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Summer Cover Crops
204 Plays2 years ago
In this episode of Hort Culture, we'll talk about summer cover crops and how they can benefit your plantings. Cover crops are plants that you grow in between your main crops to improve the soil, suppress weeds, and attract beneficial insects. Some examples of summer cover crops are buckwheat, cowpea, sunflower, and sorghum. We'll discuss how to choose the right cover crop for your situation and soil type, and how to incorporate them into your garden plan. Tune in to learn more!
Midwest Cover Crops Field Scout Mobile App
Managing Cover Crops in High Tunnels
Questions/Comments/Feedback/Suggestions for Topics: hortculturepodcast@l.uky.edu
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Transcript
Introduction to Hort Culture Podcast
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to Hort Culture, where a group of extension professionals and plant people talk about the business, production, and joy of planting seeds and helping them grow. Join us as we explore the culture of horticulture.
00:00:16
Speaker
Welcome everybody. I'm really excited this week because we are talking about cover crops. Before we get into all that. No.
Impact of Technology on Communication
00:00:27
Speaker
Fine. What do you want? Whatever happened? I thought we were supposed to ease in and talk about stuff and talk about the issues. The issues are the cover crops. What happened to when you get a phone call and all of your electronic devices just start going like,
00:00:46
Speaker
Oh, yeah, the speaker kind of interference never happened to that. I guess they fixed it. Yeah, I kind of miss it. I thought you were talking about dollop. We're on a whole different generation. I was like, get off my modem, Brett. Yeah, I'll speak. No, I just was thinking about that and how because like I was imagining receiving a phone call during the podcast and it just like freaked out and it just would feel a little more human. I don't know.
00:01:15
Speaker
I mean, I can drop things at random or, you know, make my cat or something. One of my favorite things is that I used to pay for ringtones and my phone hasn't been off vibrate in like 10 years now. So. Oh yeah. That's one of my favorite things to think about. You can see everyone in our, all the meetings we used to attend, everybody would check their phone.
00:01:33
Speaker
at the beginning, but now everyone's on silent all the time anyway, so nobody has to check their phone anymore. Oh, not everybody. There's always one. Oh, this is true. Yeah, you are correct. My parents have started keeping their phones impossibly loud on the ringer because they're retired so they don't, they're just trying to answer it. And sometimes they answer those during meetings.
00:01:53
Speaker
Yeah. And you hear the whole conversation while you're trying to teach. You don't exit the room. You gotta set the ringtone to max volume and then the brightness to max brightness. I think when you reach a certain age, so you look at it. I mean, like when I pick up a parent's phone, it's like,
00:02:11
Speaker
Blinding I'm moderating I will threaten you I'm gonna borrow everyone my friends phones not tell them turn them all on
00:02:30
Speaker
and call them all in succession. I literally start at the beginning and I'm like, if I hear your phone go off, you need to get out. Is that the phone going off or Alexis? What? Their phones don't go off. We should call each other during this to see if she will threaten us to get off. I've already muted my phone. This is your warning.
00:02:53
Speaker
out there that are like I feel ya and there's listeners out there going oh god I'm never gonna say anything she's involved county is now county non grata for my mom are you can't escape he's all over I'm afraid now
00:03:12
Speaker
I'm gonna be everywhere.
Listener Engagement and Feedback
00:03:13
Speaker
Oh, I meant to tell you guys, and I haven't yet, so I'm gonna tell you now, on our Hort Culture podcast. You can follow us at at hortculturepodcast on Instagram. We had a wonderful listener say that she had just started listening to the podcast as a brand new flower farmer in Berea and finding so much value in the episodes. Thank you. I'm not gonna say this person's name on the podcast, just cause, you know, I don't know if they want to be said on the podcast, but.
00:03:42
Speaker
get called out. Thank you. And we are excited to hear from you guys. If you ever have any ideas. If they want to get on the pod, maybe we hit them back and say, hey, we're looking for some new farmer guests or something. I'd recently recorded a very fun little video for our... So I work with the Center for Crop Diversification group on campus. Me and Josh both do. And it's just about specialty crops in general, marketing and production stuff.
00:04:10
Speaker
But we did a recording about how to use podcasts or how to think about approaching podcasts as a grower. And the things that I highlighted were I think it can make you smarter and you can learn some stuff. It can make you feel a little less alone and like part of a broader community and like you're pulling in the same direction as at least the people that you have those
00:04:30
Speaker
pair of social relationships with through the podcast. And the last one I said was, you know, if you have podcasts, especially local ones or ones that are really niche, consider contacting them and seeing if you can get on as a way to like kind of promote your business, but also bring your business into that, that fold of folks who are pulling in that same direction. And so I think in general, we, we like having guests and are thinking about how to structure that. So if yeah, if there's anybody out there who wants to maybe come on, give us a shout and we'll see if we can work something out.
00:05:00
Speaker
Podcasting is not nearly as scary as, you know, radio or like anything live. Cause number one, we're recording. So if you say a bad word, it's okay. We can edit that out. It's okay. I mean, we don't want to, but we have to. Um, I know it's, it's mostly for me. That was a, that was a problem. It's me. Um, but it's, it's just a fun conversation with your pals or, you know, some other like-minded plant people. So I could think of some bad words.
00:05:28
Speaker
Can you? Malice. For example, erosion. Boom. And that's the segue, ladies and gentlemen. Oil microbial death. Delinity buildup. Dirt. That's a bad word. Dirt. Sorry, Alexis. Weeds in an open field.
00:05:47
Speaker
And that's what we were trying to combat. These are the bad words that we're trying to wash out of our mouths and everyone else's mouth all across the pod nation.
