Growing Cover Crops in Home Gardens and Homesteads

0:00 Thank you for joining us today. This is a bit of a bonus episode that we're kind of tacking to the end of our spring webinar series this year. We did a six-part series on cover crop basics. And throughout that series, we just noticed that there were a lot of smaller scale growers who were really active during those webinars asking lots of really great questions. And since we're focusing more on the large scale context in the webinar series in general, we figured we might as well put together a full webinar to answer some of your questions and just go a little bit more in depth into the context of planting cover crops in your garden or on your homestead.

0:42 I will just go ahead and pass it over to you, Jonathan. Let me see if I can get my screen share to work. I'm always coaching other people through sharing their screen. And now I have to do it. Let's see if I can figure it out. There we go. It looks good. So we're going to walk through these slides. Sophie's going to chime in as we go. But the first thing I wanted to say is that if you haven't watched the first episode of our cover crop basics series, Keith Burns, one of the co-owners and co-founders of Green Cover, does a really fantastic job walking through some of the basic principles of cover crops and regenerative agriculture, specifically the six principles of soil health. Those are foundational to using cover crops and using them successfully at any scale.

1:38 When we're talking about smaller scale, we're not going to dive into some of that introductory material and encourage you to go and watch that other webinar episode. And I think Kate can probably put it in the chat for us. But what we want to do is kind of dive into some specific considerations for a smaller scale. First off, I wanted to just get you familiar with the products that we carry for smaller growers. If you've got a homestead or a garden and you want to incorporate cover crops, really the best route is to buy one of our pre-made mixes and plant one of those. We've got a lot of mixes that work for a lot of different scenarios. And the thing that's great about them is that they are packed full of diversity and they're actually affordable at a small scale. Whereas we can't really do a custom mix for a backyard garden, we got all of this diversity put into these mixes. So these are the basic three.

2:38 Overwintering, you'd plant this in the fall and most of the species in most conditions are going to overwinter. Cool season soil builder would be something you want to plant in late summer or in the fall or you could plant it in the spring. It will probably winter kill in most areas in the US unless you're further south. And then warm season soil builder is just a really good diverse mix that can be planted in late spring or early summer and really do well in warm weather. So then we've got these pollinator mixes. I won't go through all of these, but cover crops can be used to attract pollinators. And we've got a lot of really good options here. So then we've got a bunch of grazing mixes. And I really do think that these grazing mixes are a great option if you're on a homestead, if you've got any kind of livestock. Our basic grazing mixes, cool season and warm season grazing mix are designed with cattle in mind and they can work really well on a small scale. We also have some sheep and goat grazing mixes that work really well if you've got those smaller livestock. It's going to have more broad leaves, things like that that they're going to really enjoy. And then these last three mixes, plant diversity is really what these are about.

4:00 Microisal mix is going to be a really good option if you're trying to increase the amount of microisal fungi in your soil. And then high diversity is just going to have a ton of plants in it. And the Mila garden mix we won't talk about too much. But if you're interested in growing a cover crop mix that you can harvest from, that one's a great one to look into. And we do have a free seed program where if you promise to donate half of what you produce with the Mopa Garden mix if you sign up for the first acre program, we'll give you the free seed as long as you promise to donate it. So that's something you can look at. Sophie, do you have any other comments as we're talking through those things?

4:40 I would just say if you want to learn more about the Mila Garden mix, just go to milpa garden.com and there's loads of information on there. Also the link to apply for the first acre program. And then in general, a lot of these mixes are actually going to be relatively interchangeable in a garden scenario because you have more flexibility with terminating a cover crop in the garden because it is more of a hand tool scenario.

5:17 Actually do have a lot of flexibility and that's very nice because you can kind of try different mixes year over year to really make sure you're getting that optimal diversity in your garden.

5:31 Let's go on to my next slide. We put together this tool that we call a decision guide. And I'm actually going to switch over to a web browser and show you how it works a little bit because it's really helpful to think through. Okay, there's a lot of mixes. Which one might be best for what I'm trying to accomplish? So, this is the decision guide that we have. It's linked from the Garden and Homestead page on our website.

6:01 Let's just start with a basic one. Let's say I want to cover I want cover for my garden. And I'm going to do a cover crop. I'm going to plant cover crops. Let's say I'm going to plant it in the fall. And yes, I want it to winterkill. So if I answer that question, then I get this cool season soil boulder recommended. And if I change that to no, I don't want it to winter kill, then overwintering mix is what it recommends. And then that'll survive the winter.

6:31 If I start over and we'll just do one more option here. So let's say actually what I want is feed for my livestock. I'm going to choose yep annuals and I need feed in the summer. So then warm season grazing mix or warm season sheep and goat grazing mix depending on which type of livestock I have. So you can play around with this on your own. I'm sure K will put the link in the chat. But that can kind of help you think through some of those simple things.

