Cover cropping is a soil health management practice that provides multiple benefits including increased soil organic matter, weed suppression, pest and disease cycle disruption, and enhanced biodiversity. The key to successful cover cropping is first determining your specific goals (such as nitrogen fixation, biomass production, or weed suppression), then selecting appropriate species based on your climate, soil conditions, and production needs. Legumes (like clovers, peas, and beans) fix atmospheric nitrogen through symbiotic relationships with rhizobia bacteria, while non-legumes (including cereals, grasses, and brassicas) provide biomass production, nutrient accumulation, and other benefits. Implementation involves proper ground preparation, appropriate seeding methods (broadcasting or drilling), adequate moisture for establishment, and timely termination before the crop sets seed. The success of cover cropping depends on understanding your specific context, planning ahead, and being flexible to adapt to changing conditions.
Cover Cropping for Field & Garden | Johnny's Webinar SeriesAñadido:
hello everyone and thank you for joining us today for our latest webinar in our educational series cover cropping for field and garden we're really happy to have you join us today I'm going to go ahead and introduce our presenter for today Colin Thompson joined Johnny's as uh the farm operations manager in early 2021 having previously managed farms in Virginia Michigan and Iowa he holds a Bachelor of Science in environmental biology and a master's in sustainable Food Systems with his team Colin uses an integrated approach to manage over 200 mixed active and fallow Acres combining organic sustainable and low input practices to support the breeding trialing and Seed production activities at Johnny's research Farm Colin all right thank you Joshua um and thanks to everyone who's here and participating in this this is exciting topic to discuss it's one of my probably favorite aspects of of farming and so I'm excited that there's enough interest in this sort of event to uh to host a webinar on this topic so thanks for taking the time out of hopefully uh equally nice day is what we're seeing here in Central Maine um so before we get started what I really wanted to do was do a little bit of a introduction to the Johnny's research farm so most of you given that you're sitting in on a Johnny's webinar are probably familiar with the company itself but there's there's actually a lot that goes on behind the scenes especially at the the research farm that a lot of people don't full have a full understanding of so in order to have a productive conversation about what we do our context and how to how we potentially make decisions surrounding cover cropping I thought it might be good to give a little bit of a background um so the the Johnny's research Farm the original Farm site was purchased in 1976 and it still functions as our our home place um it has grown a lot since then but the the core goals of what we're doing haven't really changed all that much and so we kind of break it down into three primary areas of focus when it comes to what we do at the research Farm there's the breeding activity that is the development and introduction of of new vegetable and flower varieties we have three sort of breeding teams on site looking at everything from cucurbits that is uh squash and pumpkins to charred to onions to flowers uh tomatoes and peppers all sorts of things and those are really we we focus on things like flavor and color um thinking about our end users our customers what they might be interested in in new varieties and try to Target our efforts to match just that we also do a lot of seed production which is not surprising given that we are a seed company um and that takes a few different forms but really the ultimate goal with any of the seed production activities is to essentially fill the packets that you might find at your doorstep after ordering from us um it may be an actual commercial variety or commercial production that we fill the packets and send out to you or we are developing the earlier lots of seed that is send off sent off to partner producers in other areas around the world and then lastly and maybe what we're probably most well known for is our product trialing and this is where we take varieties that we've generated through our breeding programs as well as varieties that we get from partner breeders from other seed companies and field test them and that's really how we're able to determine whether or not a product or a variety a tool whatever the case may be is up to the standards of of Johnny's selected seeds so everything that you see in the Johnny's catalog in any given year has been field tested on the research farm and that I think is is pretty dang unique for um for a company like ours to be doing something like that and that hopefully means that when you open up that seed packet sew it in your garden or on your farm you can be pretty confident that it's going to work and then it's going to perform for you and also when you call us up we might be able to answer a few questions about it which is pretty neat so like I said the farm has grown quite a bit since the the 70s when it was established now we we span nine different Farm locations over a total of just over 200 Acres um we've got about 50 to 75 acres in active production in any given year and given that we're talking about cover cropping today we try to have at least 50 percent of that acreage in cover crop throughout the year at some point more is better and sometimes we can far exceed that Target but really what we're trying to do is have a healthy balance between with a cash crop production and cover Crop Production so that we can continue to focus on our soil Health uh first and foremost that sharp looking bunch there is the farm operations staff um there are 31 of us in the farm operations department but that's a small percentage of all the individuals involved on the research Farm everything from product technicians that are doing the evaluations product managers that kind of keep their finger on the pulse of the the market support staff breeders breeding technicians admin there's a lot of people that go into essentially making Johnny's research Farm happen which is uh it's really great it's a really excellent group of people so um let's start off by talking about kind of what we're going to cover today uh certainly cover cropping but uh I wanted to break it apart into a few different areas of focus so first off we're going to be looking at our cover cropping goals that is how do we determine what it is we are trying to accomplish as we're integrating cover crops into our production system we'll talk about all the different reasons why cover crops are fantastic and then you can start to piece together what is most important to you on your farm in your garden and why you might want to favor one versus another species selection there are countless different types of cover crops that you can integrate into your into your production plan but maybe the hardest part is is choosing what you wanna what you want to grow so we'll talk through some of the different options that exist out there some of the limitations and advantages of different ones and then lastly we'll talk about the the sort of nuts and bolts how do you actually make it happen through establishment management termination Etc um kind of sprinkled throughout this I'm going to be using the Johnny's research Farm is essentially a case study um and so you can kind of see how we go through the process of identifying our goals uh making decisions determining how to integrate cover crops into our production system and hopefully that'll help you kind of think about how it will work for your own operation um but before we get any further one of the things that I'm hoping that we can do is I'm going to hand it back to Joshua and we're going to put a couple of survey questions up on the screen um two things that we're hoping to find out from the folks who are tuning in for today first one would be what is your experience level in cover cropping are you brand new to it are you starting to dabble or have you been doing this for years and do it extensively um for for on your garden or on your farm so if you wouldn't mind going ahead and clicking on which of those options you basically uh identify with that'd be fantastic we'll give you a couple seconds to do that we're going to end this one because we have one more follow-up question so I'd like to just end the voting now uh and let's share the results we actually had a really great number of folks yeah that's great Okay cool so half of you are brand new to this or have to respondents are brand new to this that's great well welcome welcome to the fold of cover croppers that's exciting uh should I go ahead Colin and uh bring up the freaking question go ahead and put the second one up if you wouldn't mind thank you you bet just one moment so this next question is going to be basically for those of you in the room what is your scale of production um maybe some of you don't actually have a garden space or have any fields that you're working right now um maybe some of you are a commercial operation farming on 100 acres again go through kind of self-identify where you would fall among these and they'll help us kind of understand what kind of tools and techniques you folks might be using excellent all right in the next couple of moments I'm going to end the voting so my apologies if you haven't had a chance to place your vote we actually have a really great number of feed folks who've provided feedback so I'm going to end right now and in a moment I will share the results all right looks like we got a good number of uh home gardeners or homesteaders as well as uh some commercial operations and then a few that are just getting started maybe interested but not currently growing maybe aspiring to do so well it's a great time to start thinking about cover crops because if you can start running with them from day one then that's that's even better cool well this is helpful this is great and thank you all for uh joining us um in this conversation no matter where you're at hopefully there'll be some valuable information for all types and um all backgrounds here but again as we work through this I'll try to keep in mind sort of what we just learned and and talk about some of the tools and techniques and options for smaller scale production um as well as uh when the question and answer period starts we can dive into some of the the topics that are most um most relevant to your own circumstances okay so let's dive into the the actual info um so I always like to start by saying okay what are we actually trying to accomplish here right um what are the goals what are we trying to uh make happen with our production system and how do cover crops come into play what are they going to be doing for us so if you've had any exposure to cover crops