Can you plant a cover crop into grass?

Velvet bean (Mucuna pruriens) grows well during Florida’s hot and humid summers. It is a vining cover crop, known for its ability to produce an abundance of biomass that quickly covers the ground and smothers weeds. With that in mind, we selected velvet bean as a legume to plant as a fallow crop in our research plots. We hypothesized that velvet bean could be sown directly into a field of grass and that it would, in time, cover the ground and overtop the grass.

To establish the planting we began by mowing the plots at a height of 8 to 10 cm. The next day the seeds were jab-planted at a spacing of about 50 (between-row) X 20 (in-row) cm. Velvet bean provided adequate cover to suppress weed growth. In addition to weed suppression, an abundance of biomass has implications for soil improvement, if the biomass is left in the field.

Read more about the results of using velvet bean to smother grass