This year I built a vegetable garden and purposely seeded the top soil with clover. The garden has become more wild and “overgrown” looking but I think it adds a bit more wild beauty to it. There’s a list of reasons why I chose to add clover as ground cover including:

• Clover bringing nitrogen into the soil
• Clover roots to help loosen the soil to make it easier for my crops to spread their roots
• By creating a barrier to retain moisture in the soil
• To promote a place for microfauna to live within the soil. Healthy soil is alive with small bugs like springtails who feast on mold and funguses and poop out nutrients that are easily absorbed by plant roots
• To promote a place for larger insects like isopods and beetles to help break down organic material. Similar to springtails, the waste, as well as old molts and waste from dead insect bodies help feed plant roots.
• Clover roots will help loosen any compacted soil allowing crop roots to spread easier
• When planting new crops, you can simply dig up an area of clover and mix it back into the ground. By doing this, you are turning that clover into fertilizer as it gets broken down by insects and microfauna
• All parts of clover are edible. Strange to even think of it as a weed in my personal opinion

Something important that modern agriculture seems to overlook is soil health. Healthy soil is alive with microfauna and microfauna is diverse and complicated like any other ecosystem. The soil will be more like a desert without ground cover because there’s no safe places for all the tiny life that gets easily overlooked. I even added some large stones and stepping stones because insects love hiding under things like that. My goal is to promote enough life to ensure a healthy, living soil that won’t rely heavily on outsourced fertilizers. Composting would be a great compliment to my garden if I got off my ass and built one.

Modern agriculture and farming/gardening practices rely too heavily on outsourced fertilizers and seems to disregard soil health altogether. It’s quite sad to see how damaging and nutrient draining monoculture crops are to our precious top soil.

The whole idea of using clover as ground cover is a mix of knowledge from indigenous histories, my bioactive terrariums I have as a hobby and other random bits of knowledge gathered from the internet over the years. This is the first year I’ve tried using clover as ground cover so I have yet to see how effective it all is but it’s a beautiful experiment in progress at least. Since I added fresh compost and horse manure this year, everything is growing great so I won’t be able to properly assess things until next year or the year after but I look forward to it.