if you've thought about this at all you probably have started started to understand what they're good for but in reality this is not an exhaustive list and it it it's kind of amazing the compounding effects that you can have from years and years of cover cropping mixing cover crops integrating them within your cash crop system um the the benefits are nearly endless one of the primary ones that we tend to focus on is that first one on there it says increasing soil organic matter and the reason I say the reason I call that one out specifically is because it has these cascading effects so once you start building organic matter within your soil you're going to see improved soil texture improved water holding capacity you're going to see your your nutrients being held in that soil profile for longer periods of time rather than leaching out or being burned off through oxidation we're going to be able to see a higher microbial activity within that soil structure which was going to help us in in Myriad ways additionally we're going to see some of the other things that are particularly important especially to organic Growers like we are here suppressing weeds breaking pests and disease Cycles we don't as organic Growers and I know not any everyone in the room may use organic practices but if you do those are two areas that can be quite problematic or challenging because we don't have as many Tools in our toolboxes and so using cover crops to essentially suppress weeds or creating sort of that that kill step between uh pests and disease uh production Cycles can be really valuable tool and then lastly but certainly not least providing habitat food sources nectar sources for beneficial insects um invertebrates vertebrate species increasing biodiversity across our farm these are all really great advantages and benefits that we can yield from from including cover crops into our annual Cycles um so really the best place to start after kind of familiarizing yourself with what cover cropping is is really to take a self-assessment right say okay what where am I you know what are my challenges what are my limitations uh do I have really high weed pressure um you know do I have a a slate of pathogens that are really really difficult for me to manage alternatively what what am I doing really well uh do I have some really nice equipment to use do I have a lot of time am I just super passionate about cover cropping and that's going to drive me to be successful in this um maybe all the above um but then really you know those things being in the front of your mind how does that impact uh or develop or refine the goals that you're going to have for your your cover cropping um on your farm or in your garden so what we can do is we can look at Johnny's research farm and say okay let's walk through this just like I would at the beginning of a season um and say you know how are we going to make these decisions so if we look at Johnny's research Farm we've been running production continuously for a long time so some of these things like High weed pressure a large weed seed bank is probably going to be the case right we also have a pretty high disease and pest load on our farm and so we're going to start thinking about some of those things we too have some unique logistical challenges that is we are spread across multiple Farm sites so getting equipment from one place to the next is somewhat challenging and we got to think about efficiencies we have an incredibly diverse crop plan we're growing literally everything you're seeing in that catalog plus more and I know a lot of you smaller Growers or Market gardeners can probably relate to that being in Central Maine we have a very short production season and so we have limited ability to tuck cover crops into the book ends of the season and that's kind of exacerbated by the fact that a lot of our crops that we grow in in a given year are long season crops you know our pumpkins our Tomatoes they go in early in the season and they stay late which means we don't have a huge window but we are also very well equipped in certain ways we have a skilled hard-working and very dedicated and knowledgeable team which is you know an invaluable asset we are land Rich which we'll talk about a little bit more how that impacts our ability to integrate cover crops into our rotations and then certainly we have equipment we are running on a slightly larger scale and as a result we have to have the tools to help us through that but I will say you don't have to you absolutely do not have to there's a lot of ways of doing this no matter where you are okay so if we kind of spell out the primary goals that we're going to have one that I am always focusing on is reducing that weed seed bank and uh smothering out as many weeds as we possibly can because that can be a problem it will be a problem it's going to reduce our production it's going to get in the way of efficient workflows it's just going to be a challenge we're also always striving to increase our soil organic matter increase the the microbial presence in in our soil so that we have biologically active alive soils in addition to that we're going to be trying to break up those disease and pest cycles that I talked about we want to increase biodiversity at the macro scale as well across the entire Farm by bringing in pollinators and beneficial insects and then for us given that we are a commercial operation our goal is probably always to reduce the overall cost of production and that could take a variety of different forms from reducing the amount of fertilizer we have to put down or making you know uh the task of going out and managing a crop easier because the weed pressure is lower or it's a healthier crop and so it's easier to harvest so again this is just an example of what we're thinking about at the Johnny's research Farm maybe some of these are directly applicable to you in your context but really the most important thing is to think about what is most important to you what are the advantages that you individually have and then what are you really trying to accomplish here so once we start to have a little bit better idea of what it is we're actually trying to accomplish with cover crops then we start thinking about okay what are the what are the types of species that I want to bring in to help accomplish or or check off those goals so there are countless ways probably of defining or categorizing cover crops and in fact if you go to the Johnny's website I think we have four or five different categories that we break these down into so um you know I think we have grains and we have grasses we have brass because we have cover crop mixes and we have legumes so for the sake of this conversation I've decided to break it into two very distinct groups and that is the legumes versus the non-legumes and for those of you who are not familiar that division is intentional in the sense that the the the uh legumes have the ability to fix atmospheric nitrogen which is basically true only of that group of of uh plants the non-legumes is a broad group of different crops that do not have that ability however countless other benefits that we we get from those species and that's why it's important to talk about both of them because they're all providing different benefits but for the sake of this conversation this is how we're going to divide them so on the non-ligum side we have cereals that is grains rye wheat oats barley Etc grasses here we've got a few examples rye grass teff Millet sedan grass and then some broad leaves like buckwheat sunflower brassicas like forage turnip mustards rapeseed tillage radish those sorts of things and then in the for the legumes we have our true clovers which they're countless different varieties sweet clovers veggies peas beans Sun hemp is a unique warm season legume lentils Alfalfa there are more than than what's listed here but this gives you a sense of some of the commonly used species and then if we want to refine it just a little bit further and say okay we've got these two broad categories how do we actually start thinking about where they fit within the production year we would break it down between warm season and cool season and the thing I got to say here is this is kind of a rough outline of of where these things generally fall based on your climate or your microclimate based on the type of soil you're running based on a lot of things that are individual to your context these lines might be blurry for example you know we might be able to where we're currently at in Central Maine we might be able to push some of the cool season species further into the warm season the summer whereas whereas farming in Virginia that may be a lot more difficult to do just because they're stressed out by the heat they may not be as productive and they may not Thrive under those conditions so if we look at this the four quadrants that exist here we have our legume and non-legum on either side and then we have our warm season and cool season um cool season we're thinking about the spring and fall maybe winter if you're in the southern part of the country where you can overwinter a lot of these crops warm season we're thinking about the opposite again this is not a comprehensive list at all there's plenty of other options that didn't make the cut but these are some of the most commonly used ones so let's let's take a look at each of these groupings a little bit further um let's first talk about maybe the broader category and that's the non-liguminous species and that would be things like grasses grains broadleaf species brassicas those sorts of things the service is provided by these are pretty wide given how diverse this grouping is so again soil organic matter production there's some really strong performers in this camp for putting out a lot of biomass that again will help us build that soil texture that water holding capacity all those sorts of things um weed suppression nutrient accumulation again this is distinct from atmospheric nitrogen fixation nutrient accumulation is more saying okay we've grown a cash crop we have Surplus nutrients hanging around in the soil let's go in with a cover crop that can mop those up hold those in those plant tissues so that they don't Leach out of the soil over the winter or during rain events and then as those break down those nutrients are mineralized and become available to our our cash crop that will follow behind um some of the other ones that we might consider as well are biomass production in a different form so basically um if we want to grow our own mulch for example which I can talk about a little bit later one that is perhaps quite unique to certain species of mustards they produce glucosinolates which is a compound that essentially can function as a natural fumigant in the soil that's a little bit more we'll say an advanced cover cropping technique but it's it just goes to show that there are really unique ways and exciting opportunities to use these cover crops to not