Alright i'm back so on the last video left you hanging a little bit we didn't quite finish our
list that we started with at the end of the day but now we're gonna finish it we're gonna get
all the things on our list checked off so we got that tarp removed added some compost to
that plot where we're doing the no-till added compost to our dino dig/onion plot got that
taken care of now we need to plant a cover crop of mustard and we need to plant a cover crop
of chickpeas so as i was telling y'all a couple videos ago we're growing food in three out of the
six plots in this area we call the dream garden we're growing food in three plots this fall/winter
the other three plots which makes six total we're putting cover crops in and feeding our soils
so this is the first one we're gonna be putting cover crops in where we had okra growing from the
spring all the way till i cut it down a few weeks ago so we're gonna be putting a cover crop here
and today we're putting another one right here where we had our peppers now both of these plots
i have tilled once since i removed all the plants same situation with the peppers and okra i didn't
pull them up i just take some loppers cut them off right right at the soil level there leave
all the roots and stuff in the ground come in here till this so i can have some available soil some
good seed to soil contact for my cover crops and uh even though it's been a few days since
we tilled it we don't need to cultivate it again it's still pretty soft and everything uh should
go in the ground pretty nicely be able to rake it in and get some good seed to soil contact okay so
now let's talk about what we're actually going to plant today which cover crops we're planting
and why the first thing to talk about here is nematodes now some of you may be familiar with
what nematodes are some of you may not so i'll give a little refresher here nematodes are the
most abundant animal on the planet there are more nematodes than there are any other kind of animal
now we're not talking about bacteria but just animals nematodes is the most abundant animal
they're everywhere in the soil there are good nematodes and there are bad nematodes we want the
good nematodes in our soil we don't want the bad nematodes the bad nematodes can negatively affect
your vegetable production in a big way if you have too many of them and two crops that come
to mind where they can really have an impact are okra and tomatoes for me down here it seems to be
more the case with okra than tomatoes but you can have an issue with both of those they don't
affect every single vegetable crop we grow but a few of them they do now how do you know if you got
a bad nematode problem well if you pull up the roots on a tomato or okra plant and you see
these little nodules on the roots that is a sign that you have root knot nematode problems and so
you can pull up the roots and see if you have them there now in my case i just cut off my okra stalks
at the soil level so i didn't pull up the roots so i didn't really investigate to see whether i
have any bad nematode problems or not but i always like to do something as a preventative measure
after i plant okra i always like to follow my okra plantings with a planting of mustard so
this whole process we do is called biofumigation and biofumigation is an organic way to reduce
harmful nematode populations in your soil yes you can control nematodes through processes
like fumigation using chemicals and stuff a lot of people you know it's not feasible to do on a
small backyard garden scale and a lot of people don't won't to use those chemicals and sometimes
those chemicals can just completely eradicate all of your soil life and we definitely don't
want to do that so we're going to use a process called biofumigation and this involves planting
mustard if you ever eat mustard raw you'll notice it has a little spice to it and that spice comes
from a chemical compound called glucosinolates and if you were to break down that mustard
and till it into your soil what happens is those compounds are released and they help get rid of
those harmful nematode populations now there are several different types of mustard out there you
can use for this in the past we planted just your standard florida broadleaf mustard which
is kind of just the standard mustard mustard that everybody grows to eat really good to eat
especially in the fall around the holidays and so such but um that particular type of mustard is on
the less lesser end of the spicy scale we've got a variety we just added called kodiak brown mustard
that is a lot more spicier something you wouldn't really want to eat words of that right here so you
wouldn't want to eat this stuff but because it's spicier the biofumigant properties are higher so
this particular variety this kodiak brown mustard works a lot better as a biofumigant you're not
going to eat it the florida broadleaf will also work as a biofumigant not as well as this but you
can eat it so you can go with whichever one works for you if i'm going to eat some mustard this year
i'll probably grow it in a separate place not necessarily as a cover crop we're going to use
this kodiak brown as a cover crop now for this biofumigation process to work you have to chop
it up and till it into the soil so you wait till the leaves or the plants get really big
you don't want them go to seed because mustard can uh regrow pretty invasively in some cases
so you don't want to let it go to seed but once those plants and those leaves get really big
you want to come in there mow it or till it into the soil you got to chop it up good and
incorporate it into the soil that's the only way this biofumigation process will work it will not
work in a no-till situation so you got to get that plant material into the soil so you start to break
down release those chemical compounds and do its work as far as managing your nematode populations
now usually i would just plant this kodiak brown mustard by itself and that was my original plan
but i got to thinking man i could mix something else with this and kind of double my return on
what i'm getting out of this cover crop so i'm going to mix it with some tillage radish
now tillage radish or daikon radish is a great cover crop because what it does it forms these
really really long roots for these really really long radishes and they scavenge nutrients from
way down deep in the soil where your plants otherwise wouldn't be able to access those
nutrients because they're too deep and your plant roots aren't always going to get down