7:13 I would just also add we did just create a new tool on the website which is a compare tool. So we won't do a demo of that right now but it's on our store. So basically if you're kind of trying to decide between two different mixes maybe you're thinking am I going to do the overwintering mix or am I going to do cool season soil builder. You can actually compare those two products and you can look at side by side the different species that are in those mixes. You can compare the price and a whole lot of other great differentiating factors. So, that's a really great tool. And then each one of those products on our on the individual product page on the store will have all the species information and any information that you need to know about when to plant that, the rates to plant that. So that's all there conveniently for you.

8:05 Let's dive into some of the considerations that are a little bit more unique to cover crops on a smaller scale. So what we want to do is start with planting. So the first slide here you might be looking at and say I don't have a no till drill and I'm in the same boat. I don't have a no-till drill but it is the most effective way to plant a cover crop mix.

8:32 There are some limitations you have with broadcasting to where there are some scenarios where you're just going to get better results if you can drill it into the ground. So, if you have access to a tractor or even if you have access to an ATV, there are some options here. So, if you can pull a no tool drill that's probably going to be a little larger, check with your local natural resource district. Sometimes they have drills that are available to rent or even that they would lend out. And then the other option is these are probably aren't super cheap, but you can get some pretty nice no till drills that you can pull behind an ATV. So that will make a lot of the planting considerations simpler. But a lot of times that's not going to be reasonable for somebody on a smaller scale.

9:27 Let's talk about what most of us are probably going to be doing, which is broadcasting. So there are four considerations that we really want to be thinking about when we're broadcasting. First off, you've got to get good seed to soil contact. So, if you're trying to broadcast and there's a bunch of stuff on the soil, a bunch of residue there, if those seeds can't penetrate, they can't actually get down into the soil, probably not going to have a great result. So, then the second one is incorporation. You know, we are broadcasting, but if we can get that seed into the soil just a little bit so that it's not just sitting on the surface, you're going to get better germination rates. And then we want to make sure that we've got moisture. And then want to think about weed control because when we're broadcasting oftentimes in order to get seed to soil contact and incorporation, we've disturbed the surface of the soil a little bit. And so then that's going to bring forth an opportunity for weeds. So how can we take care of the weeds and get cover crops established? So let's start with seed to soil contact. Really we just recommend trying to rough up the surface a little bit if you can.

10:43 Disturb the residue that's on the soil. So in a garden bed setting, you know, this is you and your fiance Mitch. Is that right, Sophie? Yeah. So, you know, you can see they've prepped this garden bed. It's a nice clean seed bed. It's ready to go. If you're trying to seed out into a pasture or something like that, it gets a little bit more complicated, but you can do things like, this is something that we do at my place is we'll pull a dethatcher behind our zero-turn lawn mower and rough up, scrape up the surface. You could use a tine or a rake harrow. That might be even better tools than what we use. Or if it's a little bit smaller and you can handle it, you can use a garden rake to rough up the surface just so that there's some soil that's exposed that the seed can contact. And then of course tillage is an option. You know, we talked about I just mentioned principles of soil health. One of those is to minimize soil disturbance. So we don't love tillage, but it is a useful tool especially on a smaller scale, especially if it's a shallow till and especially if you're planting directly into it. So if you're tilling and you're following that tillage with a diverse cover crop species, you help to minimize the damage that you would do to soil structure by tilling it.

12:08 And this is something that Keith said in his first webinar is that he likes to think of it rather than minimizing disturbance to maximize the disturbance events that you do have. So in a small setting sometimes we have to till, we have to do some of those things. We have to do bed preparation. But how can we maximize that for soil health? Be really careful that we're getting the biggest benefit we can when we do have to disturb the soil. Yeah, I would also say the Rodale Institute has a study I think they conducted this on their research farm in Southern California where they research or they essentially tested soils that they did a no-till comparison right next to a tillage comparison and both were cover-cropped extensively and they found that in the scenario where you're doing a tillage event to terminate a cover crop and then plant your next vegetable crop or vice versa, you're pulling out your vegetable crop and tilling and then planting a cover crop right after. There's actually some advantages on a small scale because you are able to incorporate that organic matter from the cover crop into the soil. A lot of people refer to cover crops on a small scale as green manure. Similar concept. So in that scenario, you have the opportunity to incorporate compost or vermicast or whatever it is. So there's definitely some nuance there and of course lots of different schools of thought on how to approach it, but yeah, great explanation, Jonathan. That was just a little bit of a tangent because this is a hot topic and I feel passionate about it.

13:48 Right. Right. And I mean it maybe helpful context for the people who are joining in if you're not super familiar with green cover. We primarily work with larger scale no-till regenerative farmers. And so sometimes tillage is like, oh, we don't till at all. That's some of the context that green cover comes from, but it's really not. I think we even on the larger scale, we're finding that sometimes tillage is the right tool. And I think we talked about that in our termination webinar in the other webinar series. So let's talk about incorporation. Again, you want to after you've broadcasted the seed, you've got that seed to soil contact. If you can go back over it with a tine or a rake harrow, dethatcher or something like that or a garden rake and just get it incorporated into the soil. So it's not just sitting on the surface. It's not there to be messed with by birds or exposed to the elements, wind and sunlight, things like that. So pretty basic, but a good step to not skip.