Exploring Cover Crops
00:05:54
Speaker
All the true leaves already know. And for that reason, we're going to be talking about cover crops today. Yeah. Is that what we're talking about, cover crops? Is that the issue of the day? That was a transition for the ages, ladies and gentlemen. I need you to really appreciate that. Thank you. But yes, cover crops is what we're talking about today. Hype, what up?
00:06:14
Speaker
Yeah. So I'm really excited to be talking about them today. So we're going to talk there. Alexis and Ray are bouncing in their seats to talk about cover crops. No, I'm bouncing because I want to hear Alexis go off on. I just so my, my agate gives me a, um, they have a new alate flavor. It's peach. And so I'm just like, not only are we talking about cover crops, but I'm caffeinated and sugar.
00:06:42
Speaker
It's like sunshine and happiness. I can talk about it because it's a Kentucky made product. So nobody at me for promotion, product promotion. Okay, whatever. Kentucky Grill. Okay, back to cover crops. So why do we love them? Everybody on this podcast, give me one reason why you love cover crops. Josh, go. They look cool when they come in. If you've ever seen Crimson Clover. I was gonna say you just took my Crimson Clover. It's pretty. Ray, why do you love cover crops? Go.
00:07:11
Speaker
Weed suppression. Weed suppression. Brett. Sitting and watching a field of buckwheat as the bees dance around happy as a bee in a buckwheat field. Have you ever had you guys? Favorite things. Have you ever had buckwheat honey, any of you guys? Yes. Oh, yes. This is the most unique. It's almost like, and it's like a sorghum, like that dark. Yeah, I love it. Good stuff. The bees love buckwheat, don't they? Yeah.
00:07:41
Speaker
Well, I love, I, it's really hard for me to pick one, one reason, but I, I love cover crops because they have, they have some bio fuming it prop issue that they can deal with. So you got, you got some weird nematode issues. What she likes about it is that it can kill things.
00:08:10
Speaker
For those of you who don't know me, now you do. Are you the same person that made a video? Yeah, I'm sorry, Brad. She made videos of killing ladybugs. Oh, no, Japanese beetles. I would never do that. I'm sorry. I was going to interject with the long story. He says, yes, yes, kill all of them.
00:08:31
Speaker
Yeah, I have a video of me putting, uh, at the beginning of the season, I, I, the first Japanese Beatles, I find I put them on little pikes at the end of my rows. Wow. Medieval. Brutal. Yeah. So the biofumigant is sort of like your bio weapon against things that you were trying to. So brassicas, right? They, uh, they can be used as a biofumigant.
00:08:52
Speaker
It's not the easiest thing in the world to do, but it's very exciting if you get it done. Right. Not to say I've done it, but I have read a lot about it. So is it similar to like.
00:09:03
Speaker
So wasabi and mustard, the spiciness, is that the same? It's mustard gas. Yeah, it's the same kind of similar. It's literally what they made. It's a world war one solution to the problem. Mustard gas, yes. It's an old world solution to a modern problem. Yeah, so let's start to talk about, Josh, what was your favorite about cover crops?
00:09:26
Speaker
I like the way they look, that's what I said. I like the way it's a nice thick stand of cover crop is cool. In general, you ecology people, I've heard them say, I've gone to their gatherings. I've heard them say things like about trying to keep the soil covered.
00:09:45
Speaker
Yes, as much as you can. Why? Why do that? Why would you want to do that? And what do you I mean, and like, so covered, what do you mean, like, put a tarp on it? I mean, are we talking about something? What are we talking about there? Well, I mean, something that we talk a lot about in bigger agriculture is this concept of
00:10:00
Speaker
crusting and I'm just looking for a reason to use the word crusting truly but it kind of relates back to me. One of the things I think one of the great things is it adds organic matter which has a lot of benefits in the soil. I mean yeah there's lots of other benefits to cover crops but I kind of start there with this concept of crusting and soil tilth we sometimes say kind of the
00:10:22
Speaker
this talking about the structure of the soil, but organic matter sort of relates to all of that. And when you're dealing with cover crops, you're either leaving it on top of the ground or you're incorporating it. And there's a couple of different reasons why you would do that. But yeah, yeah, it kind of goes back to organic matter for me. That's one of the great things about cover crops. When I think of bare ground, bare ground being a bad thing, a thing that we're trying to avoid and solve with cover crops. Bare ground is not a good situation because your soil, it can easily leave your field.
00:10:52
Speaker
Right. Whether it's wind or rain. And that soil that is leaving, I remember one of the first books I read about agronomy was that the soil that leaves, you know, due to water moving over the surface or wind, bloom, wind storms, that's your best stuff. So you're letting, you don't want to let it go. And when it moves around where it's not supposed to be, that's the number one pollutant.
00:11:18
Speaker
We don't typically think of soil as a pollutant, but it's a huge pollutant when it gets in waters and streams and it carries those non-mobile nutrients. When the soil moves, you know, those non-mobile nutrients will move with it, so you get lots of problems with that. We've lost so much topsoil over the past, you know, thousands of years. Yeah, even the last 200 years, 30% of the topsoil, yeah, in the U.S., I'm reading the publication.
00:11:42
Speaker
I think we also need to start thinking of the soil as something that is alive.
