Dynamic Cover Crop Strategies

jungle is in the life that is how this jungle is fertile and alive and if you take away that life you cannot recreate it and that is the same concept with which i approach cover crops cover crops are our deep reservoirs of life life that we can where we can really mimic nature and let incredible diversity occur let it be riotous let it grow way way way more than than if we tried to have crops we could harvest from so close there's no way you could harvest anything from it yeah let's start completely from scratch right now our audience is live we're on the air we were not i checked over here okay so go to the beginning and i'll do that welcome righty taylor welcome everyone we're about to get started here we were started but we were moving ready [Music] [Music] glad to talk about cover crops yet again i've been doing it for a long time we're going to go right to the first slide the first slide shows you the same picture as we saw on the introductory slide i did that on purpose because i want you to notice something a minute detail there where the cursor oops that was the mistake where the cursor is you notice that this butterfly has got a piece of its wing missing the term for that is it's been notched and butterflies have evolved to make these eyes they don't do them because they're beautiful though we sure think they are they do them because that presents a target for birds it looks like that's the eye of the organism the bird is trying to feed on and the bird takes a notch out of the wing not very nutritious for it and not vital to the butterfly and the butterfly lives to pollinate another plant and lay its larva and continue to feed the web of life and so to me that is the perfect symbol of the genius of nature and that is what i want to speak about here there's a wonderful book called original wisdom by robert wolf it's stories of ancient ways of knowing and he in this book describes his interactions with the indigenous original peoples of malaysia and they were not readily willing to talk to him but he won their trust and he learned a bunch of wonderful stuff from them which he shares in this book what's pertinent to our talk was his description of what happened when government a government agency asked him since he actually had some rapport with these indigenous peoples if they if he could try to convince those peoples to work on the rubber plantations that i guess it's not that easy to find people that can work in those extremely hot humid conditions and they thought these indigenous peoples would be perfect for this so he said well i'll ask but i'm not optimistic and he asked them a group of them and as he said often happens they were silent they didn't really respond for a while and then all of a sudden one person spoke and he said that was usually the way and you could tell that he was speaking for everybody and he said we would love to help out but we've watched these rubber plantations and we see that they work for the people who are producing rubber but when they leave them the jungle doesn't come back they have changed the land so much that the jungle doesn't come back and we cannot help to do that because the jungle is our home it is our source of everything we cannot help to destroy the jungle and as robert wolf was describing this to the the agency workers that had tried to get him to recruit these people they were pretty dismissive their response was well they're just lazy they don't like to work but there was one scientist who was at a desk on the phone and robert noticed that that scientist while he talked was kind of trying to get off and was paying a lot of attention to what robert was saying and robert got done talking he was headed out and the scientist got off the phone and interrupted him and said what you just said is absolutely right it is what we are researching right now we have taken a plot of land i forget how big it was but it was a pretty good sized plot of land and we are cataloging every bit of life on this on this land every plant all the life we can find down to the level of the soil we can never begin to afford to try to catalog all the life in the soil but we've taken it down to the soil and what we found is that they totally understand that the fertility of this jungle is in this life that is the jungle the jungle cannot be productive and will not thrive without all of this life i just was telling my wife who introduced me to this book today that i was going to add this slide and talk about this as kind of an opening concept and she said yes and that's what i'm following right now i wish i could remember the name of the person that she's reading and watching on youtube right now but this person is a native american and she's speaking to the fact that all over the world the web of life has gotten very thin and everybody needs to do everything they can to re-weave the web of life and cover crops are an incredible tool for that they are mimicking nature they're major diversity they're massively productive as they're going to see they're producing fertility above ground and below ground they're having all kinds of positive other impacts they're totally nurturing giving sustenance and our bridge to all kinds of beneficial life that the farm needs so sometimes we don't even think of all that life as beneficial some parts of it we might think are pest but the reality is we need all of that life and cover crops are a pathway to that and so that's the ancient wisdom that i hope that we can relearn um and rededicate ourselves to tonight cover crops provide solar-powered fertility none of us would be eating if it wasn't for cover crops all of life except for i guess some place deep deep down in the ocean next to a few volcanic fissures there is some other life that doesn't use solar energy but that's you know it's using the heat from the earth instead but the rest of us are all eating because of solar energy and we all see what solar energy makes above ground we see the plants we see the trees we see the incredible power of plant life that is fueled by our sun which is this massive source of wealth for all of us but below ground those same plants are pumping exudates into the soil 50 to 80 percent of everything the plants produce above ground as far as nutrients is pumped below the soil and exude it 30 to 50 of what comes from solar from photosynthesis from most plants 30 to 50 percent is exuded into the soil by those plants to feed the microbial communities that work in mutuality with those plants providing water protection from pathogens and access to minerals that the plants couldn't otherwise access and so that's an incredible donation to all of us that we all would not be able to thrive without which is a solar energy protection from the elements if you look at soil that is covered with plants and soil that's not covered with plants especially if it has clay in it but even if not pounding rains baking sun powerful powerful hail wind all of those things are eroding and degrading so soil if it is not protected by plants weed suppression we're going to talk a lot about that tonight cover crops are probably the number one tool that organic farmers can use to to break the weed cycle on their plants that and the integration of animals together are probably the our best chance at solving what's probably one of the biggest problems for organic and regenerative farmers and and backyard gardeners too water retention we brought gabe brown to speak here about i guess it's now four years ago quite a while ago and one of the incredible facts that i used to promote promote his his um talk and get people to come was the fact that when gabe brown realized he had no choice but to go with working with nature and stop trying to make the land do what he wanted it to do but rather to do what it wanted it to do he went to multi-species cover crops and the integration of animals with multi-species cover crops in order to protect the soil gain the nutrients he needed so they could grow his crops he had really had enough climate-based disasters that he wasn't bankable anymore he couldn't get loans his only way it could keep going was to use that one source of wealth that bankers have no control over and that's the sun and basically over the course of eight years i think it was maybe it was longer than that anyways i have eight in my head because that's what the figure i'm going to give in a moment he took soil that when he started could not absorb more in the half an inch per hour per hour of rain and by creating this incredibly alive soil with this incredible soil carbon sponge he brought his soil to a point where he could gain eight inches of rain every hour folks that has to happen everywhere as we deal with the inevitable effects of climate change right now hopefully we can slow them and eventually reverse them but right now the oceans are warmer and their air is warmer and there's way more water in the air and way more of it's coming down we're seeing that in the news all the time our farm here in north carolina we lost 70 of our farm uh to fred the tropical depression fred this this fall and we've seen more major water events in the last 10 years than we've seen in the last 20 years before that so it's very important that we increase the capacity of the soil to retain water soil structure and enhancement via exudates and the residues so you have these you have plants pumping exudates in the soil to feed the microbial community and at the same time they are shedding leaves or when they're finished we're killing them in some way we try not to incorporate them because we want that protection on top but we're killing them and those residues are becoming part of the soil carbon sponge they're being turned in to humus or other soil aggregates with the help of largely fungi and then there's serendipitous harvest turns out that a bunch of our cover crops and a bunch of new ones that i want us to think about potential cover crops have aspects of them that are very nutritious for us and oftentimes quite tasty it's not like you're going to make your living on your cover crops but you might get to eat a bunch from them and you might find an occasional crop that you can actually take to market and sell and then finally natural air conditioning via respiration i want to recommend walter yenney and i have a link at the end to one of his videos walter yenni is talking about the fact that we are at a stage right now where climate catastrophe is happening it's there's no way to avoid that we can definitely mitigate it it's not hopeless but we've got to get going on it and we're kind of missing a big piece of it there's a major focus on fossil fuels and fossil fuels are an important piece because they are that greenhouse that's holding the heat in but global warming was happening prior to industrialization not as quickly but it was happening prior to industrialization because of humanity's incredible tendency to defoliate the planet to cut down forest you know it's kind of classic that greece has become a deforested land because of people over harvesting trees for various state purposes and that's you can see that everywhere all over the world and we have to reverse that walter yeni does an incredible job of explaining why to you about that why that's important but he makes the point that five percent of the heat dynamics on the planet are affected by fossil fuels and the greenhouse gas effect that fossil fuels cause the other 95 percent are the direct relation relate are directly related to hydrological systems to the the retention of water and the movement of water in plants and in the soil plants help to create the soil carbon sponge which holds water and plants are respiring and when he said that i remembered a figure which i have to chase down again i know i read it in a rep from a reputable source so it's probably true maybe it's apocryphal but anyways from what i read a long time ago a a huge healthy hemlock here here in the southeast of the united states hemlock conifer it's a conifer tree will produce a respirator rather up to 40 000 gallons of water on a hot summer day right that hemlocks are critical to our mountain environments because by doing that they're keeping the mountain streams cool that's why we have the trout there's a whole lot of our ecology that depends on hemlocks okay in a recent video of walter yannis that i was watching he put out the figure that a gallon of respired water provides puts out in the process of respiring 600 calories so 600 calories are being pumped into the air not retained right and that is cool that's a cooling process if you multiply 600 times 40 000 gallons i think that's about 24 million calories a day that one hemlock tree is cooling the planet by now it's more complex than that because water vapor is also a greenhouse gas so it's not like you're directly getting that much cooling but there is still a net gain in cooling from every plant that's growing and indeed of course it's also covering that soil and soil is very good at retaining heat so those plants are better at keeping the soil cool which is also important for our crops so we want to grow them every which way we can okay basically regenerative the regenerative agriculture vision is solar powered the brilliant and dynamically dynamically interactive living architecture of plants ensures maximum solar energy is delivered to the soil food web through exudates and here's just one picture there's if you look closely in here there's buckwheat there's sudex there's sunhemp there's cow peas there's just a wonderful array and you can see there you can't see the ground basically this architecture is capturing every bit of solar power and that is the goal we want that's what jungles do that's why the indigenous peoples of malaysia didn't want the jungle to be turned into a mono crop with exposed soil with the inability to capture every bit of solar power we can get okay this is the old way this is a pretty old picture and this is the way i used to do it i used to grow cover crops that's rye on the left i'd work them in i'd plant my crops and you know they did darn well i was pretty proud of myself and then i learned i learned to add some legumes i learned which we're going to see in the next slide no we're not we're going to see first that one of the other things that cover crops do is act as subsoilers and at living webb farms we had a new greenhouse the greenhouse had been constructed without leveling or the site for the for the greenhouse the foundation had been constructed without leveling the site which was an incredible mistake um and we had to level it but when we had to level we had to do it by moving soil around and that caused pretty major compaction and we resolved that problem with cover crops we basically used cover crops as subsoilers we particularly focused on though there are some other cover crops in there you can see a lot of what our radish leaves the kind of broader leaves there our radish leaves we use tillage radish also known as oil seed radish or forage radish it's basically a big daikon you can eat it just like a daikon it can get huge i've seen them get the size of a of a person's thigh and just go incredibly deep and really work the soil pretty wonderfully and then we have another crop that we're going to talk a bunch about tonight and that's facilia tenecetifolia also known as tansy leave facilia that's a member of the borage and comfrey family and that family is a family of dynamic accumulators they're very good at going really deep and pulling all kinds of nutrients in and so friend facility whatever you want to call it is one of those soil openers and dynamic accumulators the other one that we use is rye cereal rye the winter rye grain it's also very good at opening up the soil there are other ones we could have used fava beans are really good at that in the summertime sudex is particularly good if you cut it back people let sudex grow six six feet tall then cut it back they could do that sometimes twice in the summer it's so vigorous every time that you cut it it first sends its roots down deeper before it goes back up so it really helps to open the soil and there's the facilia another picture of the incredible architecture of natural systems this is a maturing winter cover crop you've got winter peas right there you have the facilia in bloom by the way people warn people growing this cover crop that you want to be sure that it is finished flowering or you terminate it's flowering before you need another crop to be pollinated because it is so attractive to pollinators that you may get less pollinating action on crops that you're hoping to pollinate it and then there's also rye and if we look deeper we'd see other cover crops too there's about probably six different cover crops that are growing in this picture then there's just a big field of cover crop this is at grand view one of our farms and you can just see the incredible biomass that's there and you can imagine how that soil is not getting as hot as it would if it was bare soil by the way if you look up maps of climate change maps that show the level of greenhouse gases in the air the amount of heat held it actually gets much worse in the winter in where where it's winter and trees and plants are going dormant because the trees and plants are actually holding a whole lot of that carbon in themselves along with doing the cooling that they're doing so winter is actually a time for greater solar gain for us than summer we actually get less gain of heat in the summer okay so the collective genius of regenerative farming of the regenerative farming community has transformed how we relate to cover crops in the 20th century and once again i made this kind of a sharper a sharper divide than it actually was i actually did learn some things about the things i'm going to have i'm going to talk about on the right side in the late 90s but for most of the of the latter part of the 20th century we read about and thought about cover crops as green manures they basically were called cover crops because they covered fallow fields and they did the things i talked about right off at the beginning they protected those fallow fields from rain from wind they also create a biomass and fix nitrogen for the next crops and it was we thought that was pretty important it was a major thing to grow cover crops and if you were being an organic grower you were not being a good organic grower if you weren't figuring out how to incorporate cover crops but in the 21st century we realized what dynamos these cover crops were sure they afforded the vital benefits discerned in the 20th century but they could also we realize be grown as