When to Plant Spring Cover Crops: Soil Temperature and Frost Timing

0:04 Hello everybody, Dylan here with Nathan Sch, sales reps here with Green Cover, talking a little bit about when is the best time to start planting our spring mixes. I know everybody's getting itchy to get into the ground whether that be moisture, whether that be it seems like springs.

0:21 So just kind of want to discuss with you guys what our approach is to going about that. So Nathan, when a customer asks you, 'Hey, I'm ready to plant. When's the ideal time?' What do you kind of generally recommend?

0:35 Yeah, so this is definitely a really common question right now. You know, the main thing is soil temperature.

0:42 For germination and then air temperature to avoid any winter kill. So most of your cool season species are going to germinate around 40 degrees, and so as long as our longterm average and our current soil temperatures are at that 40 degrees, and that probably needs to be taken at a 2-inch soil depth and early in the.

1:05 If we're at that point, then we just need to be past any concern of a hard freeze. You know, cool season species can tolerate some frost. It's when you get those hard freezes down in the 20s that we're going to start seeing some winter kill. Of course there are a lot of other factors that go into when is the

1:24 Time to plant so maybe you want to get into the weeds a little bit more on those. Yeah, so I definitely agree with those parameters. We cannot physically be out there measuring the soil temp, you know, so any kind of thermometer works that has any kind of probe, so even just a, you know, just any kind of like a

1:42 A food thermometer works to measure those temperatures. I usually refer to GreenCast, and with GreenCast you can put your ZIP code in there. You can see roughly current soil temperatures, you can see five and ten year average. So I kind of combined the two, the three of those to get to that 40° temp, and then I also...

2:01 Kind of incorporate the 10-day forecast for the ambient temp to see, okay, do we have any hard freezes coming up or what do the 10-day forecast look like? And you know, that freezing temp really kind of coincides with it. I believe it has to be around, you know, 4 hours at that.

2:38 Little bit deeper. You can get it in the ground while you have moisture, get it sprouted and it's going to stay in the ground a little bit longer so we can maybe avoid if there are some of those hard freezes here in the next couple weeks. But that at least allows you to get it in, get it up and hopefully get a good good.

2:57 Forge going with some more moisture, but those are really the parameters I try to stick to. And yeah, it's the biggest thing is going out there and measuring it yourself too to get good hard data on your area.

3:11 Because there's going to be a lot of factors that affect that soil temp, you know, how biologically active soils are, what sort.

3:16 What's our residue situation, what's our moisture situation? So tools like that Greencast website are great for getting ideas, but the results are going to vary on the farm. And I definitely agree with that thought of, hey, I have a really nice planting window right now. We plant now, plant a little deeper, like those oats and peas.

3:35 Cereals that can go a little deeper, and then we'll delay that emergence, so it'll be a couple weeks before those plants are up where they're actually susceptible to being damaged. And so that's how we can kind of take advantage of early springs like what we seem to be having this year and get our seeds in the ground. So you know, it can be as simple as or as complicated as we want it to be, but at the end of the day, 40° soil temps and past the hard freezes, and we should be good to go.