Soil Health and Management
00:11:47
Speaker
So I know it's, we tend to think of soil as just kind of there and it's in, you know. Co-dead substrate. Yeah, it's just something to grow plants in. But it is alive. And by keeping the soil covered, what you're doing is providing homes and food to those valuable, we say microbes a lot. I just, listen, microbes, fungi,
00:12:11
Speaker
You know, insects, whatever it is, micro flora and micro fauna, micro fauna, micro fauna, micro fauna, micro fauna, micro fauna, micro fauna, micro fauna. By keeping the soil covered by having active root growth down in their
00:12:26
Speaker
At the you know is ideal because you're providing them habitat And those are the things that are going to make nutrients available to your plant Make water available to your plant air pathways you name it we need those things to survive if you're going to grow in a soil media, so that's a
00:12:47
Speaker
Yeah, that's what I think about from a cover crop perspective is keeping that soil alive Because from an ero and erosion is obviously a bad word in cover crops you help with that But I can throw a tarp a silage tarp over top of my soil and not have any of it blow away with the wind but what a tarp doesn't do is provide habitat for those Mac those fauna and flora that are so valuable to our plant life and
00:13:15
Speaker
I think another component this time of year, so we're going to be talking about summer cover crops specifically, but right now we're just in the general cover crop vibe, general cover crop lane, is that this time of year, especially if you move into June, July, you go out and lay down on a bare field in the sun and see how long you want to stick around slash can stay alive. That heat can actually be a really detrimental thing to that top layer of
00:13:40
Speaker
of life and we can use that to kind of kill some weed seeds and to our advantage in some cases with solarization and stuff like that. But the cover crops, it's a nice little shady cabana for all those microbes and other stuff to hang out under in the middle of summertime. So okay, keep it covered. Why don't we just plant back to back to back cover crops year round, keep these things, mow them down, grow it up or going back to Great Plains vibe level of
00:14:08
Speaker
of fertility in the fields. Why don't we do that? Well, I want to use our soil for economics, capitalism. And so keeping the crops covered includes a period where we're growing what we would call a cash crop to differentiate it from a cover crop. So it's not keep them under cover crops all the time, it's keep something planted there.
00:14:33
Speaker
And we talked about last week a lot about the crop rotation side of things, right? So how do you all, how does, how might, is it just an example to lay it out? How might a cash crop, cover crop rotation look in the course of a year? The big thing to me is the consideration when you're starting out is when the cash crop is going in or finishing and that's a lot of that will have to do with whether or not you're planting a cool season cover crop versus like a warm season cover crop.
00:15:02
Speaker
We touched on just a little bit in the last episode of rotating things in and out where that's going to impact your cover crops and the timing thereof because certain crops do well in cooler weather and certain crops do well in warmer weather.
00:15:18
Speaker
So you think of cover crops as part of the rotation, is that right? Part of the rotation and timing is important there because then that's going to determine if you are putting in a cover crop for one of the many reasons that we just discussed, you know, it's going to impact that. Yeah.
00:15:34
Speaker
when your cash crops are there and then when they're not there your cover crops are. So why going back to I think like what you were originally getting at Brett why don't we okay if the goal is to have plants growing in an area why don't we do cash crop after cash crop because we've got plants growing in that area so why would you incorporate a cover crop well one reason would be because you're probably
00:15:57
Speaker
A lot of us are not growing. There's some people, there's just some really impressive, intensive people out there that are growing year round in an area. Like if you've got a high tunnel or something like that, you're going to go in maybe with tomatoes. You're going to go back in with your lettuces. You've kind of constantly got something going in there.
00:16:14
Speaker
But I think for most people, they're going to have an off season. So one thing is that you might not want to be growing or outside picking or weeding or doing whatever it is in, you know, February or November when it's just gross outside. So if you have you can put in a cover crop just to cover the soil.
00:16:35
Speaker
and to help with your those winter weeds that we get a lot. But another reason is going to be nutrients from a nutrient standpoint. So when you are putting in a cash crop, you are constantly removing nutrients from the soil because those nutrients are going up into this tomatoes, up into those beans, into the leaf lettuce, whatever it is. Into my belly.
00:16:57
Speaker
And then into your belly. Exactly. So you're mining the nutrients from the soil. What a cover crop has the ability to do is to put nutrients back into the soil and again, help those microbes get through that process. The plant is usually staying in a little bit longer.
00:17:17
Speaker
depending on the type, but you're typically incorporating them back into the soil. At the same time, you're benefiting from the weed suppression that you're going to get, and then you're rotating, hopefully, if you're doing it right, you're rotating those families, so you're breaking the disease and insect cycle that could be there.
00:17:34
Speaker
So you mentioned nitrogen, Alexis, which we had just a discussion on the side. It's the one element that's usually typically most limiting needed in the greatest quantity, but it's the most mobile in plant systems. Some plant systems, after the plants are produced, you either have less nitrogen than you started with, or you have more. You have an excess of nitrogen, and that also has a big impact on your cover crops. Some cover crops you would plant,
00:18:04
Speaker
because you don't want that nitrogen to go anywhere. You want to sequester that into biomass. Because nitrogen is like all the other nutrients, when we talked about soil erosion, if that soil were to erode,
00:18:16
Speaker
you're not capturing that nitrogen. So that's a big consideration to me is, what's the state of nitrogen after your production of whatever crop? And I think about home gardeners here. I mean, yes, it has a huge impact, especially on commercial producers, but home gardeners year in and year out, they ask about cover crops. Well, I know that most home gardeners, the nitrogen is so high, the phosphorous and potassium in their soils, particularly in the nitrogen probably is too.
00:18:45
Speaker
It's very high in their soil and I usually recommend a cover crop that's going to take in nitrogen, not a legume that's going to produce nitrogen through the legume itself. So that's a big deal to me is the state of nitrogen after a crop.