mulch that was in place for no-till systems we could grow the large amounts of biomass you've seen in the pictures i've already shown you of cover crops and you could roll them down or less good but still good enough flammable those to kill them you have to have a way to terminate them but once you terminate them you have large amounts of organic matter that are on top of the soil that you can plant through and the weeds don't have the light to germinate and the moisture gets held in by those cover crops so that's a major benefit that we hadn't really been using as much there was like i said it wasn't as as evenly divided as i made out in the slides in the late 90s there was a researcher i think he was in pennsylvania who made a real big deal of and got a lot of attention for developing a tomato system where he grew abundant rich crops of veg and then mowed them at the base so that they just dropped and really mulch tomato patches and then as they rot it they fed the tomatoes and he got great productivity there so it's not like we immediately made this transition as soon as the 21st century happened but we're headed that way and it's all come more to fruition here in this this century okay they also provide critical biodiverse habitat for beneficial insects and other life and i want to really emphasize the other life they they advertise cover crops provide harborage and new nutrition for all kinds of life and we want all of that life even though sometimes i think some of that life is quite bothersome indeed i'm not a big fan of groundhogs on the farm but i recognize their ecological place and i'm okay with the fact that sometimes the groundhogs are eating my cover crops if i can get them to eat those and not the crops i'm pretty happy cover crops also can provide high quality animal forage and we've done some with that our farm in florida has done much more with that we've literally sewn cover crops into pastures to improve the pastures and the animals can both eat the cover crops and the pasture and then as you'll see this year we've moved more towards integrating those animals into our larger farm operation our north farm okay and finally cover crops offer a natural alternative to herbicides they basically provide competition and there's a phenomena we call allopathy whereby they exude germination and growth inhibiting exudates i think they exude exudates right basically their roots are pumping out stuff that gives them an advantage over other plants rye is pretty famous for that and really the one that is most powerful is sudex sudex which is a hybrid of sorghum and sedan grass is a favorite of farmers for its incredible ability to build biomass and i just as i just described go down deep and open up the soil but one of the other things it does is when you kill it the residue and what it what what has been pumping into the soil makes it much harder for other plants to germinate and we had that really graphically shown to us one year when we had a huge crop of basically multi-species cover crops in the greenhouse that i just showed you where we are growing the cover crops to open up the soil the new greenhouse and we basically came in there and flail mowed it and then to prepare a seed bed we're going to direct seed we flail motor in september and i said let's try just piling straw we had straw piled up from other uses on top of these beds and let the straw encourage the life to come up and devour these cover crops you know he said if things go well we should have a perfect seed bed and we did we pulled that straw off about the middle of november about two months later and there was just this fine layer of decomposed cover crop and we planted into that and i i actually wasn't getting to do it myself but i asked my co-workers to water it and give it a week and then flame any weeds because we're going to be planting carrots and beets and onions things that are slow germinators and they can really have the weeds get ahead of them and make ver make them very hard to grow and i was busy working on presentations couldn't get to do it myself but i checked in with my co-workers and said did you flame they said pat there were no weeds we didn't need to i'm like oh great actually it wasn't great at all we then seeded the cover crops and we got horrible germination we just i i think the carrots barely came up at all the beets were terrible oh turnips was the other one turnips did pretty well they came up despite it and the next summer ron morris was presenting here we have i want you to see that that video series that we have um and he spoke to the fact that he as far as he could tell sudex was the most delayed leopathic cover crop that he had ever grown and he spoke to the fact that usually that phenomenon just causes seeds not to germinate that if you put weak seedlings into freshly incorporated sudex it would actually kill them now that could be this can be an advantage if you time it right so it's not that it's bad but you have to understand the phenomena and indeed about four or five weeks after our germination wasn't good we started getting much more germination because the effect had worn off so you just want time when that happens and make sure you do it in a way or if you're planting healthy big vigorous transplants in this effect can be very very positive and we've had a lot of good effect when we're doing transplants okay in the latter part of the 20th century our approach to cover crops was pretty transactional by that i mean you would look at you know what cover crop you're growing and you could see how many pounds of nitrogen it fixed and how much biomass you got and that's what you're growing it for you weren't really thinking about i'm growing a plant communica i'm growing communities of plants that are about maximizing the life in mutuality and that is kind of the concept that i was trying to get across when i was first talking about original wisdom and so you know it was pretty cutting edge in the in the 20th century um it was the best practice to include combinations of grains and legumes i first learned about this from keith baldwin i now retired wonderful extension agent um an educator and he explained to me that if you grow a cover crop with a grain the grain is very good at scavenging the nitrogen that's available in the soil the cover crop the the legume i said if you grow i say if you grow a cover crop if you grow a grain with a legume basically the grain is going to quickly take up nitrogen and it's going to get all the nitrogen it can and that is going to make the legume have to make fix more nitrogen the legume won't fix nitrogen if it doesn't need to and of course it fixes it in those little nodules i think we actually didn't look at that picture maybe we should go back for a second for somebody that hasn't looked at it okay good right here these are the nodules i'm talking about and they're on most legumes doesn't mean they're not the legume isn't going to fix nitrogen if they don't have these but by and large they're on most legumes and they have a rhizobia bacteria that they are feeding that lives in these nodules and basically those bacteria are very good at fixing nitrogen from the air i don't think it's accidental that nitrogen is such a huge piece of fertility for plants given that it is the most abundant element we have in the air it's about our atmosphere is about 78 nitrogen so having legumes that fix that nitrogen is a big deal and by the way if you don't have the bacteria nobody's home those nodules will not fix nitrogen you can tell if you have the right life bacteria rhizobia bacteria in these nodules by cutting one open with your fingernail and if it's reddish brown or pinkish that means that the bacteria is there if it's white that means nobody's home and you need to inoculate next time okay so we knew that by combining legumes with grains we caused the legumes to fix far more nitrogen than they would if we just grew legumes and of course we wouldn't be fixing any nitrogen if we just grew grains though we would and this is important to remember still have those grains scavenging for nitrogen that might move out of the rise of rhizophir the roots the root zone if we didn't have these fast growing grains to go ahead and scavenge up and hold all those nutrients and not just nitrogen but phosphorus and potassium and other nutrients but meanwhile having the rhizobia bacteria actually fix more nitrogen because it needs it too and it's not as good at getting it from the soil because it doesn't need to be means that you have a more dynamic situation and of course once again the results from this combination were measured in pounds of nitrogen and biomass per acre and those are really good things we don't want to say they're not but the benefits of our 21st century multi-species cocktails and ray archuleta and i think we have his link to his talk that he gave here with david brand and jay brandt brant was the person who really introduced the concept of cocktails once again i make i talk about it like it happened 20th century and then it changed in the 21st century i was drifting towards cocktails um in the lab part of the 90s i was incur i was growing two or three different cover crops at a time maybe even four but i wasn't at six or seven or eight and when i first heard heard of ray archie i heard about him for a long time before i actually heard him and it was from people really enthusiastic about the impacts they were seeing from ramping up the the diversity the biodiversity when you think about it the more diversity of plants that you grow especially since almost all of these plants are taking solar energy and pumping exudates into the soil to feed the microbial community you're going to have a much more diverse healthy community if you have a diverse a diverse array of plants doing that to say nothing of having all these plants as we've already shown having different architecture to maximize solar solar collection okay so yeah the solar efficiency of combinations often results in excellent nitrogen and biomass production but the impact of abundant soil echo exudates diverse soil exudates produced by such cocktails create a vigor and resilience in the soil food web that is probably more important than just having more nitrogen and having more biomass though it's to be fair not nearly as easy to measure um so basically i want to give a big pitch for the link up here that's to the sare book which you can download as a pdf or you can buy it's pretty reasonably priced and it's managing cover crops profitably what's interesting is i have been recommending this book since the 90s i mean i when i got this book i just sat down and read it from cover cover i haven't looked at it since then and of course they've been updating it and indeed i've told people it doesn't really talk about a lot of the new cover crops i'm wrong about that it does i just wasn't reading it again looking at the latest edition so it's in its third edition now and a lot of the cover crops i talk about are now covered in the book when they weren't at first indeed when i pulled it up to get a link and put it on here i started reading it and i had to stop myself and get back to work on my powerpoint because there's a bunch of stuff that's new in there that i want to read and i've looked up one thing i wanted to find and there was some new information which i'm looking forward to sharing with you it's a wonderful book i highly recommend it you can get it for free or you can buy it for not much money and it's put out by ser which is a government agency um and which provides grants and co sponsors conferences indeed we have a link to another conference that i took part in that was sponsored by sarah it's a really great organization and i recommend following them okay so in the 20th century it wasn't like we only had one or two cover crops we had quite a few that we used rye has always been a star and actually at that point managing cover crops properly said for the southeast where we are that the king and queen of cover crops for biomass production were rye and hairy vetch and i think that's true though we don't grow hairy veg at all anymore and i'll explain why in a little bit but they're a highly highly productive combination also wheat barley oats all of those were being used in the 90s for various reasons oats are particularly interesting because a whole lot of us wanted to use them to winter kill and they theoretically do winter kill and apparently they absolutely do further north but here in the mountains of north carolina [Music] as a as a cover crop expert from the extension office said to me pat when you want them to die they live and you want them to live they die and that's kind of true here it's not they're not as reliable here it'd be great if they did reliably winter kill but they're still a really good and much easier to kill cover crop and they have the added advantage and i'm going to speak to this often of creating another product if you're an herbalist and you're growing oats you can let them go to seed and as you come to the milky oat stage when you take a grain and puncture it with your nail and a white milk comes out right at that stage you can harvest those oats and make a tincture that makes an incredible nerve vine that is an herbal remedy that nourishes the nervous system and i've made that and shared it with people that had various needs i'm not going to do a talk about herbal herbal products right now but it makes a wonderful tincture and if you're growing a cover crop you can make a lot of milky tincture i one year made so much that i gave it away as party favors at our christmas party so that's an added advantage buckwheat buckwheat for me in this 90s was like my go-to summer cover crop and it also had the added advantage of being a wonderful insectiary it really produced tons of nectar and pollen for the beneficial insects indeed i had a neighbor one time kind of jokingly but kind of seriously chide me for having it in bloom when the um sourwood was in bloom because sauerwood is famous for this light delicate honey and if the bees are getting buckwheat and salt and sour would nectar at the same time they weren't going to have that wonderful sour with honey but the bees don't mind and i sure didn't mind as far as the productivity went and then finally the goons of the of the 20th century were largely hairy vetch crimson clover and winter peas i used to say always austrian winter peas but i noticed that lots of times now anyways it just says peas it doesn't say austrian winter peas and then finally white and red clover nowadays you know that was starting to change in the late 90s and by now there's a whole bunch of other ones um so we have grains and other non-leguminous cover crops that are new newish they're about 15 20 years old now tillage radish is huge goes by a couple other names oil seed radish or forage radish i've already described it kind of and then this is the computer thinking it knows them more than i do this is supposed to be tansy leave facilia but it's it comes out as tansy facility do not grow tansy as a cover crop it's a perennial it's a persistent perennial it'll cause you problems it's a great beneficial insect plant it has many other values but it is not a cover crop that's supposed to say tansy leaved to cilia okay and then kale we actually used to grow kale in the summertime and i think we might get back to that and i'll talk about that a little later but we stopped because it became our bridge for harlequin bugs but we try to encourage to include it in our winter crops along with forage turnip and oil seed radish all of that family are really good for making biomass creating diversity if you use the cover crops for forage they're excellent forage so kale is a good one and we're going to get into like another whole concept which i'll cover later the way these cover crops nourish our beneficial insects which then help to control uh what we consider to be pests though actually that's a that's a a paradigm that i don't really want to encourage okay so then the grains that are kind of new are sorghum sudex which is like i said a hybrid of sorghum and sedan grass sunflowers which is really wonderful because you can have them in bloom and there's so much fun to see and then the birds love to eat the flowers too and then the legumes yellow are sweet clover which is a biennial so you got to plant it that way if you want to get the full nitrogen benefit birds with clover which is a perennial but not that hard to kill and really good for wet areas soybeans which my co-workers have been a little bit reticent to grow that because the deer like it so much but i pointed out to them the deer tend not to hit it nearly as hard when it's mixed into this incredible incredible diversity of cover crops if you grow it straight onto itself you can get hit pretty hard by deer they really love soybeans sun hemp this is a very fascinating cover crop that i was totally misled by the knowledge i had in the 90s i was wanting to explore it but i heard i read that it was illegal to grow and then at a sare sponsored cover crop conference with a bunch of extension agents from all over the united states um stuart weiss was with me he's an extension agent in the virgin islands and i said what's that plant that plant's like none i've ever seen and he said oh that's another crotal area okay and crodilary is the latin name for sunhemp i'm like wait a minute is that is that the one that's illegal and he said exactly it's not at all like sun hemp it grows low to the ground it's got i think pretty nasty spines it grows like crazy it's toxic to um cattle and other other um grazing animals and that was the one that was illegal so make sure if you're growing a crotal area that you grow sun hemp i kind of knew that it was going to be okay to grow sun hemp because even as i was reading it was illegal a lot of extension asian people and the people at the center for environmental farming systems were busy doing experiments with it so i figured if they can do it i can do it cowpeas cow peas are a really impressive cover crop there's two kinds one is a combination of vining or no this there's a there's a famous combination of the two kinds that's called iron and clay but the kind that often has grown a lot of is the vining indeterminate one that'll give you the most biomass the thing is if you're trying to grow it amongst your crops it can get pretty pretty unruly so i don't recommend it if you're growing cow peas amongst your crops and you want them to die pretty easily then you want to grow a determinate cow pea and the one that i remember the name of the certain herd other ones but one that we locally can buy is