only just say keep our soil in place over a windier wintry season but also to have really profound effects on our on our soil beat back some of these problematic pathogens those sorts of things so let's give some common examples that we're using I I really um this picture here I think is kind of cool so this is a field that's split right down the middle between winter Rye on the left side and winter wheat on the right side both of these are really great species to include in especially in a Northern climate but all over the country because they're very Hardy in terms of cold tolerance they're high biomass producers they're easy to grow they're fast to establish they do a good job of choking out weeds and they have multiple different uses and applications so winter Rye for example that's one of the ones that's probably most commonly used for a late season fall over winter cover crop largely because it can germinate at really cold temperatures so it's basically the latest thing that you can put out and still have successes we've seeded it as late as the beginning of November I mean we're still seating it now and we'll have success with that it puts out a like I said a bunch of biomass you can use the straw for mulch it actually has what are called a lilopathic effects which basically inhibits the germination of small seeded weed species or other sorts of things that might be trying to compete with the Rye so it's a really useful and beneficial species to incorporate winter wheat is it requires a little bit earlier seating date matures a little bit later doesn't put out quite as much biomass but has a lot of the the same benefits and is a really great one to incorporate as well both of these would fall into the cereals category along with barley oats triticale those sorts of things and they're they're really great to include in in your uh in your mixes foreign this one uh is quite popular it's buckwheat um and it's popular for a good reason it it tends to fill the very narrow slots and which is particularly important in Northern climates because we don't like I said have a long production season and so if when we have a small window and we need to get some cover in we can throw a buckwheat in it'll grow really fast it'll put on a lot of biomass it creates great flowers that are good for bees and other pollinators and then it breaks down really quickly it's high in nitrogen and so it breaks down readily and you don't have to contend with a lot of residue but really it's it's one of the best ones for shorter windows or smaller windows and for suppressing weeds this would be a winter kill mixture of Sudan grass tillage radish and then a couple of legumes including I think lentils and a bursium clover as you can see it's a really thick ground covering most of this will winter kill if it doesn't fully wind and but what I mean by winter kill is they're not cold tolerant enough to survive the winter in our growing zone of zone five um oh it looks we've got someone scrolling through our slides hold on one second here um and so what ends up happening is that will die off in the winter months we'll have a relatively easy to manage residue coming in in the spring we can turn the soil and we can plant right into it um among that is the tillage radish which is a really interesting crop and I this is a gross looking picture but I think it's actually quite neat tillidradish is one of those ones that's used for breaking up soil compaction it's basically a Daikon radish that has been bred to uh to to send down a deep thick Taproot that will help alleviate some of the soil compaction that can accompany equipment moving over the soil or foot traffic or vehicle traffic or just rain and snow over the years and the reason I like this picture is because in our production climate it will winter kill it'll turn into basically nothing and it will create these big channels in the soil that allow water to infiltrate allows us to have more aeration in the soil and creates great um you know soil texture once it's uh once it's finished its cycle foreign again this could be the clovers the veggies peas Bean Sun hemp lentils Alfalfa uh uh soybeans cowpeas all sorts of different things the biggest benefit of these if you talk to anyone they're going to say yeah they fix atmospheric nitrogen but what exactly does that mean um it's actually a really fascinating process where the plant uh joins in a symbiotic relationship with uh the the plants Roots they basically create these the plant creates these nodules at the root hair level where these rhizobia bacteria form colonies they are fed by the photosynthates the sugars that the plant is producing through photosynthesis so they're getting something out of it that is a a carbon source and then they're able to take atmospheric nitrogen form nitrogen gas and convert it into a usable form of ammonia that plant can then use for its own production and the beauty of this is it's going to support the plant on which those nodules are formed but there's also leakage that takes place here and so there's going to be additional benefits for all the other crops or other plants that are in close proximity to that legume that has those nodules on its on its roots um the thing to keep in mind though and the reason that this is a good thing to to focus on for cover cropping specifically is because when we treat legumes like a green manure that is we turn those into the soil or we mow them off and they are Incorporated in in the um top layer of the soil all the nitrogen that has been concentrated in those tissues goes directly back into the soil if we go through and harvest the field of soybeans and take all the seeds out of there that is actually uh exporting a huge amount of the nitrogen that was generated through this symbiotic relationship while there's still going to be some nitrogen present in the plant tissue itself it's much more similar to say like a grain you know a grain that might be kind of soaking up some some residual nitrogen that's already existed in the soil so uh we could go on and on about the the the magic of this symbiotic relationship but needless to say it's a really amazing thing that if we leverage pop properly can have really excellent benefits additionally we're going to have some of the other uh benefits that we see in the non-ligum species like erosion control we're going to see some biomass production certainly the flowering structures on these varieties are great for pollinators for bees natives Etc a lot of additional advantages here so seeing some of them out in the wild this is an example of a a sort of a living mulch between crop beds of medium red clover it can be used as sort of a temporary green manure that gets worked in which is the case here or it can be used as a more perennial system if we were to do something that can like a Dutch white clover that can withstand foot traffic vehicle traffic whatever the case may be that's more of a perennial ground cover again it's going to continue as long as the uh rhizobia bacteria are present in the soil either naturally or if we inoculate it we're going to continue to fix that atmospheric nitrogen and make that available to um the the either the existing plant or plants that are in close proximity um I'll talk a little bit more more about the system that we use to actually get this established but this is one of many different ways that we can integrate Clover into the uh um into the system or integrate legumes into the system here would be an example of our uh an option for our Southern growers in the room this is cow peas and cowpeas is a warm season legume that is really quite quick growing puts on a lot of biomass in a short order oftentimes coupled with buckwheat because they grow at similar rates but you're getting a little bit of an added advantage of having nitrogen fixation in addition to the weed suppression activities of uh buckwheat for example um but this is an example of it out in the wild that at the Johnny's research Farm and here would be an example of what we call inter sewing or using a nurse crop so this is actually interesting in that it's a mismatch in the sense of warm season versus cool season uh underneath the canopy you see a uh it's a summer Alfalfa but an alfalfa species and then above it we've got buckwheat so Alfalfa is a cool season buckwheat's a warm season generally speaking and so what the buckwheat is doing is it's creating this nice micro climate underneath the canopy where the soil is cooler where we're seeing higher humidity levels where we're seeing um you know retained soil moisture and so that Alfalfa is able to establish under those conditions where if it was wide open exposed to all the solar radiation and drying effect of winds and whatnot it may not be able to thrive nearly as much we'd come through when the buckwheat is is ready to be terminated once it flowers mow it off and we're going to have a nice carpet of alfalfa remaining underneath uh here would be an example of a winter kill mix this includes uh oats peas and vetch this is actually one of the mixes that Johnny's offers it's called their spring green manure mix um this is just a show that you can mix legumes into different uh Blends and have that effect even if it's not your only or primary component of a mix the other thing I wanted to point out about this picture specifically is if you look at the bottom left hand corner you'll see a sunflower and the reason I wanted to bring that up is sometimes it makes sense just to throw whatever seed you've got into the hopper and and just let it go as long as the management strategy is consistent so in this example this is seated in the fall we're going to let it winter kill the vetch might overwinter but it's going to be pretty easy to uh to terminate in the spring that sunflower is not going to make it over a main winter and so it doesn't really matter you know we can have as much diversity or as little diversity as we want but generally speaking um the more we have the better we are so if we look at um some of our mixes here um where we're integrating the the legumes in with say a grain there's another added benefit that may or may not um be apparent so when we're talking about grains when we're talking about mixes and residue management one of the things that we have to consider is the carbon to nitrogen ratio and so if we were to go out and this is a mixture of Rye it looks like a vetch it looks like we might have a couple of different clovers in there as well if we were to go out and grow nothing but rye and let it go all the way to maturity it would be very high carbon that is a high carbon and nitrogen ratio and the effect of that is we're going to have a hard time getting it to break down quickly there's a lot of science behind it if you're interested in it we can talk about it further in the Q a but basically by adding legumes into our mix we are balancing it out dropping that carbon and nitrogen ratio and making it easier for those soil microbes to