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your food. Too many people feel distanced from where their food is grown, even though they aren’t actually separated. Everything is connected and everything is important. From my study of nutrition and of the soil, I realized that the same thing is happening in the soil that is happening in our gut. Just as we have to make sure our bodies have the necessary nutrients and a healthy digestive system to assimilate those nutrients, we have to think of the soil in the same way. We need to eat food that is nutritious. It can’t be that way unless the soil has a healthy digestion system and is full of nutrition. Healthy soil produces healthy plants, which feed healthy people, who populate healthy communities, which create a healthy world. Cover crops are food for the soil. They gather what they can from the sun, the rain, the air, and the soil they are grown in, turning it all into food that will feed back the soil with the plants as they decompose, both the above ground parts that you see and the extensive root systems that you don’t see. It is the circle of life. One thing nourishes the next.
    When I began gardening, the only information I had about cover crops was accompanied by information about the right time to turn them under with a tiller. Since I didn’t have a tiller, I didn’t consider cover crops, opting instead to cover my garden with leaves each winter. Using leaves is still a good idea, but not everyone has leaves available. As your garden gets bigger, as mine did, you need more and more leaves. Since my son owned a lawn service and one of his services was leaf removal, I had plenty of leaves available to me. There is a limit, however, to how many leaves one person can haul around on their garden, or make that how many leaves one person wants to haul around. The fourth year I was growing to sell to restaurants I bought a tiller and expanded my garden area. I only tilled once, and at the most twice, during the season. I maintained grass paths by mowing and treated each bed individually, not tilling the whole garden at one time. The beds in the market garden were 4′ × 75′. I didn’t use the tiller in the smaller gardens, which are the ones you see in my videos. Those were still covered with leaves for the winter. When I learned that I didn’t need a tiller to manage cover crops I made the change to cover crops for all the gardens. Besides, I was beginning to worry that one day I might not have all those leaves available to me. What if Jarod decided to do something else and was not able to bring his leaves here? If my garden program depended on them, what would I do? I could find another source, but I wouldn’t have the same confidence that they would bring me only leaves I could be sure weren’t contaminated with anything harmful.
    Beware of Bringing in Outside Inputs
    About the time I was thinking about that, I began to hear about a new danger that had been ushered in with the new century. Through the twentieth century organic gardeners gathered carbon materials for mulch and compost from whatever sources they could find. If these materials weren’t grown organically it was thought that the composting action would break things down and life would be good. In 2001 I learned about a new class of chemicals that were being used in the landscapeindustry and in agriculture that survived the composting process. These herbicides were used to kill broadleaf weeds in landscapes and to insure weed-free hay and grain in agriculture. If you used the resulting grass clippings, hay, straw, or even the compost made from the manure from animals that had eaten that hay or been bedded with that straw on your garden, your crops could suffer herbicide damage! Furthermore, the damage could persist for several years. I won’t go into specific names of herbicides. As soon as one is banned another will be on the market. You could find more about this by searching “killer compost” on the internet. An early example of this