called red ripper the common combination that uses a cover crop oftentimes is called iron and clay and one of one of them either the iron or the clay is a determinant and one is an indeterminate the combination gives you that dense architecture that we're talking about that captures more sunlight so the determinant one is bigger and taller and the vining one can grow up on and it gives you more biomass but you don't want to use that if you're trying to grow it let's say in a grow zone for plants because it's going to vine off to the side and cause you all kinds of problems one that isn't as commonly used as a cover crop here that i've experimented with but not enough and i want to do more with is fava beans flava beans are one of my favorite vegetable crops and they're the only bean that we grow in cold weather they're actually not a bean they're actually a veg and they have many many beneficial aspects but there's a a bunch of them that are smaller seeded that you can grow as a cover crop they're often called broad beans instead of fava beans and then lab lab lab lab i got turned on to by mark schoenbeck it's also known as purple hyacinth bean it's really lovely it's not easy to find if you want to try it the company i found that could get it for me was called kaufman seed i haven't bought from them for a long time they're out in the midwest but they're real good at finding unusual cover crop seeds they're not good at remembering that you don't want treated seed so you want to emphasize that make sure it's written on the invoice at one time had to send about three bags of cover crop seed back because they were treated with fungicide which of course is an organic grower i can't use what mark loved about lab lab was the way it grew its mat which makes this large large heavily vining mat of um of foliage it suppressed everything else and when you removed it you had a ready to plant bed so those are the the new cover crops compared to the 20th century cover crops okay so the more species you pick the more productivity right that's the whole idea of these cocktails but you want to consider some things right and a major thing to consider is how long to maturity because basically it's very hard to kill anything before it goes to seed because that is the purpose of plants and they're going to put everything they can into staying alive until they start to make seed then they become much more vulnerable because all of their energy is in seed production and their root systems and their stems are easier to permanently kill and that's why we have a roller crimper because when you roll it it might still pop back up but that crimper breaks that brittle seed stock and then the plant dies so getting crops that will die that will senesce go to seed quickly enough to fit our schedules is pretty important and we'll talk about that more in a minute we are in the mountains of north carolina we have a lot of really cool moist weather and i'm going to describe more how two different mays had diametrically different impacts on our on our no-till farming plants when it's cool and moist our no-till systems do not work well at all when it's hot and dry the year of 2019 i like to say that may was like august and june was like april and that totally worked for us that worked for us except for one in one way which i'll describe a little later but why it works so well for us is our biomass of winter cover crops which looked a lot like that um picture i showed you with the facilia in there was all because of the heat senescing going to seed and when we rolled it down because it was so hot it didn't have a chance it all died and quickly dried and became this thick biomass that was going to stay there literally i have a picture which i didn't include because you know i put so many slides in a talk that thick biomass was still there and still suppressing weeds in late october and that was a a huge benefit for us in may of 2020 it was wet and cool and when we rolled down our cover crop rather than drying it all just rotted and then wet and cool favors the growth of grasses and what i call i call 2020 our grasses disaster gear it was just impossible to control the grasses and i really want to thank our interns of that year because they incredibly good nature did far more weeding than we represented to them they would have to do they're basing how much weeding they'd have to do on a few years of successful no-till and our system crashed and burned because of not cooperative weather in 2020 okay in our climate that's just problematic we are trying to get rid of vetch and it's not easy fetch is famous for having hard seed that will stay alive in the soil for up to 15 years and it just keeps coming and coming i think we finally have found a solution for it but it's been driving us nuts because vetch does not want to die unless it's brutally hot and we've had several years where we can kill everything else but we can't kill the vets we don't plant it anymore but it's coming on endlessly from years before when we did plant it and didn't know to control it if you're killing it's no problem and we used to tilt so we didn't worry about because you could always kill it it dies immediately from being tilled if you flail more you can kill it but we want to roll our cover crop why rolling is superior to flail mowing though flail mailing is very effective and a lot of people have flail mowers and think that's just as good it's kind of just as good except for one thing if you flail mode that same cover crop in 2019 that i said was still there suppressing weeds and protecting the soil four months later four and a half months later it would be gone in our nice live soil that's full of life that can digest readily available nutrients it'll be gone in less than a month so it'd be protecting our young seedlings but then our soil would be bare again and you can work with that if you don't have a roller crimper and you only have a flail mower you just have to know that is that short-term cover is rotting away or even before it's completely rotted you've got to sew your next understory cover crop to provide the same kind of protection and weed suppression that you're getting from your biomass okay so for us we've had so many years where we we would have a hot week we'd roll our veg it was dying and then it would cool off and start raining and we'd see this dead cover crop just kind of tilt up and start growing again and it would just drive us nuts so we really don't want to have vetch anymore um but we've got it now that's too bad because vetch has got tons of good qualities as i said in the in the last part of the 20th century growing growing managing cover crops profitably called it the king and queen of biomass producers for the winter season by the way in the southeast and we discovered that to be true so the one new thing a bit of information i allowed myself to glean from managing cover crops profitably the third edition that i just pulled up for you all to be able to access was that plant breeders are working with farmers who have talked about this problem of vets taking too long to senesce and not being able to get it killed soon enough or at all in our case and they have developed a new variety i say knew it's now about 15 years old but i'm just learning about it and that's called purple bounty and apparently that is a much shorter season veg so that it is going to flower and in full senescence so that it's easier to kill well before which is kind of the drop dead planting time for most of us in the southeast i think is going to be sometime in april or may depending on where you are in the flatlands closer to the ocean it's probably in april for us it's in may and your your hairy vetch is going to start going to seed then but if the weather's not good it won't go to seed enough so hopefully this purple bounty will be much further along and easier to kill at that point the problem for us still is that oftentimes unless you're flailing even if you manage to somewhat kill the vetch it's still only by the time you got it mature enough to die it may already be setting seed and i don't know if you've all noticed that but plants don't die when we think we've killed them they live for as long as they can to do one thing reproduce so a famous example would be go ahead and pull what's called pigweed or amaranth out of the soil and drop it in your path and now if you don't if you're not careful when it rains it'll just re-roof and start growing right away but even if you get it to die you will see that this plant that hadn't yet made seed actually still gets to set seed because it draws its life from what's a very big robust plant from the leaves from the stems from everywhere and it still sets seeds and that can also happen with fetch you can roll it down have it so that it's dead and there are pods on there that aren't fully developed and yet they'll still develop and make seed it won't be as good a seed but it'll be good enough to drive you nuts so you want to be careful with fetch sun hemp by the way is my favorite legume for being certain of being able to kill it i've never seen it live from being rolled when you roll it it doesn't crimp it breaks off and it's dead it's got a disadvantage in there it's got a very lignus or woody stem so you have to work with that it's not like that doesn't rot pretty quickly it actually it's got a lot of advantages it'll stick around if you grow it in the right place it'll stick around and help to suppress weeds and slowly release nutrients but it's the best one for diet and there's variations between all those anyways the persistence or lack thereof of residue is something we want to think about too so cover crops like grains are the sunhemp are high in lignin and their stems when you roll them down and they dry if they do dry now if it's like may in 2020 wet and cool even they're going to rot on you but if you can get them to you know dry out they will last a long time so my goal is to set up a zoned planting season i want to have the high lignin cover crops growing adjacent to where i'm putting my plants i learned this from ron morris and we have a great video which we have a link to here in this talk and that's what he taught me to do to grow cover crops that are persistent once you knock them down or even some like sudex won't even die grow those in the adjacent areas the lanes and the immediately adjacent part of the beds to where you have your planting zone and in your planting zone grow legumes that are high in nitrogen but easy to kill things like cow peas things like crimson clover things like peas fava beans those kinds of plants and they're succulent so if you come through with your no-till planter they're going to be chopped up by the disc the first chops them up and then they're going to be busted up and pulled out by the ripper that opens up your planting hole and they're going to die and they're going to rock quickly and release nutrients to the crop you're planting so basically i'm recommending that you put those kinds of more succulent crops such as cow peas mustard winter peas fava beans and other plants like that in the grow zone and then have on the outer edge and in the lanes wherever you're growing cover crops have those consist of a bunch of the more lignous ones not that you wouldn't grow some of these other plants with them but you'd want to have enough of the highly lignous ones to give you enough residue to get it to stick around one that we didn't get to try this year we're going to experiment with next year is flax flax of course is the famous fiber plant and the highest source of plant available omega-3 fatty acids but not the most readily available source we'll get to that one but i want to grow it as a source of high lignin biomass and so we'll play with that for next year okay all right so excuse me while i convet you about hairy vetch it i already talked about some it's driven me quite nuts i've had a hard time killing it everywhere that i've wanted to have it die in early may when the weather's wrong and it won't die but i did have the pleasure of having every resource i needed to make it work wonderfully and that was at this community garden that i managed for a high-end development mountain air and they had a huge resource which we took advantage of fully they collected the leaves from all these lawns and brought us literally hundreds of yards of leaves which we had no place to put them except for in what were deep paths around our beds and we would come we would have a work day maybe even rent like a a power a power um wheelbarrow that's the only thing you could fit in the little garden gate and we would move hundreds and hundreds of yards of leaves into and on top of the beds we didn't have cover crops on but we mostly had cover crops on the beds unless they were growing some perennials for the members in their in their garden little garden beds but we would basically stomp the leaves in the paths adjacent to the beds and that was a couple weeks process they it was quite a mess and unruly for a couple weeks while we got them really packed in then they would rot down they make wonderful amendments for the soil that soil was sub soil when we first started and it was black and rich when i left after about seven years but the other advantage was that we could come in in february or march and mow this incredible mass of veg that would not die if we wanted to try and kill it right until it was going to seed which is too late sometime in may we could come in and cut it to the ground i call that scalping right just scalp it to the ground let the as much of the residue as it could drop right on the bed and then take a bunch of those rotting leaves which are now quite thick and heavy because they've been sitting all winter in the paths right and pile those on top and that would kill anything it would kill rye it would kill vetch everything died and then this worked fine because the way that resort works is these are second homes people don't come up until the weather's good so they wouldn't come up until late april or early may to start gardening and at that point we could just come in and pull those leaves off and all this residue has rotted down and made a wonderful planting bed and there were no weeds and it was easy to plant so it can work if you do that and that's one way i recommend for a lot of small growers if you don't have a tractor and you want to get your bed ready early if you want to start planting in let's say april this isn't going to work for trying to plant in february or march but if you want to plant let's say in april you can get out there in the end of january or middle of january and just take a bunch of leaves or some other heavy mulch and now silage tarps are used this way but i think salads tarps aren't as fast as the leaves are heavy mulch because they're they're not weighing down and pressing that material into the ground there they allow more air so i think that the rotting is not as quick but silence tarps are used this way too to give you a no-till preparation without having to use a no-till planter and a roller crimper and all of that not that they even work for something like vetch okay then i want to say let's think outside the box you know and i i first came to this this concept when i was asked to visit a regenerative farm farming operation in jamaica and helped them with some ideas and that was revelatory to me it was a joy to work with those people they are wonderful people and they're incredibly resource challenged indeed they can't afford cover crops and they really need them now because basically climate change has resulted in much stronger winds and their crops are being battered by winds and heavy rains to the point where they're thinking of setting up greenhouses in a tropical climate not obviously to hold heat but to protect the crops from how harsh the weather is but actually it started to go this way as early as the 1998 organic growers conference when i did a cover crop talk and i was thinking about that cover crop talk right before i gave it and i realized i'm going to put some unusual things in there so i included two one that i my wife was just asking me if i was going to recommend it again and i said i don't know if i'm going to recommend that one and i'll talk about why in a minute but one was um chickweed and the other one was of all things jerusalem artichokes not something most of us even myself now would think of as a cover crop why i recommended them both is because as a grower i saw the incredible positive effect they had on the soil in the places in this really good garden at the highland lake inn where i worked where the soil was pretty uniform where there'd been large chickweed patches and where we'd had jerusalem art shows for several years when i worked that soil it had more aggregation and better tilt than any place else in the garden so i thought we want those plants we want the plants that make the soil better and i had to come up with a strategy a lot of people think that you can never get rid of jerusalem artichokes there was a similar strategy to what i just talked about you would if you were going to grow jerusalem artichokes i'd recommend them as a cover crop to tame new land right if you get them established they're going to spread they're going to be so thick that other other weeds things like johnson grass are not going to be able to compete and so over the course of a few years you could use them to pioneer new land now if you do that you're not going to get great big wonderful jerusalem artichokes in the center where you're getting that major weed suppression on the outer edges you can still dig great artichokes but basically you're overcrowding the jerusalem artichokes the other thing that happens of course is when you cut them down all those stalks are providing great lignous material for fungi and stuff to aggregate and make really wonderful soil the reason why i'm not as enthused about the chickweed now is about the same time i was doing this our home garden in cielo north carolina had a lot of chickweed and my wife prepared prevailed upon me to leave it all in because she loves it well she couldn't keep up with the volume and neither could my plants chickweed can really really take over not that i'm not going to be talking about some other plants that can do that too but it's harder to harvest enough of it and at a certain point it reaches a point where it's not worth harvesting it becomes so stemmy and even though you don't think it's worth harvesting it's still setting seed like crazy so it can become a problematic winter weed i even speak to that problem a little later in the talk um but i want us to think about these