00:19:02
Speaker
that's going to really steer me into what sort of cover crop I'm going to get involved with because it's all about nitrogen to me.
Nutrient Management in Farming
00:19:09
Speaker
Not only the nitrogen that's in your soil but the carbon-nitrogen ratio of the cover crop after you're done with it, whether or not I'm going to just lay it on top of the soil through whatever means or I'm going to incorporate it. Oh, that's really important. And the flip side
00:19:26
Speaker
So I, I grow in a high tunnel and I have a lot of experience with high tunnels. You can, when I said, uh, plants, no matter what you're growing can mine nutrients and with cover crops, you can help incorporate those back in instead of ripping it all out. If you're in a high tunnel setting, a lot of the time we have heavy salinity or we, a lot of soils of Kentucky have, you know, in general have high phosphorus. Uh, sometimes those levels can be so high that they make other nutrients.
00:19:53
Speaker
make it hard for plants to take up other nutrients so the ratios get off. What people can use cover crops for is actually to pull some of those. Some cover crops are really good at mining phosphorus, as an example, some floral cover crops especially.
00:20:08
Speaker
because flowers need a lot of phosphorus to bloom. So they will pull a lot of phosphorus out of the soil. And then instead of incorporating them, they will actually put those somewhere else. So they'll either get rid of them, burn them, or they will incorporate them in a place maybe that has low nutrient levels.
00:20:26
Speaker
So in that way, they can kind of be used to actually mine that. And then they might go in with, you know, something like a lettuce that's a low feeder as far as how much nutrients they need. They're just, they're real chill. It's like feeding a baby versus feeding a football player. When a football player was a tomato.
00:20:45
Speaker
And a small two-year-old is going to be a lettuce as far as how much they're going to ingest. But yeah, plants can do a lot. Our organic growers especially really depend on cover crops for nutrient management.
00:21:01
Speaker
You know, I was just, I was reading to kind of prepare my brain with some facts for the pod and they did a study here in Kentucky that said that hairy vetch as a cover crop produces equivalent of 67 pounds per acre of nitrogen fertilizer.
00:21:19
Speaker
So it's not like small potatoes. I mean, corn needs a lot if you're going in with corn. No, it's actually a legume, not a potato at all. It's actually a small bean. They're like tiny potatoes. It's a large bean. 67 pounds per acre can be pretty significant for something to cover crop. And then that's just the nitrogen. We're not talking about the fact that it helped those microbes out. We're going to incorporate something to produce more organic matter. So our soil tilth, in general, the physical characteristics of it are better. But now we also have our nutrients added into that.
00:21:49
Speaker
Yeah. So I've found that what I need is the love and support of friends to bloom in my personal life. So in that way, you guys are my nutrient. Well, you're Mary gold. That's what they, I'm good at mind in it. Like the NPK bunch. That's right. That's a good question. I'm just your little daisy.
00:22:12
Speaker
Yeah. Or Huckleberry, how about that? Well, so if we could, maybe let's go from broad into specifics and talk. So we're right now getting ready to head into the summer-ish season. Alexis, you mentioned
00:22:25
Speaker
I think all of us have mentioned that the winter off season is kind of the most mainstream thought about cover crops because it's in between, even a lot of big commodity growers grow a winter wheat or a winter rye in between their commodity seasons from that October, November window up through planting ahead in April.
00:22:48
Speaker
Right now we're headed into the summer season and so maybe we're talking about all these categories and we're talking about nitrogen fixation and sequestration and all these other fancy little words that we're bringing up here. Can we just jump into a couple of specifics of types of types of summer cover crops and how you might use them because I think one thing
00:23:06
Speaker
that we didn't quite mention is that there are times where within a cash crop rotation, you will just have a window where you can't get something else in in a productive way, another cash crop into that rotation in a productive way. And cover crops can fill that gap. That would be something like buckwheat, maybe a short turnaround.
00:23:26
Speaker
But as far as what, when we think about summer cover crops, what are some of the big ones that come to mind? We might reference some materials here because there's a handful of them, but what are we thinking about? And if you had to summarize, you know, if we're thinking about those categories, what does that thing do? I guess we could think about it what in terms of Alexis.
00:23:46
Speaker
Joshua, non legumes and legumes. That's what I usually start with. Break it down. Yeah. And there's, there's some in each category I suppose. Legume. It's like the bean family. Nitrogen. Fixed nitrogen through there. And let's give a shout out to the, to the rhizobia for being the ones, the real OGs who are doing it.
00:24:07
Speaker
They have a, you know, I dabble in the science arts, but correct me if I'm wrong, they have these little colonies, these little clusters on their roots of the legumes that are actually the hardworking microbes that are doing that nitrogen fixation. And so as you said, Ray, you could put those in.
00:24:26
Speaker
take a soil test before and after and maybe have more nitrogen after you planted it than before. And you know, that may be desired, not always though. And we've already touched on that. It depends on what your objectives are. And the organic gardeners seem to have a lot of times a really good handle on this small and large scale production because they take these things into consideration because, you know, the limitations within their systems or the compounds that they work in.
00:24:54
Speaker
But yeah, the legumes a lot of times will have a kind of a net gain of nitrogen, whether through them making nitrogen or the fact that a lot of them are more succulent and they break down and then release additional
00:25:08
Speaker
you know, through different processes, additional nitrogen there. Yeah, that could be kind of a net gain, but... And so in summertime, what are those, that category? What are some of them that we're looking at? You know, we were kind of throwing some things out there. CalP is one that I like. That's a summer lagoon. I've seen that used some.
