Austrian Winter Peas: Planting Deep for Winter Survival

0:04 All right, so we are standing in our overwintering lagoons section of our test plots and here we have Austrian winter peas. So these were October 10th planted. Now we're here in early June in South Central Nebraska.

0:16 Austrian winter peas is probably the most common variety of winter peas. So these are pretty common. They're used all over the place. You know, good nitrogen fixer. We've got a really

0:28 Good stand here. The Austrian winter peas they overwinter fairly well. Probably they don't have as much cold tolerance as like hairy vetch does. But as long as we get them planted correctly, we

0:40 have pretty good odds. Here in Nebraska, probably eight out of 10 years, maybe even nine out of 10 years that they'll work. And as you go farther south, they'll work almost every time. So the key there is to get it through the

0:51 Winter. We want the growing point of the plant to stay below the soil until spring time. Which means we want to plant later and deeper. So likely that's probably an October plant date here in Nebraska.

1:02 And then go ahead and set that drill for, you know, 2 in deep, 2 and 1/2 in deep. They're going to come through it just fine. So this is one plant where establishing it earlier in the fall is probably going to be to your detriment.

1:14 But otherwise, it's a really nice plot of the winter peas. We've got good flower setting. There's been a lot of bees out here crawling around. This would be a really good companion with like a winter triticale or a cereal rye.

1:38 Termination, peas work well. Our friend Paul Jasa from the University of Nebraska, he likes to plant his winter peas at least 3 in deep, but if you can get them 4 in deep, he's a happy.

1:48 Camper. A lot of equipment can't do that and that of course doesn't work very well if it's going into a mix. But even at 2 in with the appropriate planting day they tend to survive pretty well. So again, we

2:03 Wouldn't necessarily plant these Austrian winter peas by themselves along with a little bit of winter rye, some winter barley something like that can make a really nice mix.

2:13 Now these are a little past when we would.

2:15 Typically roller crimp them. They're already setting seed pods. So we could have roller crimped this easily a couple weeks ago with a roller crimped out really really well could have planted corn right into this and had a really nice corn crop with I would guess you know even a couple weeks ago these probably had 130 to 150 pounds of nitrogen in it which is going to go a long ways towards growing a corn crop with very little added fertility.