FALL COVER CROPS WISH I KNEW This 10 Years Ago

hello my name is mark and welcome to i'm organic gardening today i want to talk to you about cover cropping now cover cropping is so essential to your garden i'm sitting on top of my raised bed here i have the trellis behind me that i grew tomatoes on and i also have my large backyard garden behind that also too but also my 22 acre farm i've been using cover crops for at least 10 years now and i've tried them all so i'm going to give you my experience of using cover crops in the last 10 plus years now cover cropping has developed from originally what it was stated for let's say seven years ago when i first started trying it on my farm and developing my soil or building my soil or growing my soil now i use the word growing my soil because cover crops are the only thing that can really build the soil or grow with soil it's nature nature is awesome it is the top line engineering that has been on this planet from day one cover crops are to give and maintain life in the soil when you're going from one gardening season to another gardening season it's that bridge is that crossover and if you don't have it you're going to lose that competitive edge of let's say your disease resistance your water holding capability in your soil and also those beautiful microbes that want to work for you for free those bacteria and fungi there's all types of bacteria and there's all types of fungi well sit there and eat that organic material and also your sand salt and clay people think microbes only eat organic material like because a lot of people are here composting is the best way to go i've never composted on my farm i use a mulch a heavy deep mulch on my plants in the season to reduce evaporation and to keep the soil cool and to keep those microbes working because they like to work at a certain temperature and that's important so that time that we go from our gardening season from the end to the beginning of next year in my area it's about six or seven months long so i need to have that living root in the ground that's going to help support those bacteria and fungi but also give passageways for air do you realize that our soil that we have right now or it's in your raised bed or anything else too 25 of that soil is air and 25 percent of that soil is water in there the other 45 is just your mineral base of your sand silt and clay and another maybe five percent organic matter that's all it is it's really simple to understand so what happens is after the garden season that we remove the plants and i showed you in the last video you you can remove the top of the plants but don't remove the roots let them stay there that's organic material and that's the tilling but also your cover crop that goes from your fall to your next spring again is also tilling by sending roots down and opening up that soil to give that 25 air and also that 25 water but we don't have a crisis going on easily because it's fall time and it's also winter we have plenty of moisture and we have plenty of let's say microbial activity certain types of microbial activity that's going to help build our soil again so i want to explain just a short little demonstration and there's so much information i'm going to share with you in my 10 years experience using every single type of cover crop i have and i will just go over briefly of any of those and if you have any questions leave a comment because i'll either make another video about this or i will answer your correct your like question directly to you in your comments so let me just give you a small demonstration what i'm talking about right now so my previous video if you watch it is i explained that here we have a tomato plant and other plants that we have in our vegetable garden is to always leave the roots in the ground just cut the tops off and use that for composting if you want or just as a mulch later on or chop it up now what this does those roots in the ground is giving you that 25 air in 25 water and that's what is a healthy soil is required to give your plants a also nutrient-dense food now if we don't put a cover crop in the ground and we just layer mulch on top it will let's say compact the soil over time you know again in my area i have about six or seven months easily that i'm not gardening outside because of the way the weather is so let me explain a little bit better here i have this sponge here and what happens is when those roots decay our soil is going to compact down again and less air and less water is going to get into that ground so by having a cover crop we're going to get a living root like using winter rye or clover or other things is that that root is going to expand this sponge again or that soil and allow water to go down and air to go down all those roots are actually benefiting the soil and also feeding the soil exudates from the plant itself now we're not going to get a lot of sunlight so it's not going to create a lot of exit dates that come out of the roots of the plants but where we're going to get is that living root in the ground here and something called mycorrhizal fungi is going to grow now all these things are working perfectly in nature and has been doing it from day one again like i mentioned before it's all good so remember is that your ground is like a sponge and if you don't keep a living root in the ground it's going to compact and the more compacts the harder is for microbes to move around because microbes want that water in air they need it to survive so what you're doing is you're feeding or keeping a lot of those microbes over winter and expanding that soil and keeping expanding because that's what we want we want that living root in the ground to keep that soil expanded if not it's not going to work properly there's no such thing as bare soil there's really two different types of cover crop methods and it just is an easy form to understand one of them is where i am that we get frozen soil over winter and we get temperatures that are freezing so i don't want a cover crop that dies off over winter because i want that living root in the ground to grow something very special in our soil called mycorrhizal fungi and i'll list it below how it's spelled now that micro is a fungi there's both endo and ecto and endo is the most popular one now that is going to invade the root and then help expand that soil and make into smaller aggregates and also get air and water down there now if i grow a cover crop that freezes and that root dies off over winter i'm not going to grow that beneficial mycorrhizal fungi that's in my soil so the other one is is that soils that don't freeze over winter and you don't have a harsh winter that gets below say freezing to kill all their plants off so what you can do in that case is grow other things like oats and wheat and that type of also things too and then you're you don't get that freezing weather or if