14:53 And then there is moisture. This is the biggest one really with having your broadcast be successful because if you broadcast a seed and you incorporate it and you've got seed soil contact but there's no moisture, you probably aren't going to get very a very good germination rate. So similarly, if you're going to, you know, you do you probably do this in a garden on a pretty regular basis. If you're direct sowing, you want to put something on that soil to keep the moisture, retain the moisture. So cover it with a straw mulch. You know, on a pasture, I know that's harder if you're trying to grow forage. But if there's some way that you can get a little bit of residue on top of the soil, something to retain that moisture. And then if you can plant your cover crop mix before it rains, that would be, you know, that's perfect. You can't always time it that way. But if you can, you know, if you're trying to figure out, okay, what am I going to do in the garden this week and it's like there's a rain date and I

15:57 Want to get a cover crop in, try to get that cover crop in before it rains. That will really help work the seed into the soil and get that germination started. And then if possible, if you can irrigate, which a lot of times on a smaller scale we can, that will really help the cover crop get established. Now, once you've got it established, once you've planted it, I really don't think you have to water a cover crop mix. You could, but I don't think that's essential or really important, but you really do need to get it enough moisture for it to get established.

16:31 And then there's weed control. I know that we always struggle with weeds, right? This is the large scale, small scale, it's always a problem, right? So Sophie's got some experience that I'm going to let her talk about a little bit. How do you get a clean cover crop without a bunch of weeds in it?

16:58 This photo right here, this is on a farm that I worked on on Sanan Island in Washington State. And these were brand new beds. So they were super weedy. I mean, every single type of super aggressive weed you can imagine. You can see the curly dock right at the forefront of that photo. So we were dealing with a lot of perennial and really aggressive annual weed pressure in these beds. So this was actually after the season. We had this was probably in August or so. We had pulled out some flowers that we had already harvested and we wanted to plant a cover crop in these beds.

17:34 What we actually did just knowing that there was such intense weed pressure in these garden beds is we put the drip tape back out after we ripped out our flowers. And we just watered the beds to get the weed seeds to germinate because we wanted to get that seedbank going. And then we pulled this tarp, the silage tarp that you can see. We put that over the weeds once they had come up and germinated to kill them off. And then we went in and tilt those beds, pulled out the larger weeds in that biomass and just threw them into a compost pile. But then we were able to go in and plant our cover crop mix without having such intense pressure from the weeds coming up into that cover crop mix.

18:18 Because I mean, honestly, that's one of the issues with planting a cover crop in your garden beds. If you do have really bad weed pressure, then planting your cover crop is the perfect environment for those weeds to thrive. And it's really difficult to pull those weeds when you have a cover crop growing in there. So this is one method to try to get ahead of the weeds and try to clean your seedbank out a bit. Yeah, I mean you can see this ended up being a really sparse stand of I think this was cool season soil builder, but it was definitely better than nothing, especially in this soil, which was really just getting started in a very rough place based on the expression of all the weeds in there.

19:02 Yeah. Good. So the other thing that we want to talk about that's really different on a smaller scale is terminating. So we've listed out a bunch of options here and we're going to walk through these one by one. I think maybe the biggest thing that I want to emphasize is that on a smaller scale, it might feel like, oh, I don't have access to a roller crimper and if we're growing vegetables or things like that, we're not going to be using chemicals, so I don't have as many options. But I actually think you have more options because the smaller scale really enables you to try a lot of different creative solutions.

19:42 I don't think we've solved everything here, but I think there's just so much opportunity to try something different to see what works on your operation. So, crimping, this is generally going to be for a mix that you've let over winter, like an overwintering mix or sometimes maybe you just planted cereal rye by itself. That's a pretty common thing to do. I've used a foot crimper. It works. It's a little bit of manual labor but it definitely works. But really, you can be creative about this. There's lots of options and I'll explain what I have experience with. So, building a foot crimper, super easy. You just get like a 2x6 or something like that, some rope, angle iron, put it together.

20:30 So if you're going to crimp a cereal grain, you want to wait until it's in its reproductive stage. Really any crop that you're going to crimp, you want it to be in its reproductive stage. So this is some cereal rye in overwintering mix. This was not this spring but last spring. So you can see it's starting to shed its pollen. So at which stage is called anthesis. And that means it's going to lay down if you crimp it. So here I am using my foot crimper. And we just crimp down the beds. That's what it looks like when it's crimped. And so this is from this spring. You can see me standing in the beds there on the left. And then there's the crimped.

