Cool Season Soil Builder Mix: What 11 Species Do for Your Soil

0:00 [Music]

0:05 All righty. Well, this is our cool season soil builder. So this mix was planted April 15th here in South Central Nebraska. It's now June 16th. So you know, this is right at that two two.

0:17 Months of growing season on it. This is just a really great basic mix. We sell a lot of this mix off of our website, whether it's to smaller scale folks like just to use in the backyard, a garden, just a few.

0:29 acres, or even on large scale. You know, we send a lot of mixes either this specific mix or a lot of mixes like this out the door. So, you know, cool season soil builder, as the name suggests, we're just trying to kind of.

0:41 Go after those general soil health goals. So we're, you know, diversity, keeping the ground covered, living roots for as much of the year. So here in Nebraska, we were able to plant this April 15th. We could have planted

0:52 But that's just kind of schedule-wise when it worked out to put this plot in. But yeah, there's a lot of diversity out here. So, from the camera, you know, I'm sure you can see the oats. Obviously, the mustard is.

1:03 Flowering. The barley is heading out here. So we've got the Levana beardless barley in this mix. We've got peas. In my hand, we've got a couple brassicas. So this is our impact forage collards.

1:16 I've got some radishes here. Spring-planted radishes will bolt and flower instead of making the big tuber. So these guys were flowering and now are setting seed. This is a facelia plant.

1:39 So under this canopy sometimes they're a little bit shorter. But when you have a little bit of a break in this, that they really kind of start to express themselves and so that's what we want. You know, when we plant a

1:52 Diverse mix like this, you're going to see that look different in different parts of your field. And it's kind of cool to go out there and try to understand what that mix is telling you. There's going to be areas of your field.

2:05 That's going to be more compacted. So look to see which plants do better in that compacted soil. You'll probably have parts of your field that have more fertility than others. Look to see which plants are doing best there.

2:17 So, planting a diverse mix is great for the soil, but it's also great for helping to diagnose issues within your field, but you have to take the time to go out there and look and observe and really try to understand what that mix is telling you.