you just get freezing weather for a week or something like that you're still okay because it will get damaged but not the roots would die off so i hope i make that clear is that there's two different sides to it you have the freezing area that you have to grow something in there that doesn't freeze and kill the root off and then the other side is something that you don't have a winter or freezing area and you can grow something like you know go on the field you can grow something like sunflowers in your off season because it makes a big massive root and especially if you have a sandy soil because a lot of people ask me also too they live down in florida or other areas and they have very sandy soil what can they grow sunflowers are awesome you don't want to grow the 10-foot mammoth one or something like that but you want to grow the other ones that get about six feet tall or four feet tall and what you can do is that and i'll show you that massive root system is going to go to ground and it's going to survive and it's also going to grow your fungi in the soil for you and give it a better healthy soil and it's also going to add all that organic matter and let's go on the field right now and i'll show you about the sunflowers right now because that's what we're talking about and how big of a massive root system is on those sunflowers so here's some beautiful sunflowers that are behind me they're multi-stem sunflowering i don't remember the name of the variety it's just a common variety that's out there it's a cheap product you can buy now what they're doing right now is growing soil they're collecting sunlight and pushing that exudates out into the ground of liquid carbon into the soil and storing that soil and also the roots which i'm going to pull out one of the sunflower plants that's the main key to cover cropping it's not so much about the diversity of cover cropping or using different types of cover crops is you're getting a selection of different routes now when you i pulled the sunflower out of the ground and show you the root system of that one we'll compare that to let's say some winter raw i have some growing somewhere else on the farm here now what i want to show you is a difference between the large root system and a small root system and that's what cover cropping is all about it's not so much about fixing nitrogen and all these other things or much biomass the whole thing too cover cropping is all about the roots going into the ground and forcing that soil apart and building soil aggregates so you can get that air and water in there and then those microbes the beneficial microbes of the bacteria and fungi can get in there too and get to that soil and build a huge community so we have billions and billions and billions of them in there helping our plants so let's get a sunflower root out of the ground looking at the base of this huge sunflower plant here and this is going to come easy because again it's been tilling my soil and just this basic root system here like so look at that we're going to set that aside for a second so here's our sunflower stalk i'm sorry about the quaking it's my mount here and now you can see here how well those roots are so strong and efficient to get down into that leaf mold and also down into my soil below it is massive and that's also helping to build our soil because once it gets down into the soil below it is going to open that up again and get those air passages and water passages into our soil and that's what we want from our cover crop we want those massive roots to get in there or any type of roots with as big as small and now i'm going to go over to where i have some winter rye growing already and getting into that soil also too and you can see the difference between this type of root system that you have here on your sunflowers compared to the winter rye roots and that's what we want when we combine things together we want all different types of roots to go out you know lengthwise horizontal and vertical into our soil so we can create those air and water passages and also feed the microbes we have some beautiful winter rye growing this is what it looks like it looks like a grass but it's really not and you can see here i have some residue i've been growing this in the field for the last let's say two years now helping build my soil and what i do is i let this grow up let it go to seed chop it down seeds go back in the ground remultiply and keep going and then the residue helps me build organic matter on top of soil so we do worms also too so now this is the winter rye and let's see if i can get in here safely and this was hard clay soil now let's see if i can pop this one section out there you go and you can see here nice right here and that's why we grow it and this is what i'm talking about all over the winter let's get a better close-up here for you now what this does and you can see all the worm holes in there too and the roots and everything else that goes with it on this bottom here you can see all the worm passages here because they like this nice let's say aerated soil and this is just beautiful soil that's being created now see this is what exactly we're looking for we're looking for big soil aggregates like this and it's just beautiful rich soil that can easily fall apart but it doesn't because it's being held together by all those roots and microbes in here and this is just gorgeous material that you can always see and again these roots are shallow now because the roots of winter rye is equal to the height so let's say the height of the grass is let's say four to five inches or the grain of this and also what we have down here is roots that are four to five inches long also too so the higher or taller the winter ride grows the deeper the roots can get in the ground because they they need that energy from the plant above to actually force those roots down but this is just gorgeous material and this was solid hard clay and now i have this beautiful loamy soil by doing nothing but growing a cover crop and that's it and maintaining it just that beautiful i was just showing you this clump of soil here and this winter ride it's also next to a two growing this is that perennial root that stays on the ground and lives over winter that's what it does winter rye has a living root over winter and it can get down to i believe like minus 30 degrees before it dies off so it's a very good cover crop cover crop of winter rye we have that perennial root in the ground living room in the ground over winter i have the same thing here with this beautiful clover and this is nice now when that clover goes to flower that's when the nitrogen comes out of the root or the nodules that's in the ground and actually the plant will use it prior to flowering so if you're going to use a cover crop of let's say clover of any type there's all different types there's short ones like this this is