the amount of organic matter that that plant has generated for this
field block is amazing and I want to show you a few things about cover crops
so first of all what we're gonna do
is dig in and look at what it looks like because it's been covered for all these months it's really
beautiful and I I want to see I want to show you a profile so we're digging digging in oh nice rock
and I want to show you this this is amazing you see here these are the roots
and you have these round balls that are on the roots
these are bacterias that connect with the roots of the legume thatch is a legume and these are
called nodes and these have the extraordinary capacity to take nitrogen that's from the sky
and bring it down into the soil because of this symbiotic relationship with these nodes
it's really an amazing process and it's because of that that we call them actually green manure
these cover crops that we use when they're legumes they can take the nitrogen that's in the sky again
and bringing into the soil and fertilize and feed the soil that way this is a super old process and
most organic farmers know about this uh regenerative Farmers people that are new
to the movement need to learn more about cover crops green manure rotations like this is the
tested classic child and true way of farming but you really see how these these these crops
have populated and you see nodes everywhere in the soil it's just amazing
see that's a really nice root system here there's tons of them
and it's a really inexpensive way to feed your soil it's just by growing these legumes
that will do that and a cover crop legume or not so legume are the only crops that
can do that that have this capacity and sometimes these bacterias are not in the soil
so you can add an inoculum usually you buy it in the form of a powder it's just something that
you'll mix with your seeds when you when you plant and just to make sure that you have these nodes
so that's something that you can you can add once once they're there though they'll be there for for
you know for as long as you're farming so that's not an issue but the all the other big benefit of
growing a cover crop is that the root systems you see them here this is all going to be decomposed
buy the soil web the living soil web in the soil so it's going to be plant food
organic matter for all the macro organisms spiders earth worms like you know everything that's in the
soil it's their food because it's it's organic matter that's decaying and so to have cover
crops that go with deep deep roots you're feeding the bottom layer of your soil you're feeding the
Ecology of your of your soil but deep deeply and that makes the big difference you know putting
compost on top doing the lasagna style kind of feeding the soil is also good because you'll
have a lot of the micro animals soil animals coming up and taking the compost and bringing
it down but there's there's all these layers of Horizons in the soil with a different ecology and
cover crops are really the only way to feed the bottom layer and that's why they're important
in the system they take up planting space and planting time so they're not lucrative in a way
but if they're put in in a rotation and you have let's say a field block or a bed that
has a cover crop one time out of four you know you're really good you can really have a sweet
spot that way so that's what we do here we'll have you know a bed or a field lock depending
on how we set up our rotation that's going to be undercover crop one time out of four
eight to twelve weeks and that in my experience is enough to generate the benefits of the cover
crops without having too much of the garden uh you know in cover crops so how to deal
with cover crops in a no dig system that's a big question um you know I I've never said that I'm a
no-tailed farm I don't really believe in that kind of wording uh we're definitely uh really sensitive
to soil ecology and we work with the Ecology of our soils but this being said you want to have
the organic matter that's on top incorporated into the soil uh most organic farmers what they'll do
is they'll mow it and then they'll they'll plow it or they'll they'll till it in it with a rototiller
and that's good practice because you know a lot of the best farms and Farmers that I've seen and met
that's their program they grow beautiful green manure cover crops and then they they till them
in and with their tractors they loosen up the soils so they have amazing tilts they
have you know beautiful crop residues that are being digested in the soil and they grow
beautiful crops that's not a no-till system and it works um what we do here is we want to have
the Ecology of the soil digesting it so what we'll do is we'll use a flail mower
we use a Flail Mower because it has knives that are cutting the
long pieces of you know all of this it'll cut it in tiny tiny tiny parts
and in the end we'll have just like this beautiful mulch that's going to digest much faster because
it's kind of like pre-cut and it won't uh it won't have the tendency to kind of stuff
the tool that we use to kind of prepare the seed bits so we'll mow it with a flail mower
and then we'll cover it with a black tarp and we'll leave it for a couple of weeks
and that's going to leave enough leeway for the microorganisms to come and kind of digest
it chew it it's going to terminate destroy kill the crop if you want because there's no light
and so that's how we get rid of the cover crop then we'll either raise our beds if we need to
or not and then when we're ready after a couple of weeks we'll come we'll do a broad fork and
we'll you know use of the BCS again to shallowly prepare the seed bed either with the power Harrow
or with you know the uh the rotor tiller that has the roller in the back the Precision depth roller
so that we're just shallowly working the top few inch and so that's the minimum uh tillage strategy
that we've used for all these years really does a good job but green manure again like they're
super amazing what they do but how to turn this into something that's going to be easy to work
on and to to digest fast that's where a tool like the Flail Mower is really really essential
it's like you can't do green manure in the Market Garden if you don't have Clay mode in my opinion
still side information that's really cool that's Lee's she's my uh she's my Apprentice
for the season and what she's doing now she's harvesting that that vetch the top of the vetch
and we're serving it at the Old Mill Restaurant this weekend and we're explaining what I just
did with you about the symbiotic relationship of plants and soil and you know atmospheric
nitrogen and we're serving green manure salad that Eric the chef is going to really nicely prepared
and so it's really cool what we're doing because we're trying to we're trying to explain why this
is important but we're feeding people so it's a real cool tidbit that's what's going on now
Lisa Is Amazing by the way this is her last week with me she's been here for I think like 15 weeks
12 you know 14 15 weeks it's been a blast to be with her so Kudos Julie's he's amazing
so before I I put on firm or I might show you what it is and how it operates so if I flip it over
you see so the flailmower has all these knives that are on a rotating shaft and what this
does is that it's gonna chop everything that goes into the mower into really small pieces
and so that's that's really instead of a lawnmower that would cut everything like at the bottom and
then you'd have these long pieces of you know crop residues green manures whatever like whatever's
whatever's in the mower it would just kind of chop it and then have long pieces this turns whatever
is growing in the garden into amazing mulch and that's really the power of this tool and
file mowers are heavy duty the ones for BCS they'll they'll last for a lifetime as long
as you maintain these knives which are easy to to unscrew and put back you can just buy new knives
when these gets used it's definitely a tool that's a hundred percent worthwhile it's a
good investment and again like the the other alternative I would say if you're not equipped
with a two-wheel tractor would be to perhaps have a weed whacker and just kind of zigzag try to cut
everything into pieces but that's a lot of work and the result will never be the same as you'll
get with a Flail Mower and you'll see this is a pretty thick cover crop you'll see when we're done
what it does is really amazing so I'm going to connect it we're going to adjust the height also
this model here is really nice because you can adjust the depth of the knives
and sometimes I really want to go close to the bottom or even sometimes I want to I want to touch
touch the soil with my knives so that I'm really sure that I'm not just flatting out the cover crop
I'm really mulching and you know mowing shredding it all so I'll go deep and I'll adjust it later on
but that's a really nice feature from this one is that you can do that so now we're going to
connect it and then we're going to start uh we're going to start mowing the cover crop
it's the good stuff
so we're done does an amazing job if you want to see more about why I'm such an armored with
the BCS you can check out this video otherwise hope things are growing where you are I'm good
I'll see you next time Jay I'm out