Dill as a Cover Crop: What We're Learning in Our Test Plot
Keith and Nathan walk through Green Cover's dill test plot to show how this aromatic plant performs as a potential cover crop. You'll see firsthand how dill grew through Nebraska heat, its weed suppression ability, and what insects it attracts—plus why we're experimenting with it for future mixes.
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0:00 [Music]
0:05 This is one of my favorite smelling plants out here Nathan. This is Dill. I just love the way that the dill smells. Now many people are familiar with dill.
0:14 From you know you may have a little plot in your garden to make dill pickles and it's no coincidence that it's growing right next to our strip of cucurbits so we're hoping that dill pickles maybe.
0:24 Just emerge from the two growing together here, but Dill is one of those things that we don't use extensively in a lot of cover crop mixes. We're kind of experimenting with it, it's.
0:34 You know it's relatively expensive seed, so we're putting it like in our showy flour mix, our warm season pollinator mixes, our Milpa mixes, but we like experimenting with different things to.
0:46 You know, hey, maybe this will work as a broad acre cover crop if we can get seed down cheap enough. That's what we did with okra a number of years ago, and now okra's fairly popular cover crop mix.
0:56 So Nathan, what are some of your observations on this plot? I mean it's grown really well. Yeah, so the dill has grown really well all through our Nebraska heat here.
1:06 We're up to like kind of mid chest high. It is sort of starting to fall over. Here we had some storms roll through but otherwise it's grown really well. It's interesting the types of insects.
1:25 Insects, maybe some ladybugs, have tended to frequent the dill a little bit more. It's an extremely interesting plant. Just structurally, the leaves are this really kind of viny-like, it doesn't...
1:35 Have big broad leaves, it's just kind of these weird stems. It has grown really well. Like I mentioned, there's been very little weed pressure in this plot of dill. It's fought back all the.
1:45 Weeds really nicely, so yeah, like you said, it smells really good when you're walking out here and you can just catch that whiff of dill. And yeah, we're definitely still kind of seeing.
1:56 You know, are there grazing benefits or what necessarily will it, is it doing to our soils? Just trying those things and seeing what sort of fits dill could have in the cover crop industry in the future. So if you have suggestions of other things for us to try putting in our plots and testing and trying and maybe making videos, let us know. We'd love to hear about it and we'd love to try those weird things as well.