essentially digest this mix um and and get that residue to break down into our soil structure a little bit faster now if we don't want that we might do something slightly different where we have a high carbon cover crop where we just have Rye or we just have wheat or we just have barley or something all the way to maturity and that will give us a nice long lasting residue so again it really depends on kind of what you're what you're trying to accomplish here this would be another example um so this is called the roller crimper we'll talk a little bit more about it in the future but that flattens and leaves the uh the terminated cover crop on the soil surface creating a really beautiful thick mulch because we had legumes in the mix this broke down a little bit faster even though it was on the soil surface it was followed by a season of following right now this exact field is in a cover crop of winter wheat that just looks fantastic and it's going to be transitioned into likely our flower trial in the coming season um so I know that it's just a lot of detail that we threw out a lot of examples and some of it may be immediately relevant and some of it may not and maybe some of this is easy to retain and some of it may not so the important thing is to also leave you with some resources that you might be able to turn to as you start weighing the options for your farm or your garden certainly a place to start this is the Johnny's webinar I would uh lose my job maybe if I didn't throw a uh a link out for some of our Growers Library resources so there are two really great resources there's more than this but two really great ones to start with cover crop uses and benefits and then the Farm Seed comparison chart which is what you see on the left here each gives some really great details about the varieties that we offer how they might fit into your system when you should see them at what rates at what depth all the relevant information to help you produce these crops another one that's really great to look into is managing cover crops profitably it's a book that was put out by Sarah you can get a free pdf version of it online or you can get the hard copy but it's a really excellent resource has all the information you need in one location so definitely something worth having on your bookshelf if you don't already have it certainly reach out to your Cooperative Extension uh there's some really you know expert resources out there in your county or in your uh in your state from your land grant universities and they can be hugely helpful in helping you develop a a cover cropping plan or a crop plan in general for your specific region or for your specific specific conditions um at your at your farmer in your garden and then lastly I wanted to talk about this um these are relatively new resources but uh there are four I believe Regional cover crops councils Northeast Midwest south and west and each of them has a website each of them has a resources section um that is definitely worth checking out go to your home region and start digging around into it this is the one for Northeast cover crops Council and they have two interactive tools this one here is called the cover crops Explorer but they also have a species selector tool where you can put in your conditions what you're trying to accomplish and it will generate some suggestions for you so that is a tremendously useful um resource that I would I strongly recommend you look into the Southern and the Western ones I think they're still developing some of the interactive tools but there's a ton of really good resources on their website and then the midwestern ones in the Northeast ones have some really neat tools that you can plug in your information and generate some responses foreign okay so now let's transition to this um the the sort of nuts and bolts of uh how we actually make it happen that is establishment management termination um say we've gone through we've picked our species uh we think we have an idea of what we want to grow now the next part is going to say how do we actually do it and just like at the beginning where we're thinking about our goals and we're thinking about our individual context it's probably a good time to step back and say okay let's do another self-survey what kind of soil am I working with is it wet at this time of year is that going to impact how we prepare the ground can I prepare the ground or do I have to wait um really heavy Clays in the spring or in the fall are going to be hard to work with and maybe you won't have the window you need to get some of these cover crops in what are my tillage practices we might have some reduced till no-till or conventional till people in the room that's going to have a big effect on your seed bed preparation what tools you're going to be able to use for establishment that's a pretty critical part of all this uh again what kind of acreage are you managing are you going to be going out there and spreading seed by hand are you going to need you know a 20-foot seed drill because you're managing managing hundreds of Acres and then maybe this will kind of feed into some of the later discussion about termination but what was most recently grown what am I going to be growing and how does that impact the residue management um you know am I am I going to be having to battle a bunch of residue and trash because I have a high biomass cover crop but I'm trying to seed carrots or Salad mix into it and that's going to be a problem so ground prep um this is this is an interesting one because it can take so many different forms and the first point I made here is that you know some species can be forgiving in terms of ground prep but what you put in is what you get out and that is not to say that the more you work your soil the better things are going to be that's not at all what I'm saying in fact when it comes to tillage less is often more um but what I mean is if you put in the thought if you put in the intention and energy to planning this out to think about how your different systems work together what preparation needs to go in uh beforehand so that I can have good germination good seed to soil contact make sure that the seed that I'm putting out isn't just sitting there or blowing away or being eaten by birds um the more thought you put into it the better off you're going to be same is true with any of your cash crops if you go out and you see a bunch of beets and then you walk away and don't do a thing for them don't irrigate them don't weed them whatever the case may be your yields probably are going to be a bit lower and while we're not typically going out and harvesting our cover crops in the traditional sense we are trying to harvest the benefits right and so the more productive that system is the more we're going to see in terms of advantages benefits and accomplishing those goals we laid out so when it comes to uh species selection and it's in and the impact of tillage or the impact of field prep ground prep on it we do want to think a little bit about individual needs for different crop types so an example I throw out here teff a lot of you may not be familiar with TEF basically it is a incredibly fine I'll show a picture of it later but an incredibly fine seeded grass species and it requires a a very consistent evenly worked consistently moist compacted surface in order to get establishment once it's off fantastic but getting it started can be difficult whereas if you're going out to seed field peas or oats or some of these other cereals they're a bit more forgiving it's a bigger seed it's going to be able to break through some of those clumps those clouds the residue a little bit more because there's more energy in that seat already to push through some of those um obstacles we'll say a couple examples of here what you might do again this is just a very basic sort of thing you could take this in a million different directions and these are tillage systems so you look at that picture that's a tilter that's basically a tiny little rototiller that works just the top couple inches of soil to create a nice seed bed but doesn't necessarily cause any damage to the deeper soil structure and so you might go through and say okay I need to focus on the different layers of my soil so I'm going to take different tillage approaches or now I'm using a no-till system and I'm going to select my species accordingly because I want to make sure that I'm not inverting my soil or causing any damage to that system seating so what do we do to actually get the seed in the ground um there's some general rules to think about so seating depth is uh going to depend based on the species a lot of the guides that you have like if you go to the Johnny's website and look at the uh the Farm Seed comparison chart or the growing information for an individual product you're going to see some guidance on how deep to see them and what rates and all those sorts of things generally speaking the smaller the seed the shallower it gets planted and so that's a good place to start if you have some really fine seed it's going to want to be shallower shallower than a big fava bean seed or something along those lines also generally speaking there are two ways of getting seed in the ground broadcasting and drilling so broadcasting is essentially just tossing the seat out having it land on the soil surface and typically doing some form of light scuffling or compressing of the soil surface to get good compaction good seed to soil contact for good germination water transfer the beauty of broadcasting is it's really easy to do with no tools or minimal tools so if you look at the upper left hand corner of this slide that's called an even spread broadcast Cedar from earthway relatively inexpensive it spins out the seed you can apply a really nice even layer of seed across the soil surface just by walking up and down and having that thing spin you can go out with a bucket and see it in your hand and toss it in your broadcasting it doesn't take much to get seed out in the into the Garden or in the field the downside of broadcasting is typically you're going to need more seed if you look at guidance for individual cover crop species oftentimes you're going to see either two separate rate recommendations that is how much seed per acre or per square foot or a range and when you're broadcasting you definitely want to be on the higher end of that range that is more seed per acre more seed per square foot because the likelihood of seed to germinate is is reduced your percentage of germinating seeds is probably going to drop because there's going to be losses due to imprecise seed placement you know seed that's on the soil surface that doesn't ever get enough water to actually germinate it's just the nature of of broadcasting drilling on the other hand requires some more specialized tools typically although there are ways around it but basically the idea is creating a Furrow in the soil dropping the seed at a specified rate 8 closing it up