00:25:30
Speaker
some others. I've even seen things like a soybean, I mean, that we don't think of. I mean, if you guys are familiar with that, I have some producers that actually... I've heard of soybeans. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of an important crop. Actually, I guess we should reference that. And yeah, the soybean, it's kind of an important little guy. You know, it's kind of an important little guy. But I guess
00:25:52
Speaker
in the conversation here, it's a used a little bit different. I'm going to cheat. I'm going to cheat here and read off. So Crimson Clover and Sweet Clover are some of the nitrogen fixtures that I think about as the clovers.
Selecting and Managing Cover Crops
00:26:07
Speaker
I generally don't. I mean, they can be used as a summer cover crop. I generally don't necessarily think of them that way. Usually Crimson Clover, we're starting to terminate by now. Yeah. So
00:26:21
Speaker
That's a challenge is timing. Yeah, that's a great point. I think that's the challenge I think when you think about cover crops the number one thing and you're using them in rotation So first, how can I wrote rotate outside of a family? All right. We've already talked about that with rotation next is
00:26:38
Speaker
What do I want it to do for me and how much effort do I want to put into it? And so I say that because we talk about the cow pee as an example. So what do I want it to do for me? Well, I want it to perform, give me biomass, which is pretty standard for most of your copper crops, but I also want it to fix nitrogen. Okay. So I know I'm going to look into a legume. The cow pee does well in droughty conditions. So if I'm putting it in, right. Cause it has a tap root. So if I'm putting it in,
00:27:06
Speaker
more in summer when we're, you know, in Kentucky, you know, I'd like to, I don't know, Kentucky weather is crazy. But in theory, you know, July, you're not going to have as much rain and I don't want to have to irrigate my cover crop. I might go with a cowpea because that's something and it's going to produce a lot of biomass. So if I really need to build my organic matter in my soil, I can do something like a cowpea.
00:27:28
Speaker
You need to think about how you're going to terminate the cover crop. Oh, the regrowth is a problem. That's the third part of this. So I need to think about what it's going to do for me, how much I want to manage it, but also termination and time, you know, timing that termination correctly, I think is really important. Yeah. So before we jump into that, maybe we can explore that for each of these so that the other big category we said was non-legumes. A lot of times I think typically we think of grasses.
00:27:56
Speaker
So the classic ones I think of are sorghum sudangrass and sudangrass, but also some of the millets, different millets. These are the warmer season grasses that in the case of sorghum sudangrass, it has no ability to handle our winters or even our early falls. It's going to be terminated by that cold and kill.
00:28:16
Speaker
And that one like sorghum Sudan is a good companion. Actually, if you want to mix it in with what Alexis was just talking about, it's a good companion for some of these things that can be blended in with some of the legumes. If you've got an handle on the termination process, which Brett, like you said, that one terminates kind of the weather terminates it. So when you're thinking about sorghum Sudan, it's a very popular one.
00:28:39
Speaker
It produces, again, a large amount of biomass, which means it gets big. So you've got to have a way to terminate it because you're not going to do it. Or I wouldn't recommend you do it by hand. A lot of people will mow this more than one time in the season so that they can have a better handle because it will get. In other words, don't let it get tall. And if you mow it, it produces even more biomass. That's a great side effect of that.
00:29:02
Speaker
Right. It also has weed suppression. So it has what's called allelopathy traits to it. So essentially those roots, have you ever heard of like a walnut root? Black walnut. So black walnut has a allelopathy toxin in the root system called juglone. And essentially things like tomatoes are very sensitive to them and they just won't grow. And that's how
00:29:25
Speaker
black walnuts keep themselves from being crowded by something else. Sorghum student grass is great for that. So if you have an area that you've got heavy weed pressure and you really want to try and deal with that, you can go in with something like that. We talked about buckwheat. I feel like we need to give buckwheat more credit. We've only barely mentioned her. Number one, she's great for pollinators. So if you are trying to attract more pollinators or if you're a beekeeper,
00:29:51
Speaker
buckwheat is a really great one. The biggest reason I love buckwheat is because it's so quick. So when you're trying to work crops in,
00:30:00
Speaker
You can put buckwheat in and it's flowering in four to six weeks. And if you need to terminate it before then, it still has lots of biomass on it. So if you need something that you can terminate within a month, buckwheat is a really good way to go. Just don't let it go to seed. Don't let it go to seed. And it's easy to terminate. So you can do this by mowing it. You can, I've used a weed we eater on it. You can also just drag yourself a tarp over top of it and smother it. Now again, you can just step on it really hard. It almost has like a succulent.
00:30:30
Speaker
And it's a great phosphorus scavenger. So if you're needing to either, you know, maybe you've got phosphorus and you've been having to add your phosphorus, it will go scavenge for it, bring it up into the root system, into that area. And then it'll be right there in that root zone when you go in with another one of your plants. And so that's one good thing that it does for you.
00:30:55
Speaker
So I thought that Juglone was a fan of the insane clown posse. It may be. Common misconception. Maybe that's the etymological origin. Juglone. Oh, that's what I was thinking of. If I could just dig a little deeper on this thing that Alexis has said several times now, this idea of biomass.
00:31:18
Speaker
It puts on a lot of biomass. And so some people may be like, yeah, I know what that means. But in general, what we're thinking of is it takes minerals and nutrients from the soil, it through the magical processes that plants go through, it takes and stores them and uses those to build itself up over the course of its growing season.
00:31:38
Speaker
So it's taking things that might typically wash out the bottom of your soil profile. They may get used by weeds. They may get blown away if the root mass weren't there. It takes them and it stores them in its physical being in this big, juicy, leafy biomass thing, this beautiful, luscious mound.