crops because they have several advantages they want to grow they grow low right there all of them are edible i'm going to talk about that a little more in the next talk next next slide but the other reason is when i was there working with nakruma who was telling me about how his squash were being battered in in jamaica by these winds and i could look at it they were young plants about you know that long and the wind was so strong the vines are just being blown around being whipped around how well is any plant going to do if they're being battered by those kinds of winds he said pat if i had cover crops i could grow them a little further out and the plant could grab those as they were growing and they could hold on but he didn't have cover crops and i said the creamer we were at market today and everybody was mad because you all ran out of callaloo callaloo is known to us as amaranth or more commonly in the mountains as pigweed or red root it's a common weed it's an abundant weed it's also an incredibly delicious weed which the people in the carrot and the cow in the caribbean are very aware of they call it callaloo and it is a number one green and i said you can grow more of that and callaloo like most of the plants i'm talking about here makes massive amounts of seed i just like made it a point to chase down and weigh the amount of seed that our my co-worker ian collected this year he wanted to collect i'm sorry i said calhoun that was personally and i'll get to i'll get to that in a minute anyways i recommend callaloo for him it makes hundreds of thousands of seeds per plant and it's small and easy to collect you don't need a lot of equipment so i said you want to just start growing that for seed you'll get tons of greens to sell that market collect those seeds plant them where you want then don't let them take over whenever they're going to become a problem for your crop harvest them and take in the market get paid to grow your cover crop and you can afford to do that you don't need a combine all you need is a a good set of screens you know i mean i'm sure you can make them for less we have a really wonderful set of screens that was donated to us um and we can make we can separate any any small seed quickly and why i started talking about purslane is because that's one one of these plants that actually my co-worker ian actually did collect this year and i called him up and i asked him i said how long did it take you to collect what you got he said i spent less than two hours on a pat i basically went out in the farm and pulled up the biggest purslanes i could find everywhere which were pretty huge i put them in a place where they dry i came back a couple weeks later i used their set of screens to separate the seed i don't think i spent more than an hour and a half at it now it may not look like a lot of seed the jar was about yay yay big and about that tall um and it was only about two thirds full but a certainly maybe a third full i'm sorry i made it a point to weigh it put it in a different container after i set a tear in it that jar contained almost a quarter pound of purslane seed the seed is tiny which means once again hundreds and hundreds of thousands of seeds in that collection process it took them and he says no more than an hour and a half for the entire process so that's possible we can do that with a bunch of these plants we can save our own seeds we can grow them as we'll talk about in the in the next dome next slide more we can sell them their food and they're fast growing and offer alternatives to us for cover crops i have been trying to get us to put more and more sweet alyssum out to get her to establish i haven't been very successful but my co-worker jeremy came to me and said pat i see you doing that all the time and we haven't really been trying to move that agenda for you but i just watched the video and there are these farmers that are growing that as a major understory crop and why do you grow sweetism as an understory crop well it smells wonderful for one thing that's called why it's called sweet alyssum it's also edible if you want to bother the leaves and the flowers are edible but it's an incredible nectary for beneficial insects so you grow it under let's say if you're growing it under tomatoes it's going to feed the wasps that are then going to parasitize the hornworms in your tomatoes so that's another reason to grow it the cresses there's a bunch of cresses there's a thing called rock crest i almost stuck a slide of it in there for you but you can look it up it's if you favor that and collect seeds it'll quickly cover an area and once again it's good eating it's not very long lived you'd grow that a place i might try that in would be after my carrots were up and my carrots had some decent size on them but before they were going to be big enough to canopy i might plant a crop a crop of rock crests in there and harvest it out you know i wouldn't let it get real big but it would be actually quite tasty and that one would be free the other cresses are two there's a broad leaf crest you can buy from some seed growers and then there's one called wrinkle crinkled curly crests developed by one of my favorite plant breeders frank morton both of those are great crops because they're up all three of them are up in a matter of days and will quickly provide a quick crop for you you can cut them a couple times and they'll have been suppressing the weeds all that time they're not going to be there all summer you probably don't want them to be particularly the rock crest you don't want to let it get real weedy but there basically can be a free crop that can provide a rapid cover of the soil and particularly good in in situations where you've got a slow growing crop that's well enough established that it's not going to be dominated by this crop but will actually these crops will germ germinate quickly enough that they will out-compete the other weeds that might be a problem personally and i've kind of talked about already a lot of people probably know that one it's a favorite weed of mine i eat tons of it and it is the highest readily available source of plant-produced omega-3 fatty acids so it's nutritional powerhouse and years ago i read a book called weeds guardians of the soil and in there the author basically his career was determined by a day of weeding he was he was earning some extra money as a young teenager someplace in the midwest i forget where and he was weeding a cornfield for a farmer farmer brought him lunch and a cool drink in the atlas around noon and sat there and ate and talked with him and he looked and saw that there was a lot of purslane growing under his corn and he said you leave that which is the local name for purslane you leave that in when you're weeding don't pull it out and that young man came out in the summer to see how the field he had weeded was doing and it was a drought and in the area he had weeded the purslane out corn was all dried up and dead and where the purse lane was growing it was abundant and the corn was green and thriving and that caused him to enter a career where he wrote a what is a great book i think it's out of print but you can find it for not too much money if you want to buy it and i think it probably you can probably access it online too it's a really a great book the other thing i remember really seeing was a diagram he had of like a few personally i mean a few lambs quarters and amaranth allowed in each row of potatoes and then he showed how much soil opening these great big tall weeds were doing for the whole row so just interesting important to note that these kind of weeds are really vigorous and great bio accumulators and they thrive they germinate quickly they cover the soil quickly and they're edible they can become incredibly weedy so remember that i'm not saying there aren't you know caveats um all right fenugreek flax i've already mentioned what i want to do with that one that's a new one as far as i'm concerned fenugreek i've grown it once as a cover crop peaceful valley farm supply in california actually sold it as a cover crop and they may still sell it as a cover crop but i have not been able to find it in a bulk quantity i finally did and i can i can backward engineer that dig through my box for receipts if somebody wants to know they can contact me at pat livingwebfarms.org um but i finally found a company that sells organic fenugreek seed for sprouting so i was able to get i think it was 45 pounds or maybe it was 55 pounds for about 160 bucks we're going to grow a lot of that as a crop to grow for seed but it's grown widely in india they grow it as a cover crop they they grow it as a food they grow it as an herb the young greens and i don't know the name of it i'm not that knowledgeable about indian cooking but my co-worker ian was a chef and he said oh yeah you go to the indian stores and you buy this bunch of greens and it's fenugreek and i love those kind of crops that can work as a as a cover crop but also as a food and in this case as an herb fenugreek is an important important herb and also a major constituent in curry so it's got a whole lot of uses i also am real interested in it because even though reading about it i haven't seen this but i planted it in late summer because that is when i understood it would do well it doesn't like superheat and i remember surviving some frost and any crop i can get that'll go into the cold season but eventually die that's a total winner because that allows me to plan on a crop killing itself for me and doing it at a way that i can stage the timing of it and have different you know if i want to keep it going longer i can pull row cover over it if it's at all hardy that means it's going to keep living until i cruelly decide at some point you don't get to live anymore i leave the row cover off and then it freezes and dies so to me that that offers a lot of flexibility i last did this 20 years ago i might be misremembering that maybe it's not at all hardy but i remember pretty much it being there in late november which in those days would not have been any plant that was not at least a little frost hardy so that's some of the re it's also a legume by the way so it's gonna be fixing nitrogen and it's very succulent so it's one of those ones i think about for the grow zone because it'll rot away quickly so to me it's got a lot of promise and i plan on doing a whole lot of experimenting next year and i'll keep you all posted okay um all right gallon soga this is one that i now eat every day all summer long i eat at least once a day almost every day anyways not every day but just about you all know this plant you may know it in a much much more weedy looking stage right now it's at the prime time to cut and even if it's got a few more flowers it'd be okay to cut but very quickly it's going to go from this low growing dense cover to this incredibly spidery airy thing that's nothing but flowers and seed pods and that can drive you nuts it has the greatest collection of non-complementary names i've ever heard you know the french call it german weed the germans call it french weed um summer devil white weed one of my favorite mountain names is no business weed it's got no business being in your garden well guess what folks it's got a lot of business being your garden it was a major food for south and central america prior to the colombian pre-columbia and pre-columbian times it's an incredible nutritional powerhouse and it's actually on the or was at least anyways on the home page of the columbian embassy it's a significant important constituent in one of their national dishes which is a stew that includes a 220 day or so mealy potato corn tomato and what they call wasco which is i'm pretty sure always dried gallon soda i haven't even tried to dry it yet i just eat it all summer there's more than enough i could dry tons of it needed all winter if you look this up you'll be amazed at how nutritional it is it's also one of the weakest things i've ever seen and i love it for that because all summer long i have this stage that we see right here you know i have this dense low stage that can come in and cut handfuls of really easy to use food the stems are tender enough i can just chop the whole thing up saute it and have it for lunch or breakfast uh you know any any time of day it's one of my favorite summer foods it has a really nice flavor that my niece described as kind of like artichoke how to describe flavors of dissimilar plants is i go on for a long time about all the plants i read about being described as tasting nutty i don't get nutty at all i get distinctive flavors but i don't get nutty so i wouldn't say that it tastes like artichoke myself but my niece would anyways i highly recommend it you do want to control it if you let it get past the stage where it is good to eat it's going to quickly put up tons of seed heads and stalks and it'll be quite competitive with your plants and it will also make tons of new weeds for later on but like i said for me that's a plus because they're germinating somewhere in my garden anytime all summer it looks just like this and i could grab grab big handfuls of it and take it home to eat you know so to me it's a total winner amaranth i've spoken quite a bit about i'm sure other people would think you don't want to grow that that's a horrible weed there is a version of it that i recommend you not grow that spiny amaranth i'm not recommending anybody treat spiny ant amaranthus anything other than something to get out of your garden it's got one of the longer sharper translucent thorns that i've ever seen if you grab that in a hurry boy it'll hurt it'll hurt a lot so i'm not talking about spiny amaranth but the other amaranth and indeed there's a bunch of cultivars that are grown for grain are grown for ornament and indeed grown for dye it's got a lot of uses and as i said in the caribbean it's a major major and cherished green and then finally lamb's quarters so both amaranth and lamb's quarters can also be used as a grain crop lamb's quarters actually is a first cousin of quinoa and it looks just like quinoa when it first starts growing and its seeds can be used like quinoa both amaranth and lambsquarters lots of small highly nutritious seeds you do want to be sure to rinse them very well they're coated with saponins that were you to ingest those saponins they would be hard on your liver but if you rinse them really well they can make really good grain and if you're if you're into doing like deeply sustainable production where you get as much food as you can from your land you might want to avail yourself of that for me there are crops that i could use as alternative cover crops and as food and indeed lamb's quarter is special because maybe maybe along with the fenugreek and with the cress um maybe not with the fenugreek and for sure with the crust it will take cold you could grow that well so it could be uh early early spring crop that you saw as a cover crop and it could also go well into winter as a cover crop and once again you can collect lots of seeds and grow it densely so this is probably my most out of the box you know weird one a lot of people think i'm not growing weeds but i've been an advocate for weeds for a long time and i still am they are dynamic they're far more vigorous and almost in every case far more nutritious than any of the crops we grow and we can use them as cover crops and for places where cover crop seed is expensive this is the answer you know i definitely want to encourage anybody that's in communication with places where it is hard to come up with cover crop seed go for these plants that make tons of tiny seed that you can collect yourself and spread and then use them as food and control them that way so they don't get out of control because if you don't they will get out of control and then you'll be mad at me because your crops are going to be negatively impacted by them but if you do it this way your crops are going to be positively impacted because of the exudates they're producing the soil production protection they're producing and the other weed suppression that they are producing note not a single weed that i'm recommending here is a perennial i'm not recommending perennial weeds as a cover crop okay so some portion of all the plants on that last slide are edible you know and some of them every bit of them is edible tillage radish you can eat all of it including the seed pods now i would suspect that these seed pods are a little big and might be tough they'll certainly be hot i promise you that you know they'll be hot and juicy they might also be sweet if it's been cold but like let's see if i get the sky to show it here right oh darn it right there in there those are seed pods that are small enough that they probably be quite delicious all these ones that are swollen like these guys over here too to the right but i'm kind of blocking actually let me step out of the way for a second so you can see them well maybe i can't okay anyway um there's some seed pods over there those younger seed pods are the ones that are gonna be quite delicious so i recommend those um you might even decide that they're a crop if you had a lot of radish going that was all in the good forage good stage you could cut whole i wouldn't try and pick them i just cut whole stalks of of seed pods and take on the market there is by the way a radish they sell for seed pods it's got one of my least favorite names of any crop it's called rat tail radish it's got a long succulent seed pod i'm sorry that is not a metaphor that i like that's not an image that appeals to me but i'm a farmer who's had to deal with the fact that rats and farms go pretty well together so i'm not a big fan of them anyways all of the blossoms on the clovers are edible um the growing tips of pea shoots and we're going to talk more about that of peas are edible both when they're young but also as they get taller all of the tips are edible and the way to spot if that pea shoot is going to be tender is if you look at a pea shoot you'll see that there's leaves that come off the stem and then after a few of those leaves and the tendrils there's a bigger leaf and it actually surrounds the stem if you pil pick your pea shoots right below that big leaf that surrounds the stem everything above it will always be tender why pea shoots to me are not a long-lived crop because they certainly will make shoots forever is that pretty quickly it's hard to cut a lot of those in a hurry when they're young they're all kind of close together and you get a lot that are basically all cut right at that place and they're tender but as they get older it just takes too much time to pick enough tender