21:18 Overwintering mix. And then we did follow with a tarp on those beds because we've got other species in there. The vetch and the winter peas that are in that mix may not terminate as well with just foot crimping, especially if they haven't flowered yet. So you want to be really cautious to make sure that depending on your timing, things like that, you're paying attention and observing and that you've got some backup plans.

21:48 This is the mix after we pulled the tarp. The photo on the left is from this year just a couple days ago. And then this is a photo from last year of plants that we transplanted into that thick mulch from those from the crimped overwintering mix. So what we do is we just take a little hand hoe and we scrape the residue apart, transplant in, and then kind of push it back around the plant. Sometimes we'll add in some soil amendments or some mulch, some straw or something like that over the spot where we've disturbed things just to make sure that we don't get any weeds growing. But it's been really effective for us. We've been really happy with that approach.

22:39 So let's move on through these terminating techniques. So you can mow cover crops if you've got access to a walk-behind tractor. I think a flail mower can be pretty effective. I've never used one. Sophie, you maybe know a little bit more about it than I do.

22:54 Yeah, I've seen a flail mower used on one of the farms I worked on and it seemed to be pretty effective. It essentially chops up the biomass instead of just cutting it as a lawnmower would, right? Again, you want to observe, is it regrowing? Because when you cut a cover crop, you're telling the plant, 'Oh, you should regrow. You should keep growing.' And so you really don't want to mow it and then expect it to die and come back a few days later or a week later and find that you've got all these new green shoots, right? So following with a tarp is again, if you're going to mow, that's going to be a helpful thing. And you know, how long you probably have to observe, I think that's really the recommendation. If you've crimped an overwintering mix and it's hot out, I've covered it with a tarp and planted transplanted into it a week later. If it's cold out, it might take 3 weeks, right? So you really just have to be paying attention to whether the rye laid down and it's turning brown and the legumes are dead, you're probably good to go. But you just want to be paying attention to those things and using a combination if necessary.

24:14 So grazing can also work. You know, we've done this a couple times where this last year we planted in one area of our garden and we grazed it down and then we tarped it and then you know it was ready for us to plant into pretty early on in the season. Chickens are also an option. If you got them densely populated, you know, they will terminate a cover crop completely. They can be very destructive creatures. And I think Sophie, you've got a photo of planting behind a chicken tractor later in the slide deck where, you know, if you're moving chickens through pastures, say if they're meat birds or something like that, you can really wipe out anything that's growing pretty quickly. And you can use that to your benefit.

25:08 So you could even use a combination of larger livestock like sheep and goats or something like that and follow them with chickens. There's a lot of options here. But again, if you're just grazing it, you might be telling those plants to regrow. And so thinking through how am I going to actually get it to a point where I can plant something else is an important consideration.

25:41 So we talked about tillage a little bit, talked about green manure a little bit. It really is an option to incorporate all of that biomass that you've grown into your garden bed. And like Sophie said, it really can feed the soil, really can help get some of that biomass worked into your soil. I don't know that I have a whole lot more to say about this method, but it's pretty self-explanatory. If you till it into the soil, it's probably not going to regrow. Hopefully not.

26:16 Yeah, hopefully not going to regrow. I have seen situations where it has. So another option is cold kill. And this is a really good option, especially if you don't have time to terminate in the spring. A lot of the methods we're talking about, if you're going to crimp something, you want to make sure that it actually dies. So these are two mixes that we have that can work really well in a scenario like this. So if you've got a garden bed that you could plant in to a cover crop in June or July, warm season soil builder would work really well.

26:47 I'm talking about, you know, where I'm at in Nebraska. Obviously, if you're further north or further south, those things might be timing might be different. A cool season soil boulder. If it's late summer or early fall, and you have enough time to get it established, you know, you can really grow some cover for your garden beds. And those will die out over winter if you get some hard freezes. So if you're further south, you might think, well, let's plant warm season soil boulder because those species really are going to die if it hits 32°. If you're further north, you might be able to plant cool season soil boulder and get that to die if you get some hard frosts.

27:34 So, just reiterate, one of these by itself may not be perfect, but when you combine them, you really can be confident that you get a good determination on your cover crop. So, I think before we start taking questions, we just wanted to work or walk through a couple examples of some experiences that we've had on at my place or that Sophie's had at some of the farms she's worked at. These are some of my son's sheep and goats with some cover crop mixes we've planted. And we did this without any tools really. So planted by roughing up the surface of the pasture and generally it was a part of the pasture that we had grazed pretty heavy and then we scraped up the surface by pulling something behind the lawn mower, planted into it, made sure there was adequate moisture and then you got a good stand for the sheep and goats to graze in.