00:31:59
Speaker
And the thing that's cool about that again is it ties it up. It takes that stuff that's there that you've either applied as fertilizer, you've built it up through nitrogen fixation, or maybe it was just there already in the soil because you have really great soil. And in the events where you have heavy rainfall or whatever, it's tied up physically in that plant. And then when you go to terminate it, all of that juicy, lovely nitrogen and carbon that was tied and other nutrients that were tied up in that plant, when it dies,
00:32:28
Speaker
you know, you fall down, leave it there, you mulch it, you do whatever you're gonna do to turn it into, you know, cut it up so that it's really finely chopped up and let it decompose. Think of that as the sponge got filled up with all this nutrients. And then when that happens, you squeeze that sponge full of nutrients out just in time for your cash crop to soak it all up. Ideal world, ideal world. Keep in mind if we're talking about something, you mentioned carbon nitrogen. If it's something like sorghum sedan grass,
00:32:57
Speaker
which has a high carbon profile, which means there's a net loss of nitrogen in the soil because it takes nitrogen. Yeah, 10 to one is an ideal ratio roughly when we're talking about the decomposition process, but it's 50 to one. So not only does it take the available nitrogen in that plant to break itself down, but it also has to use soil
00:33:21
Speaker
nitrogen to also break that down. So that's a real important concept that you have a kind of a there for a while you have a net loss. You're talking about after you've cut it down. Yes. Just like your compost pile needs green and brown items in it. It's actually going to steal some of the green items from the soil for a little while. And so that brings us back to that planning out termination that Alexis you were kind of getting at is so you got a lot of biomass to deal with. In other words you might clog up your mower you might pull out your back trying to
00:33:51
Speaker
Yeah, that's what happened to me. Sort of sitting grass. And so Alexis on the, on the termination side, in addition to the biomass, you have to think about that timing component too, right?
Decomposition and Timing of Cover Crops
00:34:07
Speaker
Right. So the more, you know, we, we said buckwheats, like kind of very like succulent, just, you know, you can kind of squash those leaves really easily and get either, it's a juicy plants, juicy, right? Juicy.
00:34:23
Speaker
So it's going to decompose quickly. So you can, so not only is it a quick crop, but in the hot summer, which is what we're usually talking about when we're, we're talking about summer cover crops. Once I, once you.
00:34:37
Speaker
chop that up and the finer the pieces are, the faster it's going to decompose. So the more succulent a cover crop is, the faster it's going to decompose. So if you can turn it under or cover it with a tarp if you're doing like a no-till type system and let it heat up.
00:34:54
Speaker
and with plenty of moisture underneath there, so you may have to even give it a little sprinkle or wait till after a rain or something. But if you let it heat up, it's going to decompose. You're probably looking at 10 to 14 days in an ideal situation. If you're doing something that is a lot drier with a lot of that biomass like sorghum sudan grass, for those of you who don't know that,
00:35:16
Speaker
Kind of think of corn, but even on more steroids. Yeah. Give you kind of an idea. It's just, it's a, it's a woodier type text. If corn is Vin Diesel, so the circumstance in grass is the rock. The rock. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Oh, well now it's on. Now we're being like, I hit you. But, okay. You'd be aware of anything on the label that says grows anywhere is between four to 12 feet tall. That's a wide range fit folks. Yeah. So that's going to think it's a longer period of time.
00:35:45
Speaker
You're probably going to want to till that one in. So you're going to break it down with something, a bush hog or a flail mower. And it will bond your bush hog or mechanical rotary style.
00:35:55
Speaker
We talked to, yeah, the flail mower we talked about. It takes sometimes a special cutter if you let these things get big. You will be frustrated if you just have like a riding mower and a small plot and you're used to mowing down your beautiful crimson clover. You will get frustrated if you have eight foot of sunhemp or sorghum sedan and try to mow that. It's going to bind all of your equipment, your tillage equipment, your mowing equipment, everything. Just to read between the lines, if you don't have a good mechanism for taking this stuff down, you may want to stay away from sorghum sudangrass as an option.
00:36:25
Speaker
Or Sun hemp. Or mow it on a continuous basis. It's one of the things they'll come back and, you know, it'll kind of regrow to an extent. So yeah. So going back to timelines, thinking about timing. So maybe I rip out, I'm going to use flowers because that's what I know a good rotation for.
00:36:46
Speaker
You might go in with some cool flowers. Cool flowers are all the hype right now, literally and figuratively. So those are actually planted in the fall. They overwinter and then you're harvesting them starting probably early in our area of the state early April through right now. Can you give me a couple of examples of those species?
00:37:05
Speaker
Or leia, agristema, renunculus, anemone. I'm not sure which language she just yelled at us in. Companionola, lark. What did you go wrong and prosper? I called you an agristema. Actually, agristema's common name is called corn cockle, which I don't like. Is this the juggalo language that you're speaking?
00:37:26
Speaker
So anyway, so you're planting them in the fall. They're overwintering. So a vegetable version of this might be lettuce or kale, Swiss chard, something like that. So you're overwintering it. You're going to harvest it until it gets too hot. And so in lettuce world and those things we call that bolting. In flower world, we just say that's going to seed. It means the exact same thing. It's just different terminology.
00:37:48
Speaker
We're about to hit that period in Central Kentucky here over the next week or two because we're getting in the 80s and those plants are unhappy. You can pull that out and some people will go right back in with a summer annual or you can put in a quick cover crop. You could put in something like buckwheat.