shoots that it's worth the money by that point you're probably just picking them for yourself and for your salad but not probably not for harvest the seeds and the flowers and the sprouts of sunflowers are edible and indeed i have to check in this more but carrie lindsey my old boss at the highland lincoln talked about grilling the entire immature seed head now i don't know if that means that he's just eating the young seeds that are grilled i'm sure he's eating the young seeds before they have a shell on them because it wouldn't be worth grilling and then trying to shell them but i don't know that if any other part of that seed head is edible but that was there's always a new thing to learn about the edibility of plants that's for sure buckwheat sprouts are edible and i don't have it on here i forgot to put it on there but of course fenugreek is you know part of the national cuisine cuisine in italy so and then the flowers and the flower buds of all the brassicas the kales the turnips the um radishes all those are also edible so there's a lot of food in your cover crop okay um if you're going to kill a cover crop in the summer you have to be careful a lot of cover crops if you want to try and kill sudex in the summer if you don't use an herbicide which i'm not recommending you're not going to kill it you know even if you flail mow it it's coming back up now there's an advantage to that if you do it in the right place because every time it comes back up as i've already said it's pushing its roots down really low so you actually get a major benefit from doing that um but you're not going to kill it so you want to be careful not to plant it where you're going to plant so this was a mix that we made we designed pretty carefully we picked different different um millets there's taller and shorter millets pearl is a taller one prozo and german foxtail are shorter and german foxtail is particularly important to me because if we're kind of late on getting a summer cover crop in where we want to plant a fall crop it'll mature in 60 days you know some of the other ones might take 80 or 90 and that's not going to work for us because you can't kill them until they're senescing but if they're senescing when you roll them they'll die so we combined here millet um sun hemp and sunflowers and then let them get good and big and roll them down and there was a a bunch i just went out drove back over to the farm to catch john henry nelson who i work with and i wanted to run my take of what happened out here this year last year rather this is a picture from last year with his we did not get even though this looks like a lot of biomass and i talked with john henry he said pat that was a lot of biomass that should have worked it didn't work and you can see that the spaces where we ripped to put the plants in are opened up a little bit but there's even a little bit of space in between last year is the year i call our grass disaster and it was just the perfect year for grasses to grow it was cool and moist all summer long and the grasses loved it and they came up through this and they drove us nuts eventually we solved this problem but it i'll show you how in a minute you have to have if you're doing organic no-till you have to have a fallback position or you're going to lose your shirt you know and there's different ones i my friend mark dempsey who i gave a talk with last week by the way that is going to be available if you join if you participate in the carolina farm stewardship conference and i have a have a link here for you there um that on the 10th of november and then we'll have a question and answer session later in that day zoom sessions so we can talk to people about it which is pretty tangential to this talk i originally this talk and that talk were one talk but i broke them apart so i could do one for us and we could do one for the for the carolina farm stewardship association um and in talking with mark dency about dempsey about his problem he among many other things that he does for carolina farm stewardship helps to manage lomax farm which is their internship um uh what they call them incubator farm right so they're working with young farms young farmers not so much interns but rather we're farms farmers can take a patch an acre or two and practice farming with it with support and with resources and he said pat same thing happened to us in 2019 we got destroyed by grasses but we solved it by using silage tarps so we grew that biomass and when the when the grasses and the weeds wouldn't stop coming up through them we just put silage tarps right up to the plants and we had incredible production but if we didn't have those silage tarps we would have lost our shirts so you do have to think about something else that you can do and we're going to look at some other solutions but this just it didn't work for us i i went out and talked to john too i said what are some of the other solutions and we'll look at some of the things i thought of and some thoughts that he had about it okay so this was a really innovative solution that john henry came up with this year our john henry and ian came up with i just got to film it i love seeing it it's not the best of pictures but if you look on the left side you'll see a long black row out there and that's our cucumbers and basically john henry has learned to use our manure spreader which is side discharge if you're buying a manure spreader boy do i recommend a side discharge one if you want to use it for mulch it's pretty perfect if you want to lay out compost windrows it's pretty perfect i think it's far easy far easier to control than a rear discharge um comp t manure spreader anyway what they did was they took we have a bunch of big pots from another project we did and they put one over every cucumber and then they just came through and dumped tons of leaves on it you can see here where they've opened them up and then you can see um right here in the lower corner where there's two that haven't been opened up yet and so that that worked really well the cucumbers had no weeds and it was far more labor intensive than just rolling down a cover crop but it wasn't that hard we got it done pretty quick i've since then thought well if you didn't have pots if you had ground cover fabric the black fabric that a lot of farmers use to control the weeds in their paths or for nursery crops or for other reasons you could basically make a very few hoops probably and put hoops over and just a few staples over your crop and then throw the throw the leaves on that and that will probably help you to pull that off and not have your leaves be covered up we've actually also just dumped the leaves and kind of dug the plants out but that's a lot slower if you can keep a bunch of the leaves off of the plants you'll do great now this is easily said by us because we are an urban area and we can just tell several landscape companies come dump your leaves here and we literally get hundreds of yards of leaves that we quickly spread across our farm to control weeds so it's a huge resource for us and if you don't have that resource then you have to go have to go to what the next slide is going to show um nope it's not this it's the next slide after this one this is just to show you what the cover crop that you just saw a picture of looked like when it was growing it is a lot of biomass you know john henry is saying pat i wouldn't think he didn't have a lot of biomass there we were impressed with how much biomass we had but it wasn't enough to control those grasses in a rainy cool season but i talked with him how could it be better and i've been thinking about that ahead of time and he he agreed with everything that i put out there and he had some thoughts of his own too and the big thought that i had was let's get some more um filler in there so fenugreek you know it's kind of this airy plant if we had a bunch of that in there would that add some more mass to what we're putting down it probably got away pretty quick but by the time it rotted away it might have inhibited those grasses long enough that our plants would be starting to canopy and we wouldn't need to have that protection they'd be there as grasses but they wouldn't have access to the sun so they wouldn't matter to us because their annual grasses are not a big deal for us unless they're competing you know so that was one of the ones i thought we won't be doing that next year next year we hope to actually grow a crop of fenugreek for seed and maybe the year after we'll have enough to try that this year i'd say we'd probably try to terminate cow peas for a similar similar use i'd use the terminate because the iron and clay the vining cow peas they can get so robust that they're hard to kill without flail mowing them and we don't want to flame well we want to have as much residue residue as we can sticking around in the forefront of this picture right here that's all sun hemp and then deeper in you can see it bigger being bigger and taller i've got a link on one of my ending slides to an interesting article in that article they say don't grow with anything else because i'll outcompetes them the other things won't do well well i don't think that's the case here in the front here you see that but i think that's just because of how things were seated we had millet and sunflowers that did quite well here too but i am now thinking from what they said that this might be an excellent sun hat might be an excellent um smother crop because if you do grow it densely and i've got a picture that'll show you that it pretty much will exclude light for anything else so sometimes multi-species isn't the way to go and that's when you're growing a smother crop a smother crop is a crop that you grow to grow so densely that it smothers out the light for the weeds that are trying to come up and it may also be a leopathic or it may just like be such a good grower that it hogs all the nutrients and all the water so that's what a smother crop is buckwheat is one of my favorite smother crops and now maybe this but it's another concept that we may not cover more so it's good that i cover it right here okay so the other thing that we might have thought about doing was fertilizing this crop if we fertilized it we might have had far more biomass and that ties right into the the first talk that was in this new series of live stream talks that we're giving and that's dan hettinger's waste not urine that video's up and i highly recommend it and indeed dan's really good about talking about being sure that it's safe to use the urine and there's lots of ways you want to be sure it can be perfectly safe if you're careful this is human urine we're talking about but um in this situation even if you're less careful it would hardly matter because it's going to be a solid three months from when you plant this early on fertile you wouldn't fertilize it now you fertilize it in the early stages not three i'm sorry not three months six weeks um before you're then rolling it down putting your other crop in you're going to easily hit the basically the standard that's that goes for all of how we relate to waste products that come from mammals that are very good for fertility but may have pathogens that are that we can also be bothered by is the what was the organic standard now is the food safety standard that is 90 days after incorporation it's safe to harvest any crop that's not touching the ground doesn't have soil touching it okay but it's after incorporation or 120 days we could easily figure this out so it could be 90 days before the plant that you're going to harvest has has any any interaction with the soil that had the urine put on it not the cover crop of the plant you're going to harvest after that that would easily be 90 days or 120 days how you get incorporation is by the mowing down and that covers where you put the urine in so you've now incorporated it so that's the possibility um i think it's the future interestingly people who know about it talk about the fact that before we hit peak oil we're likely to hit peak phosphorus peak phosphorus is not something that people who are doing diverse cover crops and encouraging mycorrhizae have much to worry about because the mycorrhizae can access the phosphorus and indeed too much phosphorus will shut the mic horizon down but if you're doing industrial ag you count on having fertilizer in a bag that's been treated with acids minerals have been treated with acid so it's readily available and we're running out of that mineral so that's going to become a problem but if you're using your own urine you've got plenty of phosphorus right there so that is another piece of that solution just a little hats off to dan for a great workshop i'm not gonna be not nearly as articulate about that as i am right now any longer okay the other solution and this is a longer term solution is animal integration that may well be the secret sauce of our how to how to not have a weed problem and do no-till and we are inspired by biodynamics i don't have time to go into why right now but we are and we're also aspiring to actually be a a certified biodynamic farm so we have to be committed to that because one of the tenets of biodynamics is that all of your nutrients come from your farm and they believe and we fully agree with them that you can't have dynamic fertility without having an animal component that is the way the world works animals and plants together create fertility we don't do it independent of each other so this year mark dempsey our friend who i talked about a little earlier who i did a carolina farm stewardship workshop with which will be available if you join the conference on november 10th and i and rocco and john henry and i were all sitting out looking at a plot that we wanted to do a no-till trial with and we said mark i don't think it's going to work there's too many grasses and way too much veg he said yeah we're not going to be able to do it and then we all looked at each other and said what am going to do about this patch this is a disaster waiting to just cause us future problems because all that vetch is going to go to seed all those grasses are going to go to seed and finally rocco said we need cows and we've been wanting to get cows anyways we got these cows from our florida farm they're a special breed from zimbabwe they're marshonas i've got a link that describes them more they're particularly good at eating a great diversity of cover crops they're excellent foragers they're small statues they're also pretty good at doing this right here you never see these guys scattered out they're always in a tight herd which really makes mob grazing work really well and so we brought those over and hats off to rocco he basically has them at our grand view farm which is about five miles away from our north farm where we had this vetch grass problem he got all the fencing installed no small feet and then he literally takes the um cattle trailer and moves this herd back and forth when we need to have the animals chew down and suppress a cover crop we want i mean a weedy crop or a cover crop we want them to always get it in the boot stage right right as it's making seed before it sets seed that's an ideal nutritious time for nutrition time for them and the perfect time for us because they're going to get it before there's any hard seed that make it through their digestive tract so they're not going to be reseeding for us they're going to get all the nutrition and we basically put those cows out on that patch i described which is about three acres and they cleaned it up when they were done it was nothing but flat residue and lots of manure and then we just plant that into a summer cover crop which then is going to create the incorporation we need so down the road we can come back in and no till roll that down and plant so it's it's got a great future um and we're real excited by it we've also seen as john henry was saying that also if we'd be if we'd been sure to graze animals over a cover crop before we put that summer cover crop in everywhere we've grazed the animals the fertility has been incredible we've seen far more vigorous cover crops so we want to get to a place where we always have the animal grazing happen before we plant our final cover crop which is the one that we're going to no-till drill into anywhere from six weeks to four months later so that that to us is a big piece of the future we're all pretty on fire about it i can go on about that a lot longer but no time so we'll just move on all right so this is the slide that i promised you two slides back i forgot the order and there's mark in the red shirt down at the very end this was a failed experiment the experiment failed not because of the cover crop but because we were trying to use a no-till tobacco drill that was pretty old it was given to us by a wonderful man named um oh i'm feeling his first name now morrison is his first name i'm forgetting right now but anyways it'll come back to me john morrison john morrison is an incredible innovator uh made his his made his career as an expert on tillage and then became the president of the no-till society as he as he was going into retirement and he invented a thing called the morrison cedar that we'll look at and talk about a little later but he gave us a no-till tobacco planter that we tried to use here and we just couldn't get it to work the soil's too way too rough here for that it's a heavy clay soil and we basically just tortured all of our seedlings to death so the overall experiment didn't work but we did grow in the course of about six weeks enough cover crop to set up a mow and blow situation so that's one of the solutions that we see to this problem of getting cover crops to die we want to grow like i described a setup where we have a planting zone with something that's going to die easily and in this case it's higher lignin as it gets older but this is a pretty young version of it this is young sun hemp and we grew nothing but sun hep where we're going to plant and then adjacent to that over here on the um on the left that's all got the multi-species mix in it lots of sudex lots more biomass the other thing about that is the sudex and some of the other things in there they're not going to die when we roll them down or cut them so we can come through and cut that and use that biomass to mulch once this sun hemp is rotted away and our plants need more mulch what we want to get to and we're about to try experimenting except for we killed all of our plants and ran out of time is where we can have these brassicas what we planned on sewing into here was brassicas have them sewn have them get maybe five or six true leaves so they'll be about