28:37 This is our vegetable garden in the summer and actually in the fall on the right. And one of the things that we do that I'll talk about a little bit is that we have living pathways in my garden. And you probably saw those in the earlier photos where you saw those strips of green in between the crimped cover crop. That's, you know, I think it's Dutch white clover and there's a little bit of some short grass that we planted in there. But those are perennial pads that live all season long and they're really great. I really like them because they make it so the garden's never muddy. The clover, it fixes nitrogen. We'll go through and mow that. And then we've got a really nitrogen-rich mulch that we can put places. And you can see over on the left, we've got a bean trellis. And you can still see this is late enough in the summer that we're harvesting lots of tomatoes.

29:34 We've planted probably some radishes or something on the shady side of this row and there's still the residue is there and there's not very many weeds that are coming through. So the other thing we do is we plant a lot of flowers. We interplant a lot of flowers in our garden. So you can see that row of marigolds in there alongside of some of those cucumbers on the right. So the other thing that I really like, hopefully you're not squeamish about spiders, but we found that by having the living pathways and by planting that overwintering mix and crimping it that we've provided really good habitat for beneficial insects. And we've struggled with some pretty major pest issues in our garden, especially cucumbers. You know, we'd always get cucumber beetles come in and then by the end of July the cucumbers would just be wilted. Well, last year we saw just hundreds of spiders all throughout the garden. And we saw a lot of these pink lady beetles all over the place. Turns out spiders eat cucumber beetle larvae.

30:53 I'm going to go back to this slide because you see my cucumbers on this trellis here. This is October in Nebraska. Like everything should have died by a frost by now. So they really lasted through. And I really think that that has much more to do with a system that is incorporating all of those soil health principles than it is one single thing we did. So this is a picture of our clover paths while the cover crop is growing this spring. And then these are some of Sophie's photos. So I'll let her talk about these.

31:30 Yeah. So these are just kind of for fun, you know. So we did kind of the opposite approach than Jonathan. We actually mulched our pathways and then cover-cropped in the garden beds pretty heavily because we were just starting out in these beds. We had just raised them that same year. And so we as we put them the mulch out there, we actually inoculated it with this wine cap garden spawn. And it was really cool to see the flush of these wine cap mushrooms as they were growing next to the cover crop. So you can see in that photo on the far right, it's a beautiful mushroom obviously, but this was in pretty much midsummer and it was pretty hot out and none of the other areas where the mulch was getting

32:19 Exposed to sun was flushing mushrooms, but where the mushroom was growing close to the cover crop, it had a really moist and cool environment. So it's just pretty cool to think about the types of microclimates that you can make in your garden by using both pollinator strips, which you see on the far left here with my puppy Lupin, and then also just growing cover crops in your garden beds.

32:43 The other thing I really like about that is just the approach to gardening where you're thinking about how can we use these paths to do something beneficial for the soil. And mushrooms aren't cover crops, but it's that same mindset of okay, how can we build an ecosystem in our garden that's really benefiting the soil and where the soil is full of life, bringing in insects that are full of life.

33:17 That reminds me I meant to say this. We were talking about those insects, and I'm actually going to go back here. I have a quote from Jonathan Lundren who's a scientist and an entomologist. One of the things he says is that for every pest insect, there are 17,000 species that are actually helping us. You think about it, we always think about pests in the garden and we think 'Oh, we've got one pest. How am I going to get rid of this pest?' We're always thinking about how can I take care of this one pest, but another approach would be to how can I bring in as many beneficial insects as possible to get balance. And I think that's some of what we saw in my garden last year.

34:25 This was just another photo of a really good stand that we had of cool season soil builder. We tilted this and then raked the seed into the soil. You can see at the very end of this bed, there's still some kale that we had planted in the spring and they were still producing, so we left them in. One thing that's cool about gardens is if you're doing kind of like multispecies in one row, you can pull something out and then just throw a cover crop in there because it really doesn't take that much time, especially if you're planting something in the fall and you're planning on overwintering or it's going to winterkill. Getting something in as soon as possible is good to think about as far as seasonal growth goes.

35:18 This is another photo from a farm that I worked on in Southern California. We pulled the broilers through the pasture and just like Jonathan was describing, they pretty much destroyed the pasture. This was a really lush perennial pasture that we had interplanted a lot of annual forage species. We were also grazing cattle in this pasture. Once we would move the chickens daily, we'd go behind with cover crop seed like I have in that bucket there and we just broadcast it, especially in the areas where the chickens had dusted themselves and made really exposed areas of soil. We'd fill those up with seed and then we'd go in with straw, which was straw they were planning on using in the garden, but it was too weedy. So we just used it out in the pasture because it didn't matter if wheat seeds were sprouting out in the pasture. So it's a good use for hay that you have left over.

36:22 This was intended to be a multispecies pollinator strip. You can see there's some clovers in there and there are some flax and other species, but the ratios, because I was making this, is one reason why we don't make small-scale custom mixes. It's really difficult to get good ratios. Phacelia, this is the plant that you see dominating here. It's a purple flowering plant, a broad leaf, and it's a really small seed size. So when I was making this mix I just put one pound of each one of those species in there, and obviously with such a small seed, the phacelia was a huge part of that mix and so it ended up dominating the mix, which honestly we were not upset about because this is an excellent pollinator species and it really brought a lot of beneficial insects into the garden. I firstly wanted to show this because it turned out beautiful, but also this is why going with a pre-made mix is a great idea and why some of the logistics behind why it's kind of difficult for us to do custom mixes on a small scale.