00:38:07
Speaker
You have a, let's call it a month just for some easy math. So in June, it goes in. It's in all the way through June. And then I'm going to terminate it. And by mid-July, I can have a second succession of summer annuals going in. So I can put in a zenia. I can put in silosha, some of those fast things. Or I can put in another cover crop if I want to, and then wait until fall to plant some more cool crops.
00:38:33
Speaker
What that does is give you flexibility. So you can go in with a cover crop.
00:38:39
Speaker
And you, if you're not ready, because sometimes you're just not ready, you're busy harvesting, if you're a business, you're harvesting, you're marketing, you're just not always ready to go back in, amend the soil, you know, till or add compost, you know, put any plastic back down, trellis, all of those things that go into putting a new crop in. Sometimes you don't have time, but we don't wanna leave that soil bare. So we put in a cover crop, we suppress the weeds, we help the soil in between, and then when you have the,
00:39:07
Speaker
the ability mentally and physically to go back in with a crop, you can go back in and know that you're not going to have as many problems and you were doing something good for your business, for your crop, for your soil in the meantime. Yeah, I think another application of the buckwheat you were talking about is if you put in your first planting of tomatoes and some deer came in and wiped them out or there's a hailstorm or some blight just pops off like never before.
00:39:38
Speaker
And you have suddenly this, you got to pull them out. There's no, they're not going to do anything. It's nice to have that on hand as a bridge crop to be able to, to make that happen on short notice. And it's also, it's a nice way to get a cover crop in, in that short window that you, maybe you want to do that. You for one reason or another, you want some biomass and some food for those microbes and, uh,
00:39:58
Speaker
But it sounds like, and correct me if I'm wrong, it sounds like some of the longer season stuff would require a little more planning in order to fit that in. It's got to be kind of a part of your rotation that you're anticipating. You know how long it's going to go. That's what I talked about on our...
00:40:14
Speaker
crop rotation section where what I'm doing is I have actual plots that are going to stay in a cover crop for a longer period of time. And I've divided up and know that I can sell, you know, certain area worth of flowers or, or veggies or whatever it is. And then I have a third area that's going to be in a cover crop and I'm just going to move those around every year so that every, you know, every three years we're getting a new cover crop in there. Um, so you can work it in that way. If you don't necessarily want to work it in,
00:40:42
Speaker
between your cash crops, you can work it in between your plots. You can think of it as your cover crop plot. So the termination on stuff like grasses, for instance, we're trying to do that before they go to seed, right? Yes. You will hate yourself if you don't. Can you just say a little bit more about that? Because there's a certain window of time where like right if we take it out,
00:41:11
Speaker
At that time, it's less likely to grow back because it's sort of committed to going toward seed, but it hasn't formed seed yet. This is at least coming out of winter that's been...
00:41:20
Speaker
kind of a time period where you're getting maximum biomass and usually have to know a little bit about the plant, look for the bloom period because some of these things bloom like buckwheat and you can, it's the cut off of that. So you have to know a little bit about the biology of the plant, but yeah, you kind of watch the plant. You want to, in many cases, you want it to make all that biomass if you have a way to terminate it and mow it and deal with that. And that's in your plan to make all of that, the green tops, you know, to make all the good stuff.
00:41:50
Speaker
Yeah, like Ray was saying, you know, it's not just about preventing it from reseeding and planting when you don't want it to. It's about the plant's physiology and where it's putting its energy right up until it seeds. It's putting a lot into vegetative growth, and that's what's giving us what we want. Once it starts going to seed, it's putting its energy into seed formation, and it's going to be a lot harder to kind of get those nutrients back out. Yeah.
00:42:18
Speaker
And on the topic today, you guys mentioned earlier, a couple of you guys were talking about some really cool tools that are fairly new through the university. Anybody want to speak a little bit more about those? Before we go into those specifically, I do work very closely with the Southern Sustainable Ag Research and Education Program. That's Southern SARE, which is a part of USDA. SARE, it's a national program interested in sustainable agriculture. And I would say one of their bread and butter
00:42:46
Speaker
topics across the last 30 years has been cover crops and the use of cover crops because it's of interest to really anyone from the home gardener scale all the way up to a 30,000 acre, 100,000 acre row crop farm and everything in between.
Resources and Tools for Cover Cropping
00:43:04
Speaker
And so there's a lot of resources available from them. There's a couple of books. You can download everything that they have for free. It's the ones called managing cover crops for profit. There's a stuff about using cover crops as part of a strategy for attracting pollinators and giving habitat for beneficial, beneficial insects and other folks like that.
00:43:24
Speaker
And they also, and I'll briefly mention too, there's a group called the, there's a Southern Cover Crops Council. I don't know that they've come out with a guide just yet, but there's also a Midwest Cover Crops Council. And they've come out with a really nice summary short, it's a pocket guide, but you can actually download the digital version of that as well.
00:43:44
Speaker
just to give you a sense of what some of the crops are, what the planting windows are, and all that kind of fun stuff. So there are some resources out there. I would encourage you to go to the SARE website and we'll also post the link to the
00:43:55
Speaker
uh, the cover crops guide as well as to get as a nice starting point and orientation point. And we will be talking about cover crops again in the future for sure. We kind of wanted to do the primer and the, and the, uh, summer stuff. But, uh, Josh, you've been working on something that like made Alexis go, Oh, this is so cool. Yeah, that was exciting to hear. Yeah. I've been developed, I've been working with the hort council, Kentucky horticulture council to develop a cover crop calculator.