a foot to 12 and 14 inches tall then come through mow down our cover crop and we're going to try and develop a way to blow it over on top of and then we can shake it down around this crop if we for this year if we'd gotten the brassicas to work we would have mowed it down by hand and just carried it over and mulched with it why i picked this mix was because of a at the southeast cover crop conference stuart weiss who i mentioned a little earlier along with danielle treadwell two extension agents one from florida one from virginia island virgin islands rather did a series of blocks of cover crop trials and they had one where they cut down a very rich legume and then they mulched it with bermuda grass and i said i bet if you look underneath there you're going to see incredible soil life because i've learned that if you take a really rich succulent waste product like actually i got taught this by bob corning a brilliant biodynamic grower who has since passed on but he taught me that you could take food waste as long as it wasn't anaerobic cover it with four inches of hay or straw and it would rot in a matter of a week or two you get incredible soil activity and you'd have nothing left and so that's what we wanted to capture here the the sun hemp is succulent at this stage very high in nitrogen if we took our cover crop put it on top at that stage it would create this basically dynamo of sheet mulching so that's an added way you can do it and we're going to take a break in about five minutes i'll finish this slide and then we'll we'll take a break essentially you're looking at here our roller crimper we'll talk about that a little more in a moment but this is where you need a crop that will roll or crimp in the summertime and mostly what you saw on the other slide was we grew ones that were old enough that they roller crimped because they were senescing but here we're able to kill the sun hemp because it has such a brittle stem so you can kill it at any stage to me that makes it a summer star that high nutrition that relative succulents so it'll rot away quickly enough to feed that grow zone but stay long enough to suppress the weeds in the early stage total winter the other point i want to make is that earthway earth i'm sorry earth tools of kentucky joel of earth tools made this roller crimper for us he makes them to order and it's cost about 1200 bucks it weighs about 300 pounds he made it for us to use it on our walk behind tractor none of us like using it because we have to walk behind it or offset the handles such that we stay out of the way of that roller crimper if we're backing up and that um is not not something that causes a lot of confidence we're all a little bit nervous when we do that so it hasn't been our favorite way rocco figured out that we could put it on our atv and it works like a charm i bet you could put it on a lawnmower a riding lawnmower and pull it that way too and so for us that's been a real winner you know so essentially the other tweak that i'd say might help us with this so if we had the the lignus cover crops growing on the side then when our rolled down mulch didn't work as it didn't in that picture i showed for our fall crops we could have taken this growing summer crop that would keep regenerating mulch and put it there instead of leaves for us we're probably going to leave use the leaves because they're easy to get we've got a spreader but i don't want to offer an option that's only going to work if you're lucky enough to live in a place where landscaping companies drive deliver you hundreds of yards of leaves so this is the other solution to the same problem and it's similar except for you're growing your mulch rather than using leaves that are delivered to you the other piece that john henry um spoke about a while back and it's kind of stuck with me and you could kind of see it are the potential for it let's go back a couple of slides here for a minute right here you can see that this no-till transplanter we have it makes these furrows right and these furrows are great for getting plants in but they're also wide open there's no there is no biomass protecting us from the weeds growing and so weeds come up like crazy in those furrows so what john henry said is he wants a water wheel transplanter and what's different about a water wheel transplanter is it doesn't rip open a strip it's a wheel that has a bunch of big spikes on it and those spikes pop open a hole for you and you can make a bunch of different sizes if you can make a water wheel transplant that you could change the wheels on they're not made that way they're made with a set spacing above here it's not enabled so but but there is actually a link if you just punch in farmhack water wheel transplanter that should take you to plans for making one so this would be a real expensive piece of equipment but you can make one for considerably less and they've had good success with it they did point out that the plans meant for it to be an 8 inch spacing they only got a 6 inch spacing that to me is a plus because we want to oftentimes plant plants further apart than six inches but not as much as 16 inches which would be if there was an eight inch spacing so what we could do if it's only a six inch spacing is we could have a setup where we stuck one plant into the transplanter that was the crop we're growing and the other one that was something like sweet alyssum or cilantro or one of the other low growing cover crops and so they would spread and create that living mulch and we'd have our spacing we'd have a foot spacing so that to me is a better design anyway that's it i guess the link is down bottom here now farms nope it's not i don't know what that is all right anyway the link is there somewhere and we're done we're going to take a break so so so so so so so so so do so so okay we're back i hope everybody got a quick refreshing break there but let's move along so here we see tools that you can use for roller crimping and there's a huge array of them we actually have another one that will show too but the simplest of all i did this for a no-till workshop is some source of weight and something with an edge so i used heavy chain rope to hold it and a tomato steak and i basically would drop it down so the tomato steak hit the cover crop and then the chain dropped on top of that and that would crimp it and if you didn't get a good grip you could step on it too and then here you see the roller crimper again and the one point that i didn't make a lot in the last slide about that is that literally john mashey of the veterans healing farm came to borrow at one time they had the wrong hitch they discovered that two men i say men on purpose because i bet it was a lot of hard work or two really strong women are weaker men like myself um you know not myself probably i don't think i'd want to do this at 70 years old but two two strong healthy young people i shouldn't have said men but really strong healthy young people um managed to roll roller crimp this but it does weigh 300 pounds before you put the 50 pound weights on both sides of it so it's it's pretty heavy but they were able to do it by hand and you could use it that way there's another solution that um john came up with but you might think that that much weight is just going to compact the soil but because it's spread out and because the cover crop is also distributing weight you can literally actually drive over a toe to bode as i cause call it and describe it there and the toad will live we first time we used our roller crimper in our grandview greenhouse we had toads popping up all over the place they're all kind of looking like what happened here you know but it actually worked fine and the toads are in a little hole it doesn't crush it enough to bother those toads at all we didn't didn't hurt the toads so that's good news okay so so and mo is another surefire way to establish a cover crop it depends on rain you can actually literally sew into and here i hand sewed because i didn't have our earthway distributing cedar broadcast cedar but i'd recommend that you'll save money on seed hand sew into this cover crop then come through and flail mow it which is what you're looking at here that's the bed that had had that cover crop in it and eight days later there was a super moon and a lot of rain that cover crop is six inches tall so that's that's a real winner um it works every time it doesn't work at all in drought even if you have sprinklers we have sprinklers it's not enough rain unless you run them all the time you need to have rain for this to work but it works really well and you can do this into not only cover crops but weeds or crop residues and it works wonderfully that what you mow on top provides the mulch you need for that cover crop to grow even though you haven't incorporated it okay and this basically this slide says the same thing so we're going to move right along this is the morrison no-till cedar and you could use this to plant cover crops but the problem is you would have to drive over where you seat it because it can only do one row at a time mark schoenbeck has done a similar thing to doing a one row cedar but he used an earthway so he can put him really close together and we have it linked to his talk up and he tells you what size seed plates to use for putting every cover crop in this actually is also good for strip tillage or for planting crops but it's not good for beds it has to be in rows john morrison described this so it could even be pulled by a horse he was a a brilliant innovator and we are going to miss him for ever now but anyways this shows that you can actually use strip tillage into cover crops and grow into thick heavy cover crops and get wonderful production and here we did a whole area that way using the morrison tiller both as a cedar and as a strip tiller this was like basically clover clover cover crop with grasses in it we were using mostly as pasture and we were able to plant plants into it and they all did great and if you have access to it having a no-till drill really can guarantee you germination our no-till drill needs to be tweaked that's why i'm up there it's designed to just put one kind of seed in so i was up there with buckets adding different seeds so we could grow the grow the different cover crops and have the grow zones it worked pretty well but it was constant management on my part my part but you cover a lot of territory in a hurry when you have a great big no-till drill like this and they all the seeds come up even in a drought because you get down on that moist soil okay and then here's my genius friend john mashie um of the veterans healing farm he needed a roller crimper he didn't have one he had to borrow ours and so he came up with making one this is essentially a lawn roller the kind you fill with water to press the seed into a lawn they cost about a hundred bucks he went to a local machine shop with some anger angle iron had him cut some holes in there so he could take a ratchet strap and ratchet strap the angle iron on so he gets the weight and then that sharp edge and he gets the crimp john's quite a genius and a wonderful innovator okay this is basically this picture's here to set the stage for the next part of the talk and basically here you see a cover crop that worked you're going to see a few more pictures there's a few weeds in the forefront starting to come up but basically this was enough well dried down dense cover crop that our squash and our sweet potatoes in 2019 did spectacularly well here you see the no-till drill it's actually sweet potatoes that are being put in there i'm going to talk more about the squash crop but you'll be able to see the sweet potatoes on the left we're not a big fan of this drill it's we have yet to adapt it so that the cells the seedlings land well and everyone is planted without having to come back and reset it was still pretty fast for the year we did it with the squash that squash this drill and the squash crop that i'm talking about now was a spectacular crop as were the sweet potatoes in this section here you can see that there's a lot of really great residue here okay there's the squash crop on the left there is where the seed potatoes the sweet potatoes you were seeing being put in and they've now canopied there's no longer any weeding needed no weeding was needed here at all and we got a spectacular crop um okay and there's the harvest some of it you can't i couldn't even get a picture of the whole room but we had a wonderful huge crop with no work whatsoever once we put them in it was really really exciting and so that's that's no-till working the way we want it to work um there you get a close-up i don't i said without any weeds but you see a few little weeds in there but not enough to cause a problem i accomplished a similar thing back in 1997 when i came back from first learning from dr elaine ingham about plants and their exudates and i wanted to have plants growing everywhere we used to just do lots and lots of leaf mold to protect us from getting weeds in our squash patches that was less than ideal because we were getting the leaf from a leaf dump and that leaf dump also had a lot of nutsedge and mugwort in it so we were causing problems it was good to get away from that essentially what i did here was so as i was starting seedlings these are not direct plant squash they're seedlings right as i was starting seedlings in the greenhouse we sewed buckwheat and then we put the seedlings out we mulched around it with grass clippings you could see there so that the row that i created i basically sewed buckwheat over the entire section then i came through with a flamer and flamed open rows for the squash okay and then where the squash went in we used grass clippings so weeds wouldn't grow there and then a dedicated organic um hero robin cahanowicz long time carolina farm stewardship member she was working with us then and she came out twice a week and used hedge shears to cut back the buckwheat as the squash ran its winter squash ran into where the buckwheat had been the buckwheat rotted away pretty quick but it suppressed the grasses and the weeds that would have come up long enough for the squash to grow over it and canopy and once again a huge bumper crop this was a 60 by 100 foot area and we might have had 10 or 15 um amaranths and lambsquarters and stuff like that in the whole patch it looked really nice which was really important for the highland lake end because that's a basically customer driven display garden so highly productive too we had tractor trailer tractor front end motors full of squash coming out of there okay this shows the roll of temperature to the left you can see a big tall crop of a grain corn it was probably bloody butcher and it's really healthy and fine it had buckwheat like this in it when it was first coming up except for the buckwheat's all from self-seeding from years where we didn't get it mowed down soon enough we didn't plant any of it and so that corn there would have been impacted like this corn except for the buckwheat doesn't do well in hot weather and so the buckwheat germinated here was probably the corn was probably planted in late april the buckwheat germinated started to grow but then it got hot and dry and the corn totally outstripped it and the buckwheat was a nice insectiary that kind of suppressed the early weeds and it was really worked out really well here this corn went in at the end of may when it cooled off like i said to be june was like april the buckwheat got almost five feet tall totally suppressed the corn you can see the corn is in those darker rows barely doing well not doing well actually we got a lousy harvest of corn had we been able to come in with a harvester and harvest the buckwheat it would have been a bumper crop so that's just something to be aware of the temperature really affected it meanwhile the temperature didn't as much affect the squash and the squash is doing great that squash is now growing into what was left of the corn that was trying to grow in the middle row so temperature can really affect which cover crops do well and how the crops perform with those corn does not do well in the cool and the buckwheat easily out competed it okay p shoots inner planet as a cover crop amongst cauliflower can work really well i think we've got a slide that shows it at the same time yeah mark really he we use the same slide in the talk i gave last week and he said that's got to be clover but if you look close that's actually peace shoots we've got to close up on the next picture basically here i came through after the cauliflower was established well enough that the piece couldn't compete probably at about the four true leaf stage and came through on a week that i knew was going to be rainy with peas that i had soaked so the radical the beginning of the root was just swelling away from the pea and i basically just sewed them into what was a light um leaf mold leaf mulch the leaf mulch was suppressing the weeds so that the cauliflower didn't get covered up by the weeds and then i brought this other cover crop on top that was also a major food crop it's a particular pea shoot i'll talk about in the next slide but we got about three solid cuttings of pea shoots before they just weren't growing in a way that they were cost effective to harvest and they they nourish the cauliflower rather than rather than impacting it negatively and indeed they actually help the leaf mold to rot and provide even more food to the cauliflower these are the peas we use it's called holland dao i wrote an article from otherwise news and they researched it and came up with the fact that hollande dial is spelled different in chinese but phonetically hol on down means peashoot it is the best pea to grow for pea shoots it's only available from stokes are that i can easily find it's only available from stoke's garden stoked seeds and you have to be very careful to make sure you get the untreated seed they have treated and untreated and you don't want the seed that has a you before it there's a number for the seed you know that all these catalogs have numbers for their seeds and in the number for the treated seed there's a u and you do not want the seed with the u in it you want it without it you get your crop of pea shoots in about 10 days they can produce several cuttings and you can even have it that if the weather cools off even if it's summer you might get a crop of peas so they're a real winner okay here is another example here i sewed cover crop into a heavy leaf mold leaf mulch in a greenhouse and we got abundant solid cover crops underneath our brassicas you can see we've been picking on these collards for a while but