By KADY LANE, guest columnist

When is “naked” gardening a bad idea? When your soil needs to stay covered up! If you’re a farmer, the same goes for your fields.

In our current climate, once the fall harvest is complete, the soil surface often sits unprotected for months at a time. This is a long time to leave topsoil unprotected and at the mercy of erosion caused by wind, rain, and snow melt. For this reason, cover crops are often planted in the fall, and can be thought of as living mulch or green manure.

The benefits of cover crops are as important to farmers as they are to home gardeners.

Cover crops need to be terminated and incorporated into the soil in the spring, ideally about two weeks before planting spring crops. By incorporating these cover crops, you can improve your soil’s biological and physical properties.

Certain cover crops have the ability to fix nitrogen from the atmosphere and return it to the soil. This return of nitrogen is essential in not only maintaining the fertility of soil, but can also increase the fertility. As these properties improve, you will have less soil compaction, higher level of available nutrients, as well as a level of natural weed suppression.

Prior to integrating cover crops, it pays to do some homework. The following resources provide advice and tools for those interested in learning more about using covers: Midwest Cover Crops Council (www.mccc.msu.edu) and the Indiana Conservation Cropping Systems Initiative (CCSI) (ccsin.iaswcd.org).

Where can you find cover crops? The Brown County Soil and Water Conservation District is offering cover crops for sale until Friday, Aug. 13. Interested? Call 812-988-2211 or email [email protected] for pricing and to place an order.

Kady Lane is an educator with the Brown County Soil & Water Conservation District. She can be reached at 812-988-2211.