that far so it scavenges those nutrients stores them in that big long radish there and when you
go through there to extinguish the cover crop chop up all those radishes you now have those nutrients
released and available at the soil surface for your next vegetable crop to use so it's a great
nutrient scavenger can also be used to break up hard soils provide some soil aeration lots of
benefits for this tillage radish now we last year i made a cocktail with this hairy vetch
an austrian winter pea and it worked great i'm probably going to use it in some other cocktails
later this year this particular first time here we're just mixing it with the kodiak brown mustard
and it should make a nice little cover crop so we're going to mix some of that together in a
minute and do that in one plot and the other plot we're going to plant these marvel chickpeas here
now i've grown austrian winter peas before i really like those as a cover crop
you can mix things make a cocktail with those as well these chickpeas also known as garbanzo beans
not only do they work well as a cover crop but you can also harvest them and eat them and make some
hummus and i'm kind of looking forward to doing that if uh you know it doesn't get too cold here
to knock them back before they are start actually producing those peas so we're going to plant these
real thick and i'm just going to grow these by themselves in the future i'll probably start
making some cocktails with these chickpeas but i want to see just how they do see what their growth
habit is since i've never grown before i want to see you know just how they do by themselves
and that will give me an idea in the future of how i can incorporate them into a cocktail now
for the chickpeas i got 10 pounds probably won't use that whole 10 pounds i might
get close to it i like to plant these cover crops really really thick
for the tillage radish and the kodiak brown mustard i've got five pounds of each of
those i probably won't use a whole 10 pounds and probably use half of one of these bags
and when you're mixing cover crops like this you can do it two ways when you're planting a cocktail
you can go out there spread the mustard and come behind it and spread the radish i did that earlier
this year with a cocktail of sorghum sedangrass and iron clay peas i strode one by hand they
came back behind and stroded the other one then raked them in in this case these seeds are pretty
equally sized and so i'm gonna mix some up in this little bucket here and then kind of
strode them both at the same time if you're doing a cocktail where the seeds are all different sizes
you may want to broadcast them separately that way you get a more even distribution and you don't go
too heavy on one of these the ones with the smaller seeds you can tend to over plant those a
little more than you can the ones with the bigger seeds so we're going to take some of this bag here
and these are our new fancy little foil bags that our bulk seeds come in and these are nice because
you don't use all the bags the seeds store really really well in here so these mustard if you were
to put this up against any other mustard seed you couldn't tell the difference it just looks like
almost all brassica or mustard seed so i'm going to put about half this bag in here
we want to make sure we plant them nice and thick and then i'm gonna put
about half this bag of tillage radish in
here and with cover cropping we don't have to be super super excited
then i'm just going to take my hand kind of mix it all together there
so that when i grab a handful to strow them i get an equal amount of the mustard
and the radish there so let's head on over to the plot let's get the seed sown we'll get it raked in
get some water on it and we will have done our cover cropping for the day
all right all right all right so we're supposed to get some rain tomorrow but i like to water these
things in as soon as i plant them just kind of get everything get all the seeds stuck in the soil
good i'm not sure if it's supposed to be a hard rain tomorrow or not these plots are pretty flat
out here so it's not like i have to worry about stuff washing out of the plots but anyway i like
to get some water on them soon as i can and usually you can see this stuff coming up in
you know two to three days germination if you keep good water on it and it's fairly warm out here
today so i expect to have some decent germination as soon as this plot gets watered in good
we'll throw that overhead sprinkler over there where we put that mustard and tillage radish in
water that in a few hours hopefully get a little more rain tomorrow and we'll get these puppies up
and going i want to show you all these chickpeas real quick look at these things they actually look
like you could take these and hydrate them they'd be quite tasty almost looks like a zipper pee
smaller but hopefully we can get a little decent harvest off them if they make it long enough
we're at least going to get a good cover crop out of them but maybe we could harvest some and
make our own little special treat with them alright nothing feels better than making a
list and checking off every item got mustard planted should add in radish there too we made
a little cocktail we wasn't originally planning on got our chickpea planted we got everything
done that we needed to do today in the garden so i hope everybody enjoyed that kind of real life
work day here on the garden and homestead got a lot of stuff done today in preparation for fall
on some upcoming videos our transplant should be ready soon we'll start getting some transplants
in the ground on those plots we composted we got some onions almost ready we'll be getting
those in the ground lots of big things coming up on upcoming videos if you have any questions
about any of these cover crops we planted today or cool season cover crops in general
put those in the comments below and either myself or some of our great viewers will be glad to help
you out i'll put some links in the description below to all those great cover crops we planted
today so you can head on over to our website and check those out if you enjoyed today's video give
me a big thumbs up don't forget to hit that subscribe button if you haven't already and
ring that bell so you get notified every time we come out with a new video and if you did enjoy
today's video check out these other two videos right here that we've done in the past on cool
season cover crops i think you'll really enjoy those as well we'll see you next time.