37:30 I just have a couple here and then we'll get to questions. I realized we went pretty long with the presentation, so my apologies there.

43:17 And some people don't like silage tarps because of this reason because if it's killing the plant, it can also be killing soil microbiology, which is true. But I have also seen life thrive underneath of tarps. If you have a tarp down for a week and you pull it over, a lot of times if you have earthworms in your garden, that's where they're at because there is a lot of moisture in that environment. And yes, it's hot on the surface, but the soil temperature is going to remain pretty consistent.

43:50 So you're basically superheating your cover crop to kill it. And to keep those silage tarps in place, especially in areas where you have a lot of wind, you can use things like tree stumps or firewood or bricks or buckets of water, sandbags. What do you use? Things like electric fence posts that we staple into the ground with lawn staples. This year we laid some cattle panels that we have out that we use for trellises down on the surface to keep it from blowing. But sealing the edge I think is really important.

44:26 And don't be surprised if you have snakes and frogs and other critters underneath of there when you pull those tarps away because they definitely like that environment. And then she asked, 'Can you show the foot crimper design again, Jonathan?' We have a graphic that has that design on it, correct? Yes. We've got a document that kind of lays that out a little bit. I'll put that in the chat and then you can just have a copy.

45:09 Jackie's final question is, 'How do you handle cold killed residue in the spring when planting vegetable seeds?' This is a really good question because if you are crimping a cereal rye crop right before you're planting your vegetables, you're going to have a really thick mulch. So you can manually remove that, which would be pretty time-consuming because you'd have to cut the plant at the root and then move it away. If you don't have living pathways, you can always just take that biomass and put it to the side and weed mulch your pathways so you don't have to worry about weeds. That's what we have done.

45:50 And another option is just to do a fall planted cover crop that's going to winter kill. Because over the winter, ideally, you leave that plant in place so that you still have the living root in the ground. That cover crop that's still standing will also be able to capture snow and retain some moisture. But you're not going to have as much residue that you have to contend with in the springtime. And you can also help to break down some of that residue by tarping it. Even if the plant is already dead, you can go through and stomp down your stocks or lay them down with the hand crimper tool. But tarping that is going to retain moisture and help that cover crop to break down.

46:42 And the other thing I would say is that if you have access to some goats or sheep or something like that, they're really great for removing residue. And sometimes if you can use the livestock to take care of the residue, then you can do something like a light tillage pass or put a tarp over it after that and that would make it so that there's not so much residue that you can't disturb it and do some direct seeding. But direct seeding is something that we struggle with in our garden is that we want to direct seed but we've got this super thick mulch. So we have to figure out a way to remove it and we don't let the goats into the garden in the middle of the season.

47:34 And I mean, some people just prefer their gardens to be cleaner. They don't want to have the residue around. So if that's the case, then you probably will just have to physically remove that biomass. And maybe make a compost with it or use it to mulch other areas on your property. Kelly is asking, 'Do you alternate the rows so that cover crop is growing in different areas or are your rows established in one place always?' Jonathan, I'll have you answer this one.

48:00 Yeah, so we try to have established rows in our garden. Because we've got those perennial pathways. And because we do amend the soil, often times before we plant cover crops, we'll try to put some compost into the beds and try to keep improving or adding organic matter, things like that. So we don't move the beds around like that. But we do try to think and we're trying to do better about this is think through what cover crops are we planting.

48:34 For instance, if I'm going to plant a cool season species that's going to winterkill, if I can plant that species on beds where I'm going to be putting in some cold weather species that I want to get in like as soon as it's warm enough for them to grow, which is like in April in Nebraska. And so if I can take advantage of what cover crop species I'm planting, thinking about what garden vegetable I'm going to plant in, thinking through that type of crop rotation in my beds. We have permanent beds, but I do plant different things depending on what we're going to grow there.

49:19 Yeah. And people who are market gardening will get really specific with their crop rotation and their cover crop. So you can plan around what type of vegetables you're growing. If you're doing a cool season, you can grow a warm season cover crop that year. And so on and so forth.

49:45 Kelly also asked after seeing that mass of facilia that was about to start flowering. She asked if the facilia is difficult to terminate and or control if the seeds are allowed to go to seed. She said that in her experience it can be weedy at times, which is a good question that we actually didn't address in the presentation. Which is just in general, do you need to worry about your cover crop going to seed and becoming a weed problem in your garden. Facilia is a pretty easy plant to terminate. Once it gets established it can be a little bit more difficult to pull out of the ground. But when I think about weeds in the garden, I would much rather have a domesticated broadleaf cover crop species as a weed in my garden, especially one that flowers, than all of these other really aggressive adapted annual weed species. So in my opinion, we honestly wanted this to go to seed because the area that it was growing in was going to be basically a tractor turnaround. And so we planted a pollinator strip in it because we weren't going to have the tractor in the garden that year. And we were definitely okay with that going to seed. But Jonathan, can you share any other experiences that you have of cover crop going to seed in your garden?