new zealand white clover and what i do with this in the ground here is i know i have beneficial microbes in here so i'll go in here like so and i'll take a small sample soil out of here and i'll put into my let's say tees because i know that i have some good beneficial microbes in this soil here and then i'll add this to my tea i'll put this in a bag because all in here is beneficial microbes those bacteria and fungi that are in here and then i'll increase the capability because i'm making a tea out of it and then i'll put that in my garden so i also have a perennial root in my in other areas that can benefit my microbes in other parts of my farm now here's another example of a different type of clover this is called monmouth red clover and you can tell it has a little bit of a heart heart-shaped uh design in each one of the leaves here or something like that and plus you can see leaves here that are let's say more massive than the new zealand white clover new zealand clovers are probably like maybe say one-third of the size of this one leaf here now this does nice it has a nice big flower on it again great coverage of the ground now also in here we should find nodules and let's see if i can dig something up now nodules don't always form all the time on your clover the reason why if you have good lush green clover it does not need to make nodules and a lot of people don't know that is not you think you plant the legume you're going to get a nodule if your soil has enough nitrogen in the soil it doesn't need to extract or make more nodules for this plant to survive or actually let it to go to flower you have good soil and that's a good indication a tip that this beautiful clover here is getting enough nitrogen from the soil if you don't have any nodules on it don't worry about it it's not a problem it's simple that it actually is not required from the soil or the plant is not requiring the soil to feed it more nitrogen it's in good shape by itself i pulled one of the clover plants out from the back here and you can see that massive nice root system on just a little bit of clover here and this is hard compact soil because i used to drive on all the time but again this hard clay compact soil can open it up and this is the best thing about cover cropping is those roots get in the ground and will stay there and continue to open up that soil letting air and water in to get those microbes working to release those minerals that are in your soil this is just beautiful you can see here just that nice clover plant and just the roots going down the soil how thick they are because we have enough moisture now and that's the whole again reason that you want to have a cover crop over winter imagine having this going in your garden and you can easily terminate this and cut the top off and what you want to do is cut it like really at the base here and then you have some green manure and then you have all these roots in the soil too amazing that's what cover cropping is it's all about the roots the size of the roots and how deep they can go in your soil over winter here's a fantastic list of all the cover crop seeds that i've done over the years and it's all in alphabetical order this list is actually out of johnny seeds catalog johnnyseeds.com i don't i'm not endorsing them or else too but it's just a great list and it shows you all the different types of cover crop so i went and i go and i marked the ones with the black circle behind the ones here that are only the ones that have a living root over winter time that's going to help you grow this mycorrhizal fungi in your garden and help grow your soil by you know lifting that soil apart letting air and water in and also helping the microbes so what you can see here is that we have crimson clover red mama cover and medium red clover now it also down here is new zealand white clover again in my area if you plant new zealand white clover now it will not um be successful in let's say uh coming forward to be hard enough to survive the winter so that's why i don't list it and also alfalfa which is the top one here is it it also shows you here it's very frost sensitive so if i want to plant alfalfa now my garden uh let's say it freezes in another month and a half that alfalfa will die off because it's frost sensitive and also you can see here down the list below on the side in the back of each of the names it will tell you the germination temperature so that's why a lot of people ask me it's like mark why don't you use a lot of different types of mixing cover crops because i plant my cover crops like now in say the month of november now if i blend planted something like crimson clover and tillage radish the tillage radish wouldn't survive it would freeze off the crimson clover would be fine but the tillage riders would die off or the turnips or that type of thing so here's a good list i will also list this on my facebook page but you can see there's very few items here you know we have your winter rye which is my staple that i use all the time because it delivers a lot of roots and a lot of roots go very deep into the soil helping that soil grow so just as an idea this is my experience over the years now i'm not against using multiple things together to grow things but i'm not in an area that allows that to happen now and also too i plant my cover crops late so i have two things i'm planting my cover crops late and i know a lot of other farmers plant them earlier and they can sow it but i don't have the equipment to do that so in my garden again if i plant off all this diversity of cover crops i would say let's say i planted something in september 90 of those cover crops will die off because i have a harsh winter and they really didn't do anything to the soil so much because they only had about two months to live to grow something so that's why i stick with the basics here because of one of these costs and also two is that i'm just getting late to the season about planting a cover crop again if you have any questions please write and contact me because then we'll go over it and i'm sure i'm going to be making a part two out of this and give you more of a better idea or what's entailed with cover cropping so give it a thumbs up and i'm here for you gardening is easy gardening is enjoyable gardening is fun and again it's not hard we have all these beautiful microbes helping us in our soil so let's excite them lets them help us and let's get some nutrient dense food i'll see you again soon i'll talk to you all guys later thanks bye

Channel: I AM ORGANIC GARDENING

Views: 192,792

Keywords: gardening, vegetables, soil, no till gardening, diy gardening, raised bed gardening, container gardening, wood chip gardeing, gardening methods, building soil, raised bed planters, cover cropping, cover crops

Id: IQ_SyzgHMcg

Length: 22min 31sec (1351 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 24 2021