Spring Trio Mix: Oats, Barley & Peas for Fast Spring Growth

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0:04 All right, well we are standing in our spring trio mix. So, this is a simple three-way blend of oats, spring barley, and spring forage peas. So, the barley is our Lavina beardless type of.

0:17 Barley. So, it doesn't have any of the long awns that sometimes barley's can have. So, it's a forage type. So, this is a great simple spring option.

0:27 So, you know, if you've been around cover crops very long, you've probably

0:30 Heard of or even planted like oats and peas yourself, right? When it comes to spring forages or spring cover crops, you know, just oats is number one, oats and peas is the next common, next most common. And then we have like something.

0:42 Like this, the trio mix, where we're adding one more grass to the mix. And that does a couple of things because one, barley has a wider range of soil types that it'll tolerate. So, if you have maybe some salinity issues or pH.

0:54 Issues, the barley might show up better for you there. The barley is also a little bit faster growing in the spring than the oats. The oats will potentially get bigger in terms of biomass, but the barley will

1:04 Grow a little bit faster. Normally, we see it hit the reproductive stage a little bit faster and get up and going. So, it does bring a little bit of diversity, not hugely different just because, you

1:14 Grass and sorry, oats and barley are in the same plant family still, but they are different.

1:20 Yeah, so, we love diversity and we promote diversity.

1:37 Diversity you're necessarily going to have. So, if your goal is just to get a cutting of hay, have really high quality hay forage, something like this is going to be pretty good because we're going to plant

1:49 This relatively thick and it would probably choke out your clovers and your brassicas and things like that. So if that's your goal, then something like this is going to be a good fit and even though it doesn't have a ton of

2:02 Diversity, if it's meeting your goals, it's still probably the right mix for you. And so, that's why we created something like this was for fairly specific goals. And like Nathan said, if you're on alkaline soils.

2:16 Or high pH's, the barley is going to be a really good boost for this on those soil conditions.

2:22 But for general purpose soil rebuilding, general purpose grazing, we would want to go with some of our other diverse mixes, but for that particular niche, this spring trio is going to be a good option for you.