packing it tightens and letting it do its thing the picture that you see on the on the left there is a seed drill it's a grain drill that allows us to seed 10 feet swaths of grains or cover crops in one pass and it does all those steps in one in one um one motion you tend to get more consistent germination you tend to be able to put down less seed and have better results however it does require specialized equipment in most instances on the garden scale you can actually basically do this the same way you would seat out a crop of carrots or beets or salad greens or something make your Furrow with your hand with a tool whatever the case may be dribble in your seed cover it up compact it a little bit and that's essentially drilling there's also push seeders like the earthwear the Jang that you can use to to drill seeds in but the idea here is that it's a little bit more precise potentially giving better conditions for germination for that crop so irrigation crop care taking care of it once the seeds in the ground so ideally you're you're able to give some water to that crop early on you're going to get more consistent germination you're going to have better results we generally try to time our seeding before a rain or a period of moisture that way we don't have to necessarily have to think about getting irrigation down in the um in the field um the challenge with providing irrigation is oftentimes you're having to use that for your cash crops or it's in a different location or you don't have the infrastructure in place needed to uh to make it happen and so that's where rain really comes into play with with some of our bigger plantings again if you have enough soil moisture you may not need to actively irrigate right off the bat but the goal is to get as much germination as quickly as possible and water as a requirement if we go out and Seed uh say a rye crop into a dry field and we aren't expecting any rain the risk we run is that opportunistic weed species which over the Millennia have basically uh figured out ways to survive in really poor conditions will likely get a head start over our cover crop or a cash crop so if we can provide good conditions early on give them a head start they can often take care of themselves in dry areas if you're running into drought in the main season or if you have less consistent moisture throughout there are species out there that you can look to for some drought tolerance I listed a couple here there's actually a resource out from the USDA uh it basically is a periodic table like you would see in chemistry class for cover crops um I wish I had it up on the screen but I didn't think of it until uh this was already put together it lays out individual cover crop types and they have little icons on there that will tell you which are drought tolerant or how much moisture you need to actually grow the crop but again the resources that I gave you earlier will also touch on whether or not it's a water intensive crop or or less so weed and Pest Control we don't do much it's the beauty of this oftentimes we're using this as a weed or Pest Control um the biggest thing is if you end up having a weedy cover crops uh stand sometimes it's better just to cut your losses work it in and start over and we'll maybe talk a little bit about that down the road okay now I want to spend a little time talking about termination because as I as I say in this first bullet point it's absolutely critical and it's often ignored until it's a little too late um the reason I say this is I have on multiple occasions tried to build out a cover crop rotation and find myself uh really kind of mad at former me or earlier me for not thinking it through and saying now I have all this really beautiful but challenging residue to to contend with which makes it more difficult so um things to consider what stage of growth is the cover crop what equipment do you have to actually terminate the crop what kind of timeline are we working on do I need this field yesterday or do I have weeks for that residue to break down and to start leading into the next thing and then lastly what is the species and what are the individual characteristics of the cover crop species that will make it either easy or hard to manage the termination of that of that crop so let's start with stage of production what I mean by that is where throughout its life cycle is the crop when you're trying to kill it right so the ease of termination that is uh how effective the different methods of terminating are going to be depends largely on where it is in that cycle so for example in this picture we've got a really beautiful stand of winter Rye that we're going through and mowing down if we had come in a week or two earlier this probably would have sprung right back up and we would have had to go through and mow it yet again burning diesel fuel uh you know setting us back burning labor hours Etc but we let it go to What's called anthesis which is when it starts shedding pollen it's going from a period of vegetative growth to focusing on the reproductive growth and it starts changing the way in which energy is used in that crop if we come through at that time mow this ride down we're going to have no issues with it dying same is true with Clover if we go through we could mow a field of red clover 50 times in a season and probably not kill it but as soon as that blooms once it's in full bloom if we come through and we mow that back it's likely not going to come back so this is really important you got to think about okay when am I going to need this field do I have enough time to get the crop to where it needs to be so that I can manage it appropriately um generally speaking you want to prevent crops from setting seed that is unless you're getting really Advanced and you want to say okay I'm going to let it set seed and get a free crop out of it come the the second cycle that's certainly something you can do but um if you don't want to contend with volunteers that is you know a second generation of that cover crop that's trying to grow you want to get to it before it has viable seed and a very fine note is if you're thinking about mixes that is a bunch of different species Blended together typically speaking you want to terminate the crop before the earliest or the fastest maturing crop set seed because otherwise you're going to have volunteers of that species um again there's a lot of uh exceptions to these rules but these are sort of General places to start and then of course just look at individual crop requirements and you'll have a much better sense of what is actually needed all right equipment how are we actually going to kill this stuff well there's a lot of different ways of doing it and it really depends on your scale of production and what you have available to you mowing you've seen a picture of a tractor running through a big field with a flail mower that is for a quick residue incorporation a Flail Mower which is basically a drum with these rotating flails that chop up residue into very small particles is preferred because they'll break down faster but they tend to be expensive not everyone has the equipment available to them so don't feel like you got to get hung up and just make sure you have a flame or rotary mowers that is a push mower a weed whacker um even a pair of scissors will work on a smaller scale basically trying to clip that crop off once it reaches the point where that termination will be effective um depending on the type of mowing you're doing you're going to have more uh say a larger smaller particle size that's going to greatly affect the rate of decomposition sometimes you want to say I want a really long uh or large particle size so I get good coverage of my soil surface I don't want to go through with the flame mower I want to lay it flat I just want to go through with say a sickle bar mower or scissors or weed whackers or rotary mower lay that flat so it continues to protect my soil surface again it really depends on the circumstances crimping I talked about this real briefly earlier but basically what this is is um taking the cut the crop laying it flat doing damage uh we'll say partial damage all the way up that stem to prevent the vascular tissues from sending water and photosynthes back and forth across that stem and what that does is it basically prevents it from growing but we don't necessarily want to sever that stem and break it into smaller pieces the reason we might want to do this is to essentially have a nice mulch like you see in this field of a rye crop that was flattened using a roller crimper so that then we can come in and plant directly into that and have essentially a nice mulched field you don't need one of these big roller crimpers either they make smaller versions of it for like a BCS um or a walk behind tractor uh when we're going through this slide West our q a moderator he was telling me that he uses t-post a t-post laid flat and two ropes and steps on it and works your way through the the Garden or the the field seeing other people do that with just two by fours on end anything that will cause enough damage to that stem to prevent that vascular tissue from working will essentially do the same thing so this can be effective at any scale really tarping is is quite popular these days and basically what that is is taking sheet of plastic whether it's clear plastic or opaque black plastic and essentially putting it over your cover crop either before you've done anything else or after you've molded or crimped it laying it flat and basically smothering it if you use clear plastic that's technically called solarization you need sunny weather you need high heat in order to make sure that that actually terminates the crop otherwise you're going to be basically creating a nice Greenhouse for it to grow in if you're doing occultation that is using opaque plastic essentially you're smothering it very effective but it takes a little longer you're basically just waiting for that crop to slowly uh use up its energy resources and die back but once you're done with it it can have really really excellent results and you're not having to turn the soil at all necessarily and then lastly is tillage and there's many many different ways of doing this depending on your scale like I said it can be anything from a rake to you know a massive disc arrow that you're dragging through the field so timing crop type again we've touched on these a little bit but really you're thinking about what is the crop that we're actually growing is it something that's really carbonaceous and lignified like a you know a winter Rye or a cereal grain that's at full maturity or is it something like a buckwheat that you mow down and basically turns to nothing in in uh less than a week um so we're talking about the carbon and nitrogen ratio again which I alluded to earlier generally speaking smaller particles and Incorporated residues will break down faster so if you want them to last longer keep them on the soil surface