the cover crop is coming up strong and basically our experience was that our crops did better because of this we actually they went longer it was like usually in a greenhouse we're going to plant our tomatoes sometime in april or early may and the cover crop the brassicas were still doing incredibly well usually they bolt it because of the heat but the cover crops were cooling the soil and they were doing that respiring that i talked about that air conditioning and one day on a hot a hot early may day jeremy walked out of the greenhouse with an arm full of kale and said pat our kale collards are doing better than as if we didn't have anything grown underneath them so it's a real winner and here the same experiment i planted cover crop into beets before we harvested them and you can see what that looks like a little better in an upcoming slide and this just is saying that i was worried that it wasn't going to be enough seed because it looked kind of sparse back there i thought i might have to come back and sew more seed but in the end it filled out and that's the same bed where the beets were so you can see there was plenty of seed and you want to be careful for sowing underneath crops you don't need as much seed as you might think you need so you can save money and maybe not create a problem and this kind of shows how early on the beets when they were you know about three weeks out from harvesting they're impacted by cold this isn't a greenhouse it's january that's why they look like that but they're still producing they made decent-sized three-inch roots or so but at that stage i sewed the cover crop right into that the cover crop is really struggling also i thought it's going to be disturbed when i pull out the see the roots but literally because we watered right afterwards even the ones that were pulled up as we pulled out the roots simply re-rooted grew looked like that after we harvest it you can see it's thicker there towards the back where we haven't harvested yet and then by the time we're ready to plant tomatoes right here you can see this cover crop is not as lush as this one over here which had been in when we first did the sewing but still a great cover crop to have when you wouldn't have had time if you didn't do this so it's a real a winner you can actually sow into root crops about three or four weeks before harvest you won't hurt them by harvesting and the cover crop will actually then give you a nice growth of cover crop before your next time around this is just showing more of that under sowing also under cylinder under kale and then you can see here kind of further down where the cursor is that's a lush full cover crop there coming on big time and that's the kind of cover crop that made it work for us so that's a real winner um now we're going to talk about insects so cover crops are an incredible habitat for insects and essentially if we're going to successfully have balance on our farms and not have to try and struggle with insects what we want to do is maximize the diversity of insects we have and that is what we're doing here when we grow cover crops that's an incredible diverse area for all kinds of insect operations to happen that is recreating the original wisdom and the original wisdom of nature is incredible productivity maximum solar energy captured maximum diversity in all forms that's why i don't like to just talk about insects because there's going to be toads in there there's going to be birds in there all kinds of life in your cover crops just ramping up the life and that life is the fertility you know and that is the original wisdom um pretty interesting we're going to talk about it quickly in the next slide but right here if you look at that this slide if it comes up and we won't wait long for it to do it if it's either going to pop up for us or not um yeah it's going to real quickly pop up yeah yeah um got it okay cow peas have extra floral nectaries right at the top of each bean coming off there's a bad guy feeding on it and that's what happens so i don't like to call any of them bad guys that's a that's a member of the ladybug family that's a that's a bean beetle and it's feeding on the extra floral nectary it's a pour right at the top of each bean as it's coming off but that's also going to feed all kinds of parasitoids and pollinators also hitting them right here i'm wondering if this is going to be can we get close up pretty quick on this yeah okay there's the bad guy quote quote the rogue of the ladybug family and you can see it's feeding on that and good shots of a whole lot of action will be good too like where you see a whole lot flying around you can see the light flying all around there's a wasp feeding on the extra floral nectar and there are extra floral nectaries on different parts of plants these are about basically getting the insects to come in not only is that water going to feed on that but if it's starting to leave it notices that there's a caterpillar it's going to grab that caterpillar chew it up and take it home and feed it to its um youngins you saw an ant there ants are in the same family as wasp their hymenoptera and so they also are going to really benefit from this extra floral nectary situation there's also going to be flies in here all kinds of good flies there we gotta fly right there you know that's probably um a fly that's also going to lay its eggs um next to a beneficial a pest a whole lot of them do that they're going to use the pest as a nursery for their young but right now it's going to feed on the extra flow and nectarine and we can watch this for a while longer i love this it's really fascinating this is available on our website you can see a wasp right there feeding just watch the whole thing when you get a chance we're going to get right out of this right now though um and go back to the slideshow which how do i do that now i close this yeah the sunflowers the cow peas and the sun all have extrapolated so that's like this is like the extra extra coral nectar in heaven you don't want me to run your swatch which one is it well right is it there look at the size of this grasshopper yeah we got some big grasshoppers right nice there actually are predacious grasshoppers too but that's not one of them yeah just come in and do it okay we're back okay right here anyway folks there's a bunch of plants i'm going to talk while he tries to figure that out um there's a bunch of plants that have extra floral nectaries some of the ones that i can think of are all of the veggies that are cover crops also all the veggies fava beans sunflowers have extra fluoromechanics you know so there's a whole array of um of plants that have extra floral nectaries and that means that in cool weather or when there's not anything flowering you're still nourishing our insect life which is critical insect populations are crashing because of neonicotinoids and roundup and other plant other pesticides that are messing with their gut biology that are messing with their immune systems um that are made causing sub-lethal poisoning that means they can't compete they can't find their way to their crops um there's lots of things that are at war with insects and we are not going to survive as a species without insects we don't have a chance we need them for so much it's it's hard hard to imagine and so that is a winner i love sharing that um a little bit of a video i recommend watching the whole thing it just as wonderful to see the life that is on the extra floral nectaries of the cow peas but there's plenty of other plants that also have these extra floral nectaries okay all right so if you're growing brassicas out there there's going to be cross-striped cabbage worms that's what this was and there's going to be imported cabbage worms we all know about worms on brassicas if you let those populations build up you'll get the predators the peconid wasps that control each of them the problem is that it's kind of hard to do that if they're eating your crops but if they're your cover crop what do you care it's all going to work out and then what's going to happen is you're going to have high levels of these baconated wasps ready to move from your cover crop to your crop which is also being impacted by these pests and that's what that diverse cover crop is is doing is providing these opportunities for these pest predator relationships to balance out when it doesn't matter to you when you're not losing money because it's balancing out it's kind of hard to wait and indeed it's a mistake to wait for what happened here on the left this is cross-striped cabbage worms on a not on a cover crop but actually a crop but basically they come together they're gregarious and i made the mistake of thinking i didn't have to use bt i could wait for the predator to show up and control it no i couldn't there's actually right here we'll get a better close-up picture that's actually a cluster of the baconed wasp that controls the european european cabbage worm and that is the cabbage worm that attacked this plant and that you can see that amount of damage is not a problem that actually just means that the food that's growing on this crop will be more nutritious but this amount is a problem this is past threshold and you will lose money if you had that growing in your in your cover crop though you wouldn't care it wouldn't matter another cover crop would take over meanwhile i've got pictures that show like five or six of these cabin of these cross-striped cabbage worms all parasitized once again later on in the season they're going to hatch out and fly over to your crops where you're being attacked by cross-striped cabbage worm and they'll hit them early enough and hard enough that you won't have to spray bt and so here here's the cross the the european cabbage worm and it is also toast dick mcdonald has taught me that you can tell if it's infected because it looks a lot fatter than the average cabbage cabbage worm when they get infected with the proconan wasp which used to be inside this worm right they get lighter colored and fatter and here it's dead and the reclining wasps have all moved out made cocoons they're getting ready to hatch out and go do it all over again and so if you have the brassicas in your cover crops these natural balances are going to occur in a place where you can afford for them to occur and that diversity will then spill over into your cash crops and save you money save you time and save the world from spraying any pesticide even one that's as relatively benign as bt bt by the way is bacillus thurigensis it's a soil bacteria that's been used for a long long time to control various insect pests it paralyzes their stomachs it's incredibly targeted you have to spray it on the crop they eat they have to eat it for it to hurt them and that's a total winner because it's not hurting anything but what eats the crop okay so here's another example of cover crops nurturing beneficial insects right here you have pennsylvania soldier beetle on buckwheat pennsylvania soldier beetles are wonderful egg eaters they will really tear up the eggs of all kinds of possible pests then they'll tear up the eggs of other other insects too they're not going to look like a ladybug egg and say i'm not going to eat it but overall they're really about balance and then over here is actually not a cover crop but it was an easy picture that i could get out of my computer to show you the benefit benefits of having an aphid inst infestation this is a reliable aphid infestation that happens in the mid spring for us every year in the mountains on the goldenrod which is a fine farmscaping plant but also a little bit too too aggressive to be a cover crop so it wants to be on your edges but this could as easily happen on peas in your cover crops are on the kale and your cover crops infides infest aphid infestations happen throughout cover crop plantings and every time they happen every predator in the neighborhood comes around so you've got a ladybug ladybug there and then right over here you have a lacewing larva and the laceling larva actually has an aphid in its mouth and then up there there's the beginnings of a merconan wasp parasitized aphid so you got three predators on one aphid infestation you could have four or five so aphids are actually good as long as they're where you want them which is not on your crops but on your cover crops or maybe on a crop that's finishing that you no longer need to have do well so i don't get rid of aphids i celebrate them as do all of my um beneficial insects okay here's an example of taking advantage of the fact that we had that same old thing buckwheat coming back from having self sewed here it worked out wonderfully we actually we tend to plant beets as plants we do better that way we planted rows of beets and then buckwheat all came up in them now you can't let the buckwheat stay there it's going to start to impact this crop right but i looked at it and said you know what it's going to grow faster and it's going to suppress the growth of the chickweed remember i talked about how quickly chickweed can take over and the hen bit both two really fast growing early early canopy winter weeds both of which are edible but you just don't want them growing in your beets because they're going to be hard to weed and they're going to start to compete the buckwheat on the other hand yeah it's competing too but it's about to die because this isn't a greenhouse and it's it's cold it's probably november the only reason the buckwheat's been alive is it is 1 16th hardy it'll survive a really light frost which means if we use row cover it can survive a hard for us so there's been a bunch of hard frost and we've kept the buckwheat going continuing to suppress those other weeds by using row cover but it's about to come out to run into a harsh harsh reality which is we're using it and we're going to leave the row cover off or we did leave the row cover off for the next really cold night and it all died and the beats released so that's a way to use a cover crop in a really innovative way to control a really tedious weed i'm trying to weed chickweed and hem bit that's a real pain if you can get buckwheat to suppress it that's a real winner um here you can just see where we had grasses and stuff it didn't work very well on the left but where we had residue like on the left side of the left pick other i'm sorry it didn't work very well on the right and where we have residue like you can see on the left side of this left picture we sewed into that we sewed white clover and as the residue released it and rotted away we established white clover in our bloody butcher corn patch now that part of the farm is a really wonderful stand of white clover that we can plant into so that's another way to take advantage you do need the rains once again to make that work but by the way the smaller seeds like clover seeds are going to work better with less rain the bigger seeds they're not going to work as well so if you're going to try and under sow or sow into another crop and it's kind of dry you're going to do better with something like clover or purslane or one of those small seeds so bigger seeds it's not likely to happen okay that's another shot of the same squash crop we're not going to talk about that again that gives more details but you can go back and read it if you want here's an example of using a cover crop and you can't even see the cover crop anymore john rowland sent me this picture when he saw i was doing a no-till talk and i love using it i love the contribution from my community john roland has our farm in weaverville i think it is north carolina and this is a mid-spring picture he had a whole this field was an oil seed radish those seed radish gets basically severely damaged by deep cold also known as tillage radish or forage radish and he looked at it saw it was going to die and just took a bunch of spinach seed and seeded it into the radish but another thing that the radishes do is they're great scavengers they are really going to grab up the nutrients and they take up all the excess nitrogen in the soil from the rotting previous crop all the excess phosphorus and then they die off slowly so in this situation he sowed the spinach it didn't do that well it was too dry it germinated but it just didn't grow but then the radish kept riding away to the point where we don't even see it the rains came back in april and he for the cost of spreading spinach seeds sold hundreds of dollars worth of spinach you can see that's some pretty nice spinach there so just you know think about it your cover crops can actually be placeholders for your next crop if you have the right conditions and it's kind of a theme you need to have water for this to work if you try and do this in a dry season you better run the sprinklers all the time anytime you're just sowing the seed and not incorporating it it's a lot harder to germinate unless you're getting rains all right this is just showing that we were able to establish crops into really really rough ground with rough residue using the morrison [Music] morrison cedar and here just that it worked that year you know this is actually a slide from 2019. if i were doing this the same talk i would not have used this slide in 2020 but that's just part of the harvest that came from that squash patch and then finally you know a lot of people can't afford a key lime plow it's a wonderful tool for open up your soil but you can use the crops that i'm talking about and animal impact and get the same kind of results we can use life to do with what this heavy expensive carbon embedded heavily carbon embedded equipment does so i think basically we can stop there and take questions there's a bunch of resources here you can access those and we'll probably put some more on this page after the fact um but i highly recommend the david brant talks the mark schoenbeck talk and hopefully we have ron morris's talk here we will put it up if we don't they're all talks that cover this too that living web has in its library all right let's take questions okay you might want to need to repeat the question a little bit since i'm far away okay um all right blissful acres off-grid homestead asks can we plant cover crops under young fruit trees and later use it to feed pigs turkeys and chickens uh the ground she says your ground is bad they've got heavy winds and hot hot summers yes you certainly can do that the one caveat i'd offer there okay so the question is can you plant cover crops under young fruit trees and then feed turkeys and chickens for one thing probably not first year fruit trees they want to be big enough that the turkeys and chickens won't hurt the fruit trees right all of those animals