51:13 Yeah, and it was something we were concerned about when we were planting like warm season pollinator. We just had a bed where we planted it and didn't get it planted with something else, so we just put a cover crop in and let's bring some pollinators in. We were concerned about it. What I found is that, especially when we're doing that thick mulch from the overwintered cover crops, that's our weed management and that prevents pretty much anything from growing where that mulch is the entire growing season. I probably didn't sell that a whole lot, but we truly don't have to weed those garden beds. It's a lot of work when you're planting. It's a lot to terminate and plant and do all the transplanting into the mulch. But it does a great job at weed suppression. So then one of the things that we grow a lot of marigolds in our garden and they reseed. We get volunteer marigolds everywhere, except that we don't get them where we've planted the overwintering mix. They can't grow there. So there's a couple perennial areas where we've got strawberries and asparagus things like that. And my wife when we started doing the overwintering mix and crimping and all that stuff, she's like, 'Am I not going to have volunteer marigolds?' Because she would transplant them into places she wanted them and we'd interplant them throughout the garden. But they still come up in that other area. So what I'm trying to say is that yes, some of the cover crop species could make seed if you don't terminate them before they're reproductive. But if you're using cover crops as a weed management tool, it's going to work for those things. And so you have weed management anyway. And like Sophie said, cover crops can become weeds if you don't manage them carefully, but they're not the same types of weeds that you have issues with like crabgrass or bindweed or something like that. They're not like that.

53:23 In general, I would say don't let your grass cover crops go to seed, but you get so much diversity from all these different broadleaf species that if they reseed themselves in areas where you don't mind or even if they're kind of growing intercropped with your vegetable species and they're not really bothering them, then to me that's great because it's just extra diversity.

53:48 You didn't even have to pay for that seed. But of course I know some people prefer to have their gardens just looking more clean. So if that's the case, then you probably just want to manage your cover crop to make sure it doesn't go to seed.

53:59 Stephen is asking, 'What are the best options for living pathways and more logistics on making that work?' And Jonathan, I'll have you take this.

54:08 Yeah. So my experience is trying to do perennial living pathways because what I found is that it's hard to get it established before you're walking all over it. So we really went with a perennial short grass blend that Green Cover sells and with some Dutch white clover and we planted them together as a mix. What I found is that the clover kind of takes over. But it is helpful to have the grass in there a little bit of diversity and we do have to mow it. We do have to trim the edges. It does spread. So you have to manage it like anything else.

54:49 That is listed on that decision guide that we shared. So we don't have a living pathways mix because it's pretty simple. It's really just essentially it's just the clover. And you can do the grass too if you want a little bit more diversity. But we tell you what ratio to get there. We tried to do something that is going to be low growing, that's not going to be a super difficult weed to manage. We're thinking about weeds and things like that too. And that it really isn't going to get woody or grow tall. We want to walk barefoot in our garden. So those are kind of the things that we've thought about.

55:38 I do think that, like I said, you do have to mow it. You do have to trim the edges. We use a garden edger. We have electric garden edger that we'll take through to just cut a line and then we'll just pull from the edges. And it's pretty easy. We use a hand sickle to kind of slice the roots, get them out. If it's starting to creep into the garden beds and we have to do that, maybe twice in the summer to trim those edges.

56:06 So it is a little bit of work. But we think it's worth it to get some of the nice nitrogen fixation from having those clovers every other row and cut down on the weeds. And the other thing I love about it is that it's cool in the garden. Like the pads don't get hot and it's really refreshing in the heat of the summer.

56:35 Yeah. And then when you think about the contrast of if you're using a wood mulch, then first of all, you want to try to find a decent source of wood to add to your garden and ideally a soft wood. And all of the effort that goes into putting that mulch into your garden is a lot. Like a lot of wheelbarrowing, shoveling mulch, and you're probably going to have to replace that every couple years depending on how much rainfall you get and how fast that breaks down. So it's a good option.

57:02 And the other thing that's great about the garden pads is that you don't have runoff issues. You don't have mulch that, if you get a super heavy rain, it's not washing out into your garden beds because it's growing.

57:24 Yeah. So somebody asked and shared that they're in an urban area and that their neighbors unfortunately don't particularly like the look of overgrown or wild-looking cover crops and they're asking what cover crops can I grow that will look more pleasing to my neighbors.