if you want them to break down try to punch them down into that soil where the microbes can do their their activity deep tillage that berries residue usually is the most effective in getting it down into the soil where microbes can Feast on it but again you're really disturbing the soil and that certainly comes with some disadvantages okay so last thing that I wanted to do is basically run you through some of the ways in which we click all these different parts together um we have a variety of different things that we're doing on Johnny's research Farm again some of these are going to be directly applicable to what you're doing them and some of them are going to be completely irrelevant and that's okay I'm not saying take what we're doing here and use it make sure that we're replicating everything that Colin's doing because sometimes that just doesn't make any sense um but really what I hope this does is to let you kind of into my thought processes and making these decisions based on our context our goals and then understand how you can do the exact same thing given your context and your goals so really I'm going to zip through this pretty quickly so that we have time for questions and answers and uh everything but I it's a good case study essentially I'm going to be talking about our typical rotation we'll do between tomatoes and say pumpkins or squash um we use what's called uh what I'm calling an extensive production system that is we're spread about a bit more than a commercial operator might be you can see in that picture we have wide Alleyways that we call Skip Lanes between our crop beds there are 12 foot sections between each of those beds so we basically have a gap in between where another bed could fit but we use those for a lot of our cover cropping or mulch Lanes so if you look at this little diagram you're going to see what you um what would be typical in a tomato uh tomato year main season we've got tomatoes in every other bed between them we have a cover crop of some sort a TEF a clove or a buckwheat something that we can manage in between that's going to offer us some benefits during the production cycle but not compete directly with our crop all right so year one we're doing what we do uh in this picture where we're managing that appropriately we might do a couple Cycles we may end up um we may end up managing something from the previous fall we might end up seating something in the spring so this would be an example of one where it's seated in the fall and then we come through and manage it throughout the production season so I don't know how easily you can tell um but I'm going to try to get this uh cursor so if you can see my pointer you'll see right down here below the primary growth is secondary growth this here is cereal Rye this here is medium red clover we've again allowed that rye to reach the point of end thesis that is maturity but not seed maturity we've seeded out Clover during the early months of the year and say March we go out before the the ground thaws we seed it out on the soil surface it grows underneath the canopy of the Rye and then we'll come through here mow off that rye which we did here with a Flail Mower and eventually we'll get this which is um you know in this case it's not Tomatoes which we've seen as the example but it's our flower our breeding flower nursery we have nice living pathway here of um of clover that we can continue to manage throughout the season and we'll continue to provide us with those various different benefits that we've discussed throughout the the presentation here would be another option this is TEF again it's a an Ethiopian grass and that's a very fine seeded crop grows really fast Smothers weeds beautifully can be mowed throughout the season withstands traffic really a great thing that we've recently incorporated into our rotations and it's also really pretty to look at so at the end of that first year we're going to wipe the Slate clean we're going to seed down a winter Rye in preparation for year two this is what it might look like going into the winter season that's a field of winter Rye you can see now that those beds are no longer defined we don't necessarily have it broken down by the bed system anymore year two we're gonna come in we're going to cut in our beds using tillage like you see in this picture but we're going to maintain those Lanes in that winter Rye that we seated excuse me that we seeded the uh fall before and that will allow us to essentially manage those skip Lanes as a mulch right so here we came through and we roller crimped it with the equipment that we have you could also mow it down depending on your weed pressure depending on how much residue you have you may come through and top dress with additional straw mulch or whatever the case may be but the long story of it is or the long story short is we're taking the residue that we grew in place leaving it on the soil surface so that we can have a nice mulch pathway which results in a squash Nursery with beautifully managed Pathways like you see in this picture after that season's done we might come through disc up that field and Seed down Rye again Frost seed clover in that is bringing it out in early spring seeding out over the top of the Rye like I mentioned earlier in it and that might be what we what we have here alternatively we could turn that right in in the spring and have a full season cover crop mix where we're growing some varieties like you see here warm season crops building that biomass managing it appropriately perhaps mowing it down like you see here in this picture but really getting prepared for the following year the fourth year where essentially we start over again um this is one example of probably millions that we could come up with of how to integrate cover crops within a cropping system we tend to do it this way we spread things out we cycle through beds we cycle through Fields alternating to make sure that we get as much of our ground covered by cover crops allowing us to maximize the potential of those cover crops even during the production season um so that we don't ever necessarily have to pull things out of production in order to get our cover crops down so this is all fine and dandy and it's great but um on occasion it just won't work out and that's okay sometimes conditions don't actually allow you to seed at the right time or you might end up seating something out but it doesn't germinate properly because you don't have enough moisture this picture for the untrained eye may look like a really it might look like a nice blanket of cover crop maybe with weed poking up here or there but in reality that is the dreaded gallon soga uh terrible terrible weed I hope none of you have in your garden or on your farm but it basically was an example of where our cover crop failed and we ended up with this thick carpet of a problem species now I will say we came in and we terminated this before it set seeds so essentially it worked as a cover crop for us it added biomass to the soil but the long the the point I'm trying to make here is that sometimes things don't go perfectly and that's okay don't be afraid to try something new if it doesn't work wipe the Slate clean try something different take notes really the best thing for you is to experiment play around with this and essentially figure out what does work for you on your property because that's going to be the most useful information that you could possibly uh generate so in summary cover crops provide a ton of benefits and they can be used in a variety of different ways but the main thing to keep in mind is understand your own context think about what it is you're trying to accomplish plan ahead think through things if you can think years out in advance you're going to be better off than say you know adjusting on the fly to a mistake that you've made countless tools available both equipment as well as educational resources that you should um you know track down and use to your advantage but most importantly have fun this can be a really exciting and a way to be creative on your on your farm or in your garden while also providing you with tremendous benefits so don't be afraid to to get out there mess some things up try out something new and if it doesn't work okay if it works great then fantastic you'll have that information going into your next production cycle so with that I'm going to pass it over to Wes he's a sales representative for Johnny's he has been diligently collecting I believe all your questions and is hopefully going to uh pitch a few of them so we can have a little bit uh of a discussion here absolutely thanks Colin hello everyone can you guys hear me all right he's having a little technical difficulty before we got going but um there are a ton of questions thank you all for your participation this has been a lot of fun um we certainly won't be able to get to every question and ones that are a little bit more specific uh you know to region or um you know we will probably stay away from the more specific ones and try to touch on some of the ones that kind of can kind of impact everyone um so first let's start out here Colin um there was some people looking for clarification on different things um first one I want to hit you with is uh somebody asks they said your cover crop seems to be in your walk area um not the crop area why is that well actually for I'm going to scroll back for a second because I think it's a point worth illustrating so we do it slightly differently as I said we we tend to spread things out a little bit because we are land rich um and because it allows us to take one field block and have cover crops and cash crops grown in the same footprint but it also provides us with some very specific benefits so we are a little bit different in that we need to get out in the field and do evaluations basically every day of the production cycle and so having the space to get an individual or a vehicle out there is actually pretty important to us so that's one of the reasons why we spread out these these beds a little bit wider but if you take a look at this you'll see okay in this picture beds one three and five are in cover crops right or in cash crops in the tomatoes and two four and six are in cover crops if I scroll two stages forward you'll notice now that we've flipped that and so now we have squash in beds two four and six where the cover crop had been previously and now we have cover crop that terminated Ryan beds one three and five that's intentional that allows us to say um in a given and I'm gonna get kind of nerdy here but in a given uh rotation like this where we have three years of production Cycles we can alternate those beds thereby on uh creating a situation in which a single bed will not see a tomato until seven years later and that allows us some really cool flexibility it allows us to manage our Fields a little bit differently if we have limited space we can omit one of those beds and put in another crop it just gives