00:44:22
Speaker
Essentially, it's available now. We'll put a link with the distribution material for this episode. But it's primarily targeting people who are working with management areas that are smaller than an acre. Now, you could have a multi-acre farm, but maybe you're just
00:44:40
Speaker
worried about managing a bed that's only a thousand square feet or 1600 or something like that. And you can use this to calculate kind of a high and low seeding rate for a variety of cover crops in Kentucky, whether they're legumes, non-legumes like we talked about for scavenging nutrients as well as
00:45:00
Speaker
We have brassicas in there as well for those of you who are excited about biofumigants and terrorizing the nematodes on your farm. And there's additional resources there as well. There's a link to Sarah Publications and things like that for more details. But it's a small or it's a simple kind of mobile responsive tool that you can pull up on your phone or your tablet or your computer and just do some quick calculations about what you'll need for
00:45:28
Speaker
seating with cover crops. That made me imagine a movie where the president of the nematodes very angrily says, we do not negotiate with brassicas. As a general policy. Like it kind of had like a tiny blubber as president, you know, from a disaster movie energy. So I just want to share that with everyone. There's a hard line being around here. A hard line.
00:45:57
Speaker
Sounds like a great tool. I'm excited to check that out. And there are some, I'm jumping in here and saying that there are some specifically for high tunnels. So a lot of time you're working in a smaller space. So the type of termination you do could be different, but also what you need, what your goals are for those cover crops are often different because you're working in a structure that there's no
00:46:25
Speaker
rain getting into. I would recommend checking those out and they have that for both cool season and warm season. If you have to have your tomato cover crop, but maybe you don't do a ton with it in the winter, you can do a cover crop then or vice versa depending on that. That can help you, especially if you're having any salinity issues going on. Cover crops can be a good resolution or part of a resolution.
00:46:50
Speaker
If you're listening to this and you want to use a cover crop maybe to establish a field or get some biomass on the field ahead of maybe starting next season to work there or whatever, if you're in any way evaluating right now, so depending on when you're listening to this, where we are generally speaking, April, May through July window, is it
00:47:11
Speaker
you could probably find some sort of cover crop to put in during that time period. And what we'll do is we'll revisit this probably several times over the course of time, but we'll also cover things like the fall considerations and give a little bit of a heads up on when you might think about seeing that kind of stuff in the future. But just in general, if you're coming away from this like, yeah, all this stuff about somewhere cover crops is great, but I'm listening to this June 13th, is it too late?
00:47:36
Speaker
Well, no, it's not, it's not too late. And you can, you can generally figure something out maybe for this year, if not for next year. Buckwheat's always the answer. It's never too late for cover crops. Russia is the number one global producer of buckwheat. Wow. Well, yeah, you can make like a flower, right? I love sober. There's a really, really good. It might be, I'm trying to think of what, there's a YouTube video, one of those,
00:48:06
Speaker
It's not a Bon Appetit, but it's in that kind of vein, but it's a really cool video of this dude making traditional soba noodles. And the thing that's tricky, so buckwheat doesn't have gluten in it.
00:48:17
Speaker
So it doesn't want to stick together. It's like trying to build a pasta out of sand almost. And so this old traditional Japanese technique of mixing it and being really delicate and it takes all this time and then you get to the end and you can mess it up. But to save you the spoiler, he does not mess it up. It's really on YouTube.
00:48:40
Speaker
Yeah, so, but sorry. You're going to add lard to stick it together. I mean, I was waiting for it and it didn't happen. Just water. I think it's just water and buckwheat flower and sounds more delicate than I would be able to work with. I mean, that's too delicate, too delicate. That's why you get to do it for you. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Bit of a bit of a buckwheat boy. Bit of a YouTuber. It sounds like. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
00:49:09
Speaker
consumption and production. Josh, Josh, can you can you save us from whatever I'm talking about? I will try. But yeah, to go ahead and kind of conclude what we talked about today with cover crops is, you know, it's important to know what to see what cover crop are you using? Are you trying to just cycle the nutrients that are there and available? Are you trying to fix nitrogen? Are you trying to murder a class of microbes like Alexis always seems to be doing?
00:49:35
Speaker
And then from that, you know, figure out when you are going to be seeding and when, and very importantly, how you are going to be terminating that when it's done, because that is a crucial thing to understand before you put stuff in the ground is how are you going to kill it before it, you know, does something you don't want it to do. And yeah, we have some new tools for this stuff. There's a lot of publications about cover cropping and what cover crops can do for you in different kinds of contexts, different times around the year.
00:50:07
Speaker
And be sure to check out the cover crop calculator. I'm proud of it. And if you're a major, major computer nerd, you can look at the source code itself and see how it works and adapt it to however you want. Open source, King. Yes.
00:50:23
Speaker
And one thing we didn't mention, there are a wide variety of ways to seed these cover crops, including very low tech, as low tech as walking around in the field with a bag or with one of the, you know, a belly, I call it a belly grinder, like that you crank to put it out or a lawn seeder, stuff like that.
00:50:41
Speaker
all the way up to vacuum cedars and all kinds of other crazy stuff. So don't let that technological thing get in your way. I've done mine by hand. I'm not saying it's done that well, but it gets the job done. It's artisan. Hand casting is a lost art.
00:50:59
Speaker
So anyways, we hope that as we grow this podcast, you will grow with us. Uh, and we are excited. Like I said, join us on Instagram, follow us at at court culture podcast. Please feel free to leave us any of your recommendations. If there's something you want to learn about, hear about, um, we are open to that. Otherwise you're just going to hear all the crazy soba noodle stories that we're going to come up with. So anyways, thank you for listening and we will talk to you next time.