Soil in need of some love? Sow green manure in your garden and you’ll reap the benefits.

I recently found a partially finished bottle of an energy drink placed in the euphorbia trough by one of the scaffolders. An architect friend joked, “Are you sure that’s Lucozade?” which made me see it differently.

In short, the garden is in disarray. Sometimes neglect has its perks; after returning from holiday, I spotted a sunflower growing in the back corner.

This week, though, some urgent tidying is underway. As I’m expecting a baby, I’ve hired a professional gardener to tackle troublesome weeds like a prickly weed and robinia saplings from the neighbour’s tree, while leaving the good stuff. Next, in the newly cleared patches, I’ll be sowing green manure.

Green manure are superheroes when it comes to boosting soil quality.

A fellow garden writer has written about cover crops, as they are essential in seasonal planting for vegetable plots. However, the only things I’m picking from my garden right now are a few foraged apples and some woody herbs.

My ambitions for the garden are modest and consistent – and enhancing soil health is top of the list. For those wondering, the scaffold is for roof repairs, and the garden boundaries are yet to be fixed, but the neighbours are on board with replacing them.

Cover crops are like superheroes for soil health. Soil likes to be covered, which is why weeds appear. But by sowing fast-growing plants, you can suppress weeds, bring in bees, shelter beneficial insects, and fix nitrogen.

Cover crops aren’t always showy – though some, like certain lupin varieties and bird’s foot trefoil, have lovely blooms – but their role is to grow vigorously rather than be admired. After they’ve grown, you can turn them under, cut them for compost, or let them decompose for worms to pull down. Their work happens below the surface.

Now is the ideal time for sowing these cold-season plants. I’ve chosen rye grass, which breaks up heavy earth, a nitrogen-lifter, a weed-suppressor, and field beans.

There’s satisfaction in planting seeds knowing it’s temporary – on the surface, anyway.