us a lot of flexibility and that's one of the points that may not be all that relevant for All Growers but for our purposes it it provides us a lot of interesting opportunities um so that's why we do it but um you know you can also do you can also use cover crops as a living mulch within a wheel track or in a path or whatever the case may be so that you don't have to weed that or so that you can get some of those side benefits and keep uh keep your weeds down bring in pollinators not have to worry about soil erosion by just seeding in those walkways as opposed to directly on the the bed tops there's a lot of different options there thanks Colin I knew that would be a good one for you because Colin has done a fantastic job of bringing in our this cover crop rotation and pretty ingeniously you know within the same Fields as he explained we you know won't have the same tomato in the same bed for seven years so um yeah fantastic there um that was sort of a large scale question let's go to kind of towards our home gardeners we've had a lot of folks asking about cover cropping in raised beds now raised beds could be a couple different things that could be a container garden that's you know up high and it's you know like a cedar bed that's filled with soil raised beds could also mean you've you're essentially created a a raised bed through like a bed former or something like that um so I guess there is a distinction there but Colin do you have any suggestions on you know for raised beds what what would you go with for you know maybe more on the home home Garden side for folks who are just looking to get into cover cropping yeah I mean the only difference between raised beds and say a flat field is that you have a little more Contour it's not necessarily the case that it's going to change how you choose your individual species or not necessarily how you're going to manage it other than if you're trying to maintain say a permanent footpath or permanent perimeter to your bed you may not want to put seed down in there because it's going to get in the way of maintaining that as such so really you can think about it almost exactly the same and honestly it opens up a few different possibilities one of the main reasons people will form raised beds in say a field is so that you get increased air flow increased drainage the beds will dry out a little bit faster which basically means you can get in there and put down your cover crop a little bit earlier for example but in reality you can do basically everything you would um in a in an alternative system it's just in a slightly different form when it comes to smaller garden beds that is like a box you know a container box Garden or something like that again really what you're trying to think about is efficient use of space right so you're you're looking at a smaller footprint and saying okay I'm trying to get as much as I possibly can out of this Garden um you know do I really want to forego some of my strawberries bed space for an oat cover crop I mean maybe maybe not um it's really about kind of identifying those goals that you have and managing um managing your your systems your garden beds accordingly there's not really um any hard and fast rules in terms of raised bed specific management other than if you have a you know a fixed space that you're managing with specific tools keep that in mind when you're thinking about residues when you're thinking about termination those sorts of things because if you have certain tools in Your Arsenal that you're using that's going to be your limiting factor other than that it's not going to look too different to be honest right same same but different yep um let's see so somebody asked uh please explain how cover cop can't cover crop can break a pest cycle and provide pollinator habitat sure so pests can take a couple different forms we can talk about insect pests as well as pathogens that is fungal bacterial whatever the case may be a disease so what I mean by interrupting or breaking a pest cycle is by putting in a non-host species so that you don't have a continuous cropping system of the same type or the same host from year to year so say we have a field or a garden where we grow tomatoes every single year in the same location year after year some of our typical diseases say we struggle with septoria leaf spot which is our favorite at the Johnny's research Farm that's going to have the ability to populate that tomato crop every single year no matter what because there's always a host present and most of the time there's also tomato residue present in those soils where that pathogen can can reside if we go in and say okay this year we're going to grow tomatoes But after those are done we're going to go in with a rye and clover cover crop or Ryan vetch or something that septoria leaf spot will not then host on those species and it might get worked out of the system as those residues break down from the Tomato crop we might have a basically a break in that system so that there's nowhere for that pathogen to survive same is true with pests with insect pests certain ins pests host on different types of species you think of like a cucumber Beetle or something they love all cucurbits if we introduce a flowering species that still is going to provide nectar and benefit habitat for beneficial insects but is not a host species for a cucumber Beetle then we'll be able to interrupt that pest cycle and the cucumber beetles won't necessarily have a place to um to to reproduce and build their populations so you can accomplish multiple things simultaneously you just got to understand the life cycles of the things that are trying to eat your crop and how uh or whether or not certain cover crops will will serve as a host species one example I want to give where you can mess this up is say I'm growing like broccoli right which is a Brassica if we come in after that and say we have Club root or we have black rot or we have some other disease that is uh really problematic for Brassica species if we come in and say okay I want to introduce a cover crop to try to help out with this and I go and see how to tillage radish or rapeseed or um you know forage turnip or something like that that is also a Brassica species and also can be a host to those pathogens we're not actually accomplishing the goal because we're creating an environment where that stuff will continue to be perpetuated and it may continue to be a problem in our next production cycle awesome um quick note while we aren't going to get into real super specific questions um if you do have a very specific question please feel free to reach out to our contact center we've got a fantastic group of farmers and gardeners from here in Maine that um you know are in our contact center ready to answer any you know home gardening questions for you um commercial they're you know equipped to work with commercial customers as well if you are a commercial grower and you are you know essentially selling your produce and that's your livelihood we have commercial territory reps available they can help you you know really hone in like the specifics on what cover crop is going to work best for you so please use those resources we also have an extensive Growers library on our website that can that has tons of tech sheets and really in-depth information on there um next question we have here is does cover cropping introduce weed seeds into the garden and I will say firsthand that it can the following you want to run us through how to avoid that yeah it certainly can any so what is a weed I guess it's something that's growing in a place that you don't want it to be growing right um and anything can theoretically then be a weed so for example if you grow a beautiful stand of Oats um and you come in to terminate it but it is already essentially gone to seed and has mature seeds you mow it down heck those oats might turn into a really nice carpet of your next flesh of Oats which can be essentially a weed species um it really you know it really depends the other thing too that may be the case is if you have a really nice canopy of some cover crop you may not notice that you actually have an infestation of another weed down in the in you know in the understory so a great example of that is again that gallon soga that's a really problematic species it's very um very aggressive we've grown something that is traditionally understood to be a good smother crop for weeds that is sorghum sedan grass or just a straight sedan grass or buckwheat you peel back that top layer and you see a beautiful carpet of gallon soga underneath set and Seed um that's a problem and you're going to further your weed pressure even though you're you're putting cover crops into the mix so really you know it it can either the cover crop species can become a weed or it can facilitate weed growth underneath and the thing that I'll say is you know don't be afraid to get down your hands and knees dig around in your in your cover crop to make sure that it is a clean stand if it's not the best thing you might be able to do is to go ahead and start over uh terminate the cover crop as best you can kill off that weed and uh try to start again but inherently I mean unless you have a really dirty seed lot you you know you get a bag of seed that has a bunch of weed seeds in it you won't necessarily immediately introduce weeds through cover cropping it's just a byproduct of not necessarily doing it in the way that um it needs to be done awesome uh next question is we have beds in greenhouses that we use to grow a lot of produce could slash should we be planting cover crop in those beds I think if cover crop as being a large area outside spaces but I guess it could benefit these smaller spaces as well this is an area that I see a lot of people moving towards um you know you can have a lot of salts build up in your greenhouses so it's good every once in a while and pull the cover off um but yeah absolutely plant your greenhouses Colin you got thoughts on that well one other thing I'll say too you can get creative about how you use cover crops and how they integrate into protected culture that is in greenhouses High tunnels Etc um just because uh you know you don't have the space to grow cover crops in a bed in a greenhouse doesn't mean you can't benefit from having cover crops as part of your overall system so think about growing cover crops harvesting it and making compost out of it and then introducing that into your Greenhouse system or your high tunnel system thereby taking advantage of some of the uh the benefits of cover cropping in an alternative site and building that fertility in your in your protected space through essentially transportation of that material but you know that you don't have to do it that way certainly you can find ways of integrating cover crops into small spaces into enclosed structures if you can grow a plant you can grow a cover crop if you're growing produce already in a protected structure there's nothing to