidic, granitic… These achillea millefolium are interesting in human medicine but also have similar bio-indications for the soil life: under my lattitudes, and in a soil where most carbon is gone (carbon hemorraghy) “mother nature” brings achillea millefolium that has strong root system, blocks whats is left, first thing. Then carbon cycle comes back and it could go to forest within 10-15 years or so if we don’t do anything.
Amaranths and chenopodes sprout when there is nitrogen leeching + some compaction happening. Panicums sprout when there is nitrogen leeching + compaction + saturation in water.
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Hahah ok
Yes interesting, that makes a lot of sense actually, and seems so simple hehe.
I’ll have to pay more attention plant indicators!
Although here in the UK it will not turn into a forest no matter how long it’s left because of the pesky deer eating everything first!
You find the right microbial balance for your plants (the right mix of plants), and get your soil healthy.
So, I guess next question is you have this system of nature trying to balance itself, and humans trying to harvest carbon. This energy store is eaten, stored or burned. In a system of cover cropping, farming, how can we make sure we remove an equal amount of carbon to the amount which gets sequestered into the soil? How would we know? I’m musing along the lines of sustainability now haha
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Well I think it just prevents evaporation, retains more moisture in the soil for when you transition from cover crops to, crops. I guess it’s having the soil structure and living cover as undisturbed as possible. Digging in leaves could expose the soil or disturb it making it worse too? And it sounds like work. Perhaps you could think of cover crops in terms of companion plants with your main crops. Keep both. Then you may not need do much at all.
Yep, there are many points realtive to your question in here : Compost, a Limiting Factor? - #35 by ThomasPicard
But yes it the overall organic (emission or sequuestration of living C compounds) balance sheet is the most important thing to figure. Agronomoists can measure that, I can’t:-)…
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I can think of some notable exceptions of symbiosis, such as old trees in a forest sharing resources with young trees through root connections, sometimes even young trees of different species! But that’s a choice the plants can make, not something we as humans can do. So that’s not something we can mimic on purpose – except for planting lots of perennials and hoping they’ll help out our annuals when they’re mature. (Maybe they will!)
My preference is to pull out weeds and drop them on top of the soil as mulch, rather than leaving them intact. Especially the very invasive ones, for some reason. Still, right now I have a polyculture of brassicas growing happily with a bunch of grass around them, and I’m inclined to leave the grass alone until the brassicas have finished maturing their seeds. The rescuegrass that is almost as tall as they are is most likely helping to shade the soil really well, keeping it cooler, so I suspect the brassicas will prefer me leaving the grass alone.
With bindweed, well, it’s just too invasive. It needs to come out, period. Of course, then I’ll sprinkle some seeds of something I want in its place, because who wants bare soil?
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My goal is to eventually ensure the soil is not exposed ever. Always covered with living plants, mulch or snow.
Some things are inevitably going to not be eaten as food. These are cover crops. Some might also be “weeds” - there are weedy species that I deliberately spread seed around for and dont bother removing from around my plants in most cases. Others might be food crops that will winter kill or be cut before reaching maturity.
Im hoping to come up with a mix that I can mostly grow myself. Without devoting tooo much of my limited growing space to cover crop seed production or causing any tenacious weeds to take hold
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Sounds like a great plan!
I want to have crops growing all year round, so I tend to look at edible cover crops for winter crop ideas. Eventually, I’d like to replace my grass entirely with edible ground covers. I probably won’t eat everything in my lawn, but the idea is to have the option.
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Hi @ThomasPicard, thanks for all the info, I’ve been looking at some lectures by Dr Christine Jones, excellent stuff. I’ve been looking at transitioning into a system that requires no outside input, like cover crops. I looked a little bit at your friend Yann and watched a couple of his lectures, I dont speak french but I speak spanish and remember a tiny bit of french from school, so I could understand some of it. I saw he just came out with a book, have you read it? how is it?
Slugs are always a problem for me with straw, hay etc. But I saw a post you wrote on that, so excited to try. I was just doing no dig compost system as it was productive, easy to plant and seed into, no weeds, not so many slugs etc. I also Have easy access to pleanty of free manure compost, so its very comfortable and easy. But after researching how important live roots are in the soil and how much faster they build soil carbon, and seeing the results Christine Jones shows, its really exciting. Have you tried using a biostimulant on the cover crop seeds?
Plus also I dont feel 100% comfortable having to import so much organic matter and would feel much better being autonomous.
the last thing i think about is how to save seeds so you dont have to buy the cover crop seeds. since you crimp at flowering stage you would have to grow a separate patch for seed saving wright? I know there is other people that use perennial cover crops but not sure how that works…anyways enough rambling for now.
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Thank you Juan for this and sorry for the late reply. No I haven’t tried using biostimulants, but why not, I am trying home-made lactofermentations (anaerobic) this year, as there are good results to help regenerating the soil in different places.
Yann says he loses up to 20% of his lettuce at young stage, but never more, usually a lot less. It depends how advanced is the decaying of the cover crop.
Yes, Yann and I both buy most of our ccrop seeds unfortunately. You would need to let it go to seed and maybe grow each species on a different plot. It is a bit too much for me as I am already doing many things but yes we should go towards local adaptation of them also. Best would be eventually to obtain dual use crops, for example with faba beans or rye, oats, lupins. But that becomes complex. But yes, could be one way forward. I use daikon radishes for specific covercrops by the way, very good to eat. They are early flowering, so I implant onions after crushing them in end of march/beginning february.
Same for me. First thing I would be wondering IF that works too. If you have any video on that would like to see it. There are many trials in France right now on permanent cover cropping in greenhouses, under tomatoes mainly, using mint, clover, alfalfa, … Best results with mint so far (link). It is not very signifying yet.
There are many farmers growing cereals with permanent cover cropping with legumes being alfalfa or clover (bringing in Nitrogen through rhizobacteria (symbiosis), but I don’t know any in organic: all use ultra-low doses of glyphosate to “calm” the cover cropping before implanting direct sown cereals, corn, using that kind of thing. That works and I am nearly 100% confident this could work in a garden, but would need to make tests, trials… and you know that when you have alfalfa it is very hard to get rid of, so it is quite risky at first sight. But yes, why not making a line of alfalfa somewhere, then try grow vegetables on the side to see how we cn adapt. Could be best option.
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This is definitely something to think about. There are some easy annual cover crops like chia and amaranth where a small patch would produce lots of seeds, pretty easy to thresh. Legumes might be more difficult. I want to start experimenting with different crops to find some, like amaranth, that produce lots of seeds in a small space and are easy to thresh.
Perennial cover crops are a little different. We encourage white clover and in shady spots we are trying Chinese artichoke (Stachys affinis). Some perennial grasses like cocksfoot (Dactylis glomerata) are easy to manage and can be cut regularly for in situ mulch but, like comfrey, are probably best as edging plants.
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