Chickpea (Desi) for Cover Crops and Companion Planting

0:00 [Music]

0:10 Right now let's talk a little bit about chickpeas, now also known as garbanzo beans. Some people would be more familiar with that terminology. These, there's two types of chickpeas there's

0:21 There's tabbouleh types which are the very large seated ones that you'd often find on a salad bar, you know the big bean on there. And then these are what's called the desi typed, and again it's a small seed that we're after for cover.

0:34 Crops so we typically have only ever used the desi types mainly because of that seed size issue. So, you know, chickpeas they're not going to be a real growth tea plant like what we saw with the peas, but there's there's some.

0:50 Good growth here some good nitrogen fixing potential and the thing that I like about these chickpeas probably better than any of the other spring plants is they do tend to have more so it probably wouldn't be my first.

1:06 Choice if it's something that I know I'm gonna be terminating May 15th but if it's something that I'm going to like throw out into June and even into the first part of July I would certainly look at putting things in there.

1:18 To tolerate that summer heat better than any of the other cool season spring plan of the gift. One thing that some people are investigating is companion planting, where you plant two different crops together and then harvest them together.

1:37 And then separating the seed later. This is a legume that some people are doing that with their heart planning with oats or planning it with spring triticale black box and I have a little early spring barley and separate amount.

2:20 Efficiency just goes up and then you have fewer weeds. You have fewer insect problems. You have people use these problems and you've hedged your bets with that diversity. We've used it in our cover crops a lot but we're just.

2:36 Starting to tap into it with grain crops down and seeing some of the same results that we're seeing with chemicals. A lot of the chickpeas and the blacks that we do buy and sell is cover crop seed having grown together and then separated.

2:48 Chickpeas cost more than then like the 40 10 for each peas for a couple of reasons number one but the other thing is that these things are very susceptible to a lot of diseases, especially asket Ida and other things.

3:13 Like that, and so you can't, you know, they're difficult to grow for good seed production as you move east and you're wetter and you ever have more humid conditions. So you don't typically see a lot of these grown in the wetter areas, but maybe, you know, if it's mixed with the flax or another crop, you kind of limit some of the diseases. But they're a little more expensive, but again as part of your crop, I'd again I would never plant these always needed. I wouldn't plan any of these there's a single cover crop, but again it makes a nice companion drop out there, especially if it's going to be growing into the gives you some additional diversity.