say that you can't also grow cover crops in that space the biggest question you'll have to ask yourself is uh is it worth it right what are the goals that you have do you need that's high value real estate under that plastic cover can you take it out of your cash crop production in order to grow your cover crop and if the answer is no that's okay you don't have to feel guilty about it there are other ways of managing your soils in a productive and good way but if you say yeah I could I can accommodate this and there's really no reason why you you shouldn't be able to um and I've seen a lot of people do some really cool things with cover cropping in greenhouses in high tunnels um or in under one form of cover or not there awesome so there's quite a few questions around no-till you know that's an incredibly popular uh style of farming and Market gardening especially right now a lot of Home gardeners are moving towards that as well so the question is how do you kill cover crops in a no-till environment can you only use winter kill cover crops no not at all so if you think about the various different ways of termination that we talked about we've got mowing we've got crimping we've got tarping and then we've got tillage so let's just eliminate tillage all together from that that conversation we're talking only on no-till systems we still have the ability to tarp to mow to Roller crimp and you can do that basically on any scale depending on the tools that you have available to you so if you wanted to say I don't you know I want all the residue to stay on the surface and I want to basically come through I'm going to tarp it down I'm going to let it sit for three weeks and I'm going to let that um you know that that plant the cover crop die back and then come through push your fingers through the residue and plant your seed or plant your transplant no problem with that whatsoever you don't have to flip the soil once so yeah there are totally ways of doing it with specialized equipment or with very basic stuff on various different scales where you never have to invert your soil awesome and actually you can get really creative Wes you were even talking about some of the ways that you're doing these trials uh at your place with you know tarping non-tarping bare soil versus um covered soil and I think there's some really cool things that that you are doing yeah I would definitely plug um silage tarps I think they've been like one of the best tools for the no-till gardener um if people aren't familiar with silage tarps it's essentially UV treated food safe plastic that's used to cover silage which is you know um corn or soybeans or something that's been ground down and it's used to feed animals and vegetable producers have you know taken this tool and adapted it to to their Garden systems and essentially it's it's just like helping to break down that plant residue and that biomass a lot faster and it helps pull up earthworms and all these good you know Critters that come up and help break down your your biomass quickly so um yeah I would definitely say silage tarps and we sell silage tarps those are available on the website um huge tool for the no-till gardener um one question Colin is you know for those who are just looking to get into cover cropping where would you steer them towards as far as like some of the more easy kind of like intro level cover crops and what are some of the crops that you would avoid uh maybe for like the more advanced cover Cropper or somebody you know something that might require a little bit more equipment to terminate um it depends a little bit on your climate so uh for Northern Growers doing things that will winter well for southern Growers too if you do get temperatures that are cold enough to Winter kill certain cover crops it's good to focus on those first because residue management becomes much easier so you know a good place to start would be looking at things like peas and oats for a northern grower you have a legume you have a brain easy to grow big seed easy to handle um though typically winter kill in zones five and colder maybe zone six and colder depending um and you'll be able to really easily work that soil in the in the spring um for the main season stuff buckwheat I think is kind of a Gateway cover crop you can do a lot with it it's relatively easy to grow the one thing I'll caution people on is it's quick to set seed and so if you don't want buckwheat volunteers you want to make sure that you get in there and terminate it before that takes place so once it starts flowering start thinking about cutting that under or turning it under ones to avoid I would say any of the really high residue options like a sudan grass um maybe even the more long-lasting ones I I caution to turn people away from Winter Rye or winter wheat but um they can be especially Rye can be a little tricky to terminate so it might be a little bit um we'll say phase two in your cover crop education um but yeah I would say you know anything that winter kills is a good place to start anything that is easy to terminate it's a great place to start and then just kind of continue adding things in and the other thing to maybe consider is to start with mono culture or as opposed to mixes then you can understand individual crop types A little bit better what I mean by that instead of going out with a 10-way blend of peas and veg and five clovers and all sorts of different things maybe the better thing to do is say okay I'm going to grow peas and I'm going to see how they function on my soils and my climate understand how to terminate them properly and focus on one thing eventually you can mix as many crops into it as you want but it's probably good to start start Simple Start small and then build up as you sort of have your your foundation laid I think he nailed it with that um awesome um so I'm getting the we need to wrap it up here signal um I think you know one question that I found interesting and there may not be a set answer for this for this but um are there any circumstances when you would recommend against cover cropping you know is there a time that you know it just wouldn't work for your system or a time where you would say no let's not do this yeah sure um couple examples that come to mind one um you don't necessarily have the space and yet you need to maximize the the say the productivity or the so you're a small Market Gardener you have half an acre that you're growing in intensive vegetable production you don't necessarily have the ability to take it out of production or say you're in a hoop house and you don't want to take that out of production to put a cover crop in it's totally okay to say hey I'm not going to focus on this I'm going to build fertility I'm going to improve my soils through other means adding compost minimizing tillage you know all sorts of different other management strategies that can help you accomplish the same thing and not necessarily require that you take it out of production for a cover crop rotation the other thing and I hesitate to say this but it's true and I I hate that it's true but it is sometimes there is a true value in having what's called a bare fallow and what that is is a taking a all crops off a field or out of a garden to manage a problem weed right and through light but continuous tillage shallow tillage to let weeds flush come through wipe them out that would be an area where bare soil actually works to your advantage but again that should be used sparingly because tillage is you know tillage for tillage sakes not necessarily something we want to promote um but those would be two two examples of where we might say now is not the time for cover crops and that's that's totally fine that's great yeah and there was you know there's a lot of questions posed around fertility um you know do I need to compost when I'm cover cropping this that and the other and I think you know our our best and safest answer is you know get a soil test and people those questions around you know how do I get a soil test um that can be through AG extension agents universities can do that for you um and use that kind of as the framework for building your cover crops right like Colin talked a lot about what is the goal of this cover crop and like why would you pick this certain species over another um so definitely look into that for sure um you have any thoughts on on that as well Colin like I think the reality is if you don't know what's going on in your soil you're guessing right you can assume you can make assumptions that hey if I plant a you know a legume out there I'm going to get a little bit more nitrogen uh assuming you have the proper rhizobia bacteria in place um you build organic matter generally speaking you're going to have some net benefits in fertility cycling and fertility management but in reality you could be horribly deficient of something like calcium and you're going to have some really big challenges ahead of you and you would never know what the problem is unless you can clearly identify the sort of physical uh expression of that or you go get a test understand what you're deficient in and amend appropriately a healthy balanced soil will grow a healthy balanced crop and the same is true with the cover crop if you want really productive Lush effective cover crops you want to have your soils in a condition where they can support that cover crops can be used to get to that point but they too need food they need water they need a good soil to to root into so um yeah I think you nailed it okay well again you know there was a ton of questions that we didn't get to um I'd like to encourage folks to you know keep asking questions reach out to our contact center reach out to your rep um and you know apologies that we didn't get to all of them but we'll keep doing these webinars and hopefully we'll help answer as all we can absolutely and thank you so much Wes thank you Colin for the uh the great presentation lots of information a lot to absorb um thankfully we have a number of different resources that we've compiled there are hundreds more out there but we just wanted to start with a few we didn't want to overwhelm they're um they're displayed on this slide here I just wanted to say we mentioned this in chat but we're actually going to make all of Collins slides available these links will be available along with other resources within our Growers library on cover cropping um and also as Wes had mentioned we have a lot of folks who are Growers and farmers who are really happy to answer your questions so please reach out to us either by phone email or live chat and again explore our Growers Library there's a lot of great stuff in there and hopefully you'll you'll enjoy the perusing and diving in deeper to this topic and many others um in the meantime thank you so much for joining us today it's truly been a pleasure until next time best wishes from the employee owners at Johnny's and thank you
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