will really wonderfully impact the cover crops you can't leave them there very long the pigs can hardly be left there anytime at all the pigs will love those rich cover crops that'll give you real pastured pork but you don't give them time to even really rut any they get to go through there in maybe an hour you know you run them through and then you run your chickens and turkeys behind you can't run chickens and turkeys together by the way there's a disease that the one brings in i think it's turkeys bring it into chicken or chickens bring it into turkeys so you can't run them together but you can run one or the other and once again they can spend more time there they're going to pick through the pig poop and eat the parasites out you know go after the flies that go after the poop they're going to get every last insect they see and eat all everything the pigs left they're going to clean it up really well but if you leave them longer they're going to start scratching big time and they're going to tear up your plants so they can they can have maybe a couple hours you know so this is going to be a heavy management situation if you're going to just leave them in there then let the trees get considerably bigger and the pigs still can't be there very long pigs can really tear up some land are there benefits to cover crops with indoor plants well actually there's a slide i didn't use showing turmeric with purslane growing in it and i'm sure that benefited it so if you have bigger indoor plants they will be much happier with other plants it is just not true that plants don't plants don't want company look in nature it doesn't happen so absolutely you could grow things like i would actually work on you know use the things that are food too i would play with the the cresses the purslane the gallons so good they would work great in your bigger pots your smaller pots there isn't going to be any room but if you've got bare soil anywhere you don't want bare soil whether it's outdoors or indoors you always want your soil covered so yes i hadn't thought of it but use those cover crops on your on your indoor plants too okay um on white clover if someone was going to combine white clover and they actually talked about vet which i know you do not recommend veg but they were talking about white clover and veg and buckwheat and they were not going to terminate it what percentages would you recommend and of course i think you're not recommending that well no i really want to back off i misunderstood if you think i'm not recommending vetch i'm not recommending vetch if you want to do no-till i grew vetch and loved it for as long as i was incorporating our flail mowing but if you want to roll and kill your cover crop it's not going to die if you're going to graze it or you're going to come in and mow i mean clover is going to love mowing it's going to thrive in that situation so it was vetch clover and what else buckwheat okay i would recommend um you know they're different sizes so this is not about weight i would recommend that you would use well i guess i got to tell you weight though i would use let's say for let's say 10 square feet okay i'm making all this up this is just like this is an idea of proportions you're going to have to go back and look at the rates and figure it out yourself because that's what i would do right but i would use proportionally i would use let's say 40 um clover and 10 maybe no i use about 60 clover 10 vetch and then um clover vegeta and then the rest buckwheat and then what i would do this that's going to work great if you if you're not going to till not going to use it as no-till just when the when the buckwheat's already gone to seed you can keep the bup creek going longer if you want by mowing the flowers off with a weed eater so you can keep it in flour for as long as you want the veg there but there's going to come a point where the vetch is trying to go to seed and it's also going to be growing over your other crops right and at that point you just come through with a lawnmower or a weed eater and cut down to the clover clover loves to be mowed low the clover is going to thrive and dominate and get dominate give you a permanent cover crop and these other two are going to make invigorate that area with all the good stuff they add phosphorus is known by the way to be great for mycorrhizal relationships in that whereby the mycorrhizae are really good at exuding acids to make phosphorus available so buckwheat buckwheat rather is the one to use if you want that to happen so it's a great one in this mix it's not something i thought of but that's a good thing you all get to take these crops and cook up your own mixes you know okay so if someone wants to mix veg and radish will the vet shade the radish too much what's going to happen is the the polite aspect of vetch is its childhood it's a very well-behaved child okay it's when it's going into teenager in adulthood that it gets a little out of control so you're so the radish and the vetch in the fall right the vetch is just not going to grow all that much in the fall the radish is going to take over this is not a bad combination i put a grain in there too myself but maybe for maybe you're talking about these because you're thinking i can kill these pretty easily by mowing so if you didn't put a grain then the vetch would eventually be the one that was really doing well because the radish is going to winter winter damage in cold weather or in hot weather it's going to go to seed and the vetch is going to last longer okay so you're going to end up with the vet shading the radish yet but the radish is already toast by the time the veg is taking over the radish is either going into senescence and going to be finishing anyways giving you radish pods or whatever or it's rotting because it was damaged by the cold so that vetch is going to be what's going to rule so you can do that mix for sure just know that you're not going to kill it with a roller crimper okay so how many years would you recommend animals foraging cover crops before the land is ready to plant if you're wanting to fertilize the land with animals um if you have time i always think it's a great idea to build your fertility for a few years you don't have to do that you can just start right away you know if you need to grow food then you just go ahead and plant your cover crops graze the animals over it put another cover crop in so you get that separation from the animal stuff right um the animal waste put the other cover crop in and as soon as that cover crop is nice and big so you can mow it down and it drops on top of the remnants of the manure and the urine you now have in co incorporation now your clock starts ticking as far as food safety goes you can put transplants in there transplants are going to be what's going to work if you're going to do seed you probably have to wait longer right because you don't have the incorporation unless the way you if you actually you could do seed you'd have to work up a row though and then you're still incorporating right but then you put your plants right into that cover crop and now you have gotten all the benefit of that animal impact and your crops are growing and they're mulched by your cover crop so i wouldn't wait but if you can what i recommend for almost anybody that's starting out is do one or two beds that you do incredibly intensively and you set them up so they can grow you lots of food in a small space it's amazing how much food you can grow in a small space and then improve your soil with cover crops and animals if you possibly can and the rest of the area and then slowly expand and get bigger as your systems happen you know if you try and put in a great big garden with a lot of animal impact and stuff you might end up with a lot of weeds but if you just ace a couple of small beds and use the animal impact for the rest of it that'll work but you don't have to avoid the animals on that for that other section you just need to make sure that after the animal impact you put one more cover crop in so you can get your incorporation okay another question can i wheatie rye grass and kill it while perennials are starting to sprout zone 7a you know there's a no-till conference i might try and attend virtually and they're going to talk about how to manage rye grass all the farmers i know stay as far away from rye grass as they can get rye grass really can get weedy rye grass is not rye grain okay um and it's a nasty wheat it's a lot of the of the annual grasses that are driving us nuts right now they're rye grass it want every plant and the every plant around has one goal right it's reproduction that's what life's about right it's about the continuation of life so it's hard to kill your rye grass without a lot of heat and really scalping it low or incorporating it if you're not incorporating rye grass it's probably going to go to seed and it's a problem i don't want does that sound like i answered that question okay good i as i got into my dissing rye grass i was losing track or whether i thoroughly answered the question obviously folks i said that i'm not not recommending vetch i'm just recommending that you know what its cloudies are i'm actually not recommending ryegrass i'm looking forward to somebody in our community here correcting me on that i've heard people make it work but i have not made it work you're gonna have to repeat it okay i recently bought a christmas tree farm looking to integrate a low perennial cover crop system for chicken forage could you recommend a blend okay let's think about this okay so they just bought a christmas tree farm and i love it they're going to actually grow cover crops under the christmas trees and run animals through it that's a wonderful plan i love that plan what would they grow i think you'd probably want to include something like white clover or another clover that would be there long term because you don't want erosion you want to have a permanent cover crop there but i would mix into that depending on the time of year you know it's a good time to plant clover is in the spring you can kind of frost seed it if you're in a in a cold area that that thawing and freezing will help to pull the cover the clover in but i'd mix into that if you're doing a spring i'd mix in oats which are excellent forage i'd mix in um if it's early enough i'd probably mix in crimson clover too i'd probably mix in the oil seed radish to open it up um if it was a little later i might look at buckwheat that's also going to give you it's what you want to do actually is get a bunch of cover crops in there that not only are going to be decent forage but also are going to be flowering at different times because christmas tree growers really want a lot of insects so they don't need to use the insecticides to protect their christmas trees you know if you're planting it later let's say you want to plant it for summer i probably wouldn't try clover it doesn't doesn't like the heat as much though if you got some rain coming it could work i'd probably then go with things like millets shorter millet like proso and soybeans unless you've got deer pressure you might back off on the soybeans but then cow peas probably to determine it you don't want them vining around sunflowers actually will work fine in here make sure you seed them more towards the center so that the shade is not hurting your plants or go for the shorter there are shorter sunflower seeds there's also along with a shorter millet there are shorter sorghums so i'd go with those i'd go with the uh what else you know one that i didn't mention that's not a cover crop that i think people should look at is bright lights cosmos it's really good at throwing a lot of flowers that the beneficials like and it's airy it doesn't cause a lot of shade it's more diversity of exudates and it's real good at getting taller if it needs to so that it'll it'll compete with other cover crops but it won't compete with your trees obviously so there's and then for a fall if you're putting them in the fall i'd go back to the clover i'd add the crimson clover i'd add probably still not rye rye's just way too rambunctious i'd probably go though with maybe barley probably spring barley so it might get winter damaged or if you're lucky winter killed i might look at adam fenugreek in there like i was talking about and you can still if it's early enough you could add buckwheat in there it'll flower and carry it along so there's various mixes like that you can play with a lot of them i'd stay away from the vining ones and i'd stay away from the ones that are going to attract deer but otherwise i'm just giving you a few ideas you can really jam on that but i'd base it with clover because you're going to establish a long-term crop that you can then sow into but you'll have that anyways you know you might need to drill that drill other crops in there over the years but a good basis of clover will really serve you well in a tree farm what cover crops would you recommend for clay soils on a market garden scale of about three acres or less okay so clay soil is my favorite i mean we all kind of hate clay because it's so hard to work and it's so hard to dry out but if you look at clay under a microscope and look at sand you know that clay's your friend clay actually has all these spaces that hold nutrients sand doesn't hold anything so if i have to choose i'll take clay but you want to improve the tilt and cover crops are going to do that so that mix that i talked about in the greenhouse that's a really good one you know the the facilia tenecetifolia is a star by the way christmas tree grower get that facilia in there that's a wonderful one that's going to go down deep it's going to open up the soil for you too i highly recommend the facilia plant in spring late summer or early fall it's pretty cold hardy it can even over winter it's gonna bring in the beneficials it's gonna go down deep it's gonna bio accumulate you know um so i get that in there i get the oil seed radish i do the rye i'd also look at fava beans fava beans are great for opening up that soil and then what else you know this sounds crazy but i'd also look at chickweed you know for a winter cover crop knowing that you're going to have to do your weed management later later on but it's just like when i see where chickweed has grown it grows anywhere that it's rich even if it's clay and what it does with the roots boy it just creates this mass of roots with all the exudates and the aggregation it's a winner you know i'd look at it but it's this is me being crazy and willing to take chances it you might be sorry you can eat the heck out of it though you know so okay last question and it's not doesn't really sound cover crop related but maybe cover crops could help why does the food i'm growing smell like it was grown in sewage water what would be a foul smell maybe some anaerobic soil sounds like anaerobic situations yeah i wonder you know this is where i wish we could actually be in conversation because um is it really wet where they are you know if it's really wet and maybe the person can respond to that you know if it's really wet that might cause it you know or another thing might be that um you know there's some wildlife that's enjoying the environment you've created and that's where the smell comes from you know did you use manure manure is going to definitely sound like smell like sewage oh and if you grew oil seed radish when they rot boy do they stink okay so go ahead okay one more question what cover crops would you recommend for sandy soils okay biomass lots of root production you know so those ryes all those grasses they're going to really make a lot of roots that's really going to help you want the um legumes that are going to work with that the clovers are really going to help with that but then the biomass makers too you know the sudex is going to give you tons of biomass in the summer that sun hemp tons of biomass so that continuous seeding you know you're going to want to grow cover crops under all your plants everybody's going to want to do that you know those under sowings are going to really help and they're going to be ones that stay low those weeds i talked about are going to really help you know plants that can really put a lot of mass on in a hurry put a lot of roots out there those roots are pumping exudates in those are all going to really help so that's that's what you want is a lot of biomass and whenever you can do it biomass it gets tall that you cut down um you don't really need if you have sandy soil you don't really need that deep penetration of the sudex but the sudex where you're not wanting it to die is one incredible solar engine it is producing biomass like you can't believe likewise the sun hemp so you'll want to mix those up you know grow those other ones that i talk about that do well underneath your plants because if you've got sandy soil you want tons of plants because your nutrition is in your plants you don't have plants your nutrients are gone so you want to have plant roots growing everywhere all right all right you can wrap it up and then announce that all right okay so thank you for your time i thoroughly enjoyed talking about this subject it's a subject dear to my heart we can answer questions and put them on our radio show anytime so just get in touch with us if you've got more detailed questions give us a little time to make sure we cover them all and then we'll set a date to have you come on and we can make that to your time so that we can do it with anybody any in the world anywhere in the world because i love to answer the questions for everybody not just for one person because they always apply check out the resources that we have here for you there's a lot of great stuff and know that we are gonna have a grant a special opening right now stay tuned for part six in five minutes of troy hinke's healing our soils with compost and compost tea great workshop he answered a lot of questions for me i highly recommend it all right grow those cover crops and eat them too thanks a lot you

Channel: Living Web Farms

Views: 250,342

Keywords: Cover crops, cover crop strategies, pat battle, living web farms, root exudates, living mulch, winter peas, eat cover crops, edible cover crops, ways to avoid pesticides, plant diversity, soil food web, seeders, planting into cover crops, suppressing weeds, soil moisture, soil water retention, Morrison seeder, types of cover crops, how to use cover crops, selecting cover crops, killing cover crops, farming with cover crops, gardening with cover crops, natural gardening

Id: AZEsL8Ounks

Length: 160min 10sec (9610 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 03 2021