57:37 So I would say that you might be able to get by with a cool season pollinator mix or the warm season pollinator mix. So those are pretty similar to our soil builder mixes in the sense where it's a lot of different cover crop species. So it's very diverse, but we've selected the cover crop species that are going to have a really beautiful bloom. So it's a lot of brassicas. And that will still get quite tall, but it's going to be flowering and it's pretty obvious that it's a pollinator patch. So perhaps your neighbors will be more tolerant of that.

58:13 But if you're really just wanting to grow something for the looks of it, then our showy flower mix is a really good option. So that's going to be essentially a mixture of cut flower species. So less a traditional cover crop mix, more of a flower mix that you could plant in strips along your garden in your landscaping. It's really beautiful and there's tons of different colors there and maybe you could pick some and bring them to your neighbors and they might warm up to the idea a little bit.

58:42 Yeah, that flower mix is truly stunning. Yeah, and it's really low maintenance, too. Especially when you consider other types of flowers that you might plant in your garden.

58:56 So I think we should probably only take a few more questions and then we'll wrap up, but there's a lot of great questions here. So just thank you everyone for participating. So Rachel asked, 'Are there certain mixes you would recommend using in a high tunnel compared to others?' And the way that I would answer that is you want your cover crop to work for you, not the other way around. Ideally your cover crop is something that you put some effort in in the beginning to get it planted, watered, growing, and then like Jonathan said, ideally it's not something that you really have to like water and baby throughout the season because that mix is supposed to be working for you. It's benefiting your soil. It's keeping weeds away. Not the other way around, you know. So, like some of your vegetable species, you're probably going to have to baby them a little bit more, but with your cover crop, yeah, you really don't want it to you really don't want you to have to work a lot to make it grow. So, that's why it's important to select the right mix that will work well in your context. Jonathan, do you have anything else to add to that? No, I think that was a good way to answer it.

1:00:10 Okay, so someone is saying I recently read that brassicas shouldn't be planted more than two years in a row and then not for three years in the same area. Can you elaborate on this? So that is probably due to some of the brasica pests that can become a really persistent issue in garden scenarios. And that's a really regional thing. I find that for some people, they don't even want a cover crop mix that has brassicas in it. Because they don't want to harbor those brasica pests over the winter. And yeah, if you're having to adapt your crop rotation to not grow brassicas at all in a year to break that pest cycle, then you definitely don't want that in your cover crop. And so we were kind of playing around with the idea of making our cool season soil builder, warm season soil builder mixes available without the brassicas specifically for a garden or market garden scenario. So if that's something that you guys would be interested in, we'd really like to hear that from you. So whether that's I don't know, Jonathan, what would be the best way for people to tell us that they're Yeah, they could send me an email. Everybody's got my email from their webinar registration. Or the contact form on the green cover site is another good way to get in touch with us. If that's something you're interested in, it is something that we're considering. You know, it is probably a lot about the pests, you know, and I think the thing is that if you can be bringing in all of those beneficials, you know, they can help. With that said, we struggle with Nebraska pests. It's yeah it's definitely a real thing. So yeah. Okay. So it's really hard to choose the last question to answer.

1:01:59 But I guess I'll take this one because we can talk a little bit about Milpa. So this person asked what would be the best cover crop mix to use before growing the three sisters which are corn, beans, and squash. So this is a great question. The three sisters, as I'm sure you know, are very complimentary to one another with the beans fixing the nitrogen for the corn and the squash using the corn stock as sort of a trellis. So these are it's a really great way to grow food in a diverse mix essentially. And our Milpa garden mix is modeled off of the three sisters. So it's much more diverse. That has anywhere between 30 and 40 species depending on the year. And so that's basically the premise is trying to create a vegetable seed mix that is going to be able to grow together and be complimentary of one another. And then as far as a cover crop to grow before that milpa garden mix, any of our cool season pre-made mixes would be a great option. Yeah, there's not necessarily anything specific that you would need to do to prepare unless you are finding that it's difficult to grow corn in your garden, then maybe you want to choose a mix that is heavier on the legumes for that nitrogen fixation. Which again, a lot of our pre-made mixes are going to have a really high percentage of legumes in there for the nitrogen benefit anyways. So you can just grab one of those pre-made mixes, probably cool season soil builder, and you should be good to go. Yeah. And a lot of that is, you know, how do you want to terminate it? How are you going to prep the area for what you're going to plant? You know, I think those questions, especially when you're planting that diverse mix like our soil builder mixes, it's really when are you planting, when are you terminating, and that diversity is going to benefit really almost any scenario with what you're planning following it in a garden. Yeah. So, I think we'll go ahead and wrap up there just to respect everybody's time. I know we went a little bit over, but just thank you all for participating and this is the first time that we've ever done a webinar for some of our smaller growers. And so we're curious to see if this is something that you guys are interested in this type of content. We're definitely trying to find ways to help people make the right cover crop decision on our website. So if you're watching this on YouTube, leave us a comment and feel free to give us any feedback that you guys have, or any ideas of things you'd like to learn more about. Yep. Thanks everybody. Thank you.