Compost crops are easy to grow, and feed your soil when you aren’t using your garden. Harvested and composted, they return to the soil nutrients lost when food crops are harvested, and protect the soil from the weather over the winter.

Traditional and organic farmers have been successfully using compost crops for centuries, and they are an essential part of crop rotation. A Compost crop is a plant primarily grown to be cut down and composted. The prime goal is to grow more soil. Some compost crops also fix Nitrogen in the soil and some produce a food crop at the same time. Compost crops provide a nutritious, low maintenance ground cover for your precious soil. You can produce large amounts of organic matter in as little as six weeks, utilizing your garden beds when they would otherwise lie empty.

By compost cropping you end up with better soil - an increase in the quantity and the quality of all aspects of the soil’s ecology including: your soil’s microbial population, organic matter content, and soil fertility, thereby giving all the rest of nature’s processes a boost. By making compost from your crop you not only increase soil volume and quality, but feed earthworms and soil organisms, which in turn stimulate and speed up the release of nutrients, thus making more nutrients available for the next crop.

There are Compost Crops to suit all soil conditions and all times of the year. Building up fertility is a slow process, and takes considerably more than one season. Somewhat faster results can be achieved by following the Biointensive method detailed in How To Grow More Vegetables... and our other books.