Foot Crimping Your Overwintering Mix in the Garden
Watch Jonathan demonstrate how to crimp a cover crop mix on a small garden scale using a simple foot crimper. You'll learn when to crimp based on rye growth stage, how to build a basic crimper tool, and why this technique creates a thick mulch layer perfect for transplanting vegetables.
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0:00 Hey everybody, it's Jonathan from Green Cover, and I'm out here in my garden and last year we planted green covers.
0:08 Overwintering mix in our garden rows and today I'm going to crimp these rows so that we have a nice thick mulch that we
0:18 Can transplant our vegetables into.
0:21 How do I know that now is the time to crimp? Well, if you look at at the Rye.
0:27 Which is the thing I'm mostly concerned about, getting a good kill on. You can see it's starting to shed its pollen.
0:33 Here we call this enthesis and if the Ry heads are really starting to shed, they're pinging like that you can see.
0:41 It dangling down there we'll be able to get a pretty good kill from crimping. I see some other things in here I see.
0:48 Quite a bit of vetch. The vetch hasn't quite flowered yet, and I could wait a little bit longer but I'm itching to get.
1:00 And that's going to crimp okay. I think so. I'll show you what I'm going to use to crimp it. This is my
1:08 Handy foot crimper. I just used a couple ropes we had laying around and some metal, some angle iron or
1:16 Something like that, it works just fine and put that at the bottom of a board. Hold onto the ropes and stomp down the.
1:24 The overwintering mix and should get a pretty decent kill. So our goal here is to crush the stems, you can see, or break the stems without severing them. The whole mix will lay down, create a nice mulch mat that we can transplant into and help keep weeds down throughout the growing season.