Winter Cereals and Legumes: What Actually Survives Harsh Winters

0:00 Okay welcome to Green Cover Seeds 2018 overwintering plots. My name is Keith Burns, this is Dale Strickler, and we're just going to take you on a little virtual tour of our overwintering plots. Everything that we're going to be looking at here was planted October 17th of 2017.

0:19 Dale, I would say we had a pretty cold winter here in Nebraska. How about down in Kansas? Same. Yeah, we had a lot of things winter kill that we don't ordinarily see winter kill. We down to 15 below or even worse and so an extended period of time, and it was quite dry, which compounded it. In spite of the harsh winter, things overwinter very well. Part of that I think could be because this is kind of protected, guys. You can kind of pan around—we've got a windbreak to the north, we've got some trees over here to the west, so that probably helped. But it was still cold, but I think the wind got held off.

0:57 As we work our way down, you're gonna see that there's some things that overwintered very, very impressively. So we're gonna start out here talking about winter wheat, and we've got several different types of winter wheat here. This plot that I'm standing in is a forage winter wheat, it's a variety called Willow Creek, and it is a very, very long season forage. It's probably the longest season of the winter cereals that you can plant. If you can see, this stuff is not even thinking about heading out yet, whereas the other wheats and the triticales and the rye are all either fully headed or almost fully headed.

1:31 So Willow Creek, the fit that it has, would be you plant it and it's the last thing that you graze because it will hold its forage quality the deepest into the spring and even the early summer as any of the winter cereals. Yeah, and one of the problems we run into when people are trying to do a forage system based mostly on annuals is that the winter annuals, most of the winter annuals really lose their quality once they head out, which happens usually in mid-May, and the summer annuals really aren't ready to graze until July. So that leaves a month to six weeks with really poor quality or no forage.

2:11 So the Willow Creek, because it heads out so much later than your other winter cereals, it can plug that gap for high quality forage. That's something we're very excited about. So kind of that mid-May to mid-June summer slump, it can kind of help build that.

2:31 It's about the same type as the other weeks based on what we've seen in the past. As Willow Creek is going to get another I would say 18 inches to 24 inches of growth before it fully heads out. So there's a lot of forage potential to come yet on this one. Yeah, it's not very impressive looking now. In a month, this will be phenomenal—leafy, tall, dense forage. This will be brown, it'll be straw, it'll be strong.

3:01 Right, and so next we have Gore winter wheat, which is a soft red winter wheat I believe it was developed in Georgia. It's pretty extensively used throughout the South. We don't typically, we wouldn't necessarily use it here in Nebraska because I always worry a little bit about its winter hardiness. It seemed to do real well up here this year, but.

3:22 It's definitely one of the popular grades out weeds down south and one of the benefits of Gore and a lot of other soft weeks is that number one they tend to be a little more disease resistant if you plant them early for grazing compared to our hard red winter weeds which we try to observe the hessian fly free date not plant them too early because they tend to get vector-borne diseases like weed street mosaic and barley yellow dwarf and those sort of things.

3:56 But another real benefit as you can see if we can get this is that the absence of a beard. Now this doesn't make a difference until the plants head out obviously, but after heading out and a year like this one where things have just come on so slow and people are desperate for forage, a lot of people are staying on their winter cereals longer than they anticipated. This is still going to be much more palatable than something with a beard on it, and even if you're putting up hey as we'll see as we move through the triticale, there's a difference there as well.

4:35 The next winter wheat we have here is a sy Monument. It is a hard red winter wheat, it is unloaded or it's not completely beardless, but the awns are very short or I guess this is probably a medium awn. This one, what you said? Yeah, it's not huge like some of the rye and stuff, but it does have a beard. You know, we don't use wheat a lot as a spring graze, that's where we prefer. That's pretty Kaley as you can see. Dale show them the difference there between the triticale and the wheat, the amount of forages there is.

5:11 Yeah, I mean a lot of people say why should I spend money for rye or triticale? I'll just wheat. It's cheap, it's available. I'll just plant wheat and plant it thick. I think you can see the reason that we try to steer people towards triticale or rye for a winter forage. It's just the difference in productivity between the two is really pretty amazing. And of course triticale is a hybrid between rye and wheat. It's intermediate in most characteristics, but there is also a definite hybrid vigor that you get with triticale.

5:52 We'll talk a little bit about triticale versus rye as we get to some of the other plots, but you can see you give up a lot when you just plant wheat. We did we did forage clippings on these plots yesterday, so when the guys get those dried down and weighed up, we'll be able to have a good comparison of the other thing. That is, triticale and rye are going to have a much more extensive root system in the ground, making it a better cover crop, a better soil builder. So again, that's why we like it.

6:31 But there's certain times when winter wheat has a fit, especially that Willow Creek, if you're wanting late grazing you do have the option of a grain harvest here in case wheat prices ever get up to where they really need to be to make a profit. That's an option. One other drawback though of the wheat compared to the triticale or the rye is disease, and especially if you plant early with especially our hard red winter wheat, it's very important not to plant too early or you just get ate up by disease. The triticale and rye have much

7:08 Better tolerance of early planning to get that maximum for its production. So as we move into the triticale, this is one thing to take note on. This triticale is probably close to four feet tall because of the cold late spring. All of the cereals, for the most part, are shorter than normal. We would typically see these all a little bit taller, although the rye is still going to be pushing five feet. But most of these, in a more typical spring type year, would have more growth and be taller.

7:45 We've got several different triticale varieties that we're looking at here. This is one called Mon Tech, out of Montana. We aren't currently raising this; we're just evaluating it. It looks pretty good. It's got a good wide leaf on it and looks like it would have good forage. It looks to be a truly beardless type. I don't even see short awns really on this one.

8:09 Most triticales are either have the long beards or they're awletted, as we'll show you on some of these that are just short awns. But this one looks to be truly beardless, so this is called Mon Tech.

8:24 The next two that we're going to look at we're going to kind of compare side-by-side because these are kind of the two that we most often use. I'm standing in what's called Fridge. Fridge is kind of an older variety; it's been around a long long time. Lots of people have used it. It is an awletted type, so it does have short awns, but they typically aren't going to be an issue for either haying or grazing, so it's okay to use for that.

8:52 Dale is standing in a newer one that we've been using called 813. You don't see a whole lot of difference here, but when we had these in our plots in Oklahoma when Brett had those plots, they told him what you saw on those plots down there. We went down to the plots and in the fall it was absolutely dramatic how much more full growth the 813 had compared to the Fridge. It was amazing and seemed to be more winter active, more fall active, more winter active.

9:28 I think one other thing that you see is the Fridge is a little taller than the 813 right now. You also see it's a little farther along. This has got a little more punch, longer season, so it's going to come on. When we look at the product sheet on 813, it's definitely one that fits the south better. We're a little concerned about taking it too far north because of winter hardiness, but it certainly has done great this year. This is the second year we've had it. Fridge did well last year too, so Fridge is a good fit. 813, especially if you're going south or if you're planning earlier, is going to be better because, like Dale said, more fall growth.

10:17 These weren't planted until October 17th, so we just didn't have a lot of time for fall growth, which may be one of the reasons we're not seeing a big difference. This next one is a variety called Grays. All it is a bearded type. You can see that this one does have a longer, bigger beard, so we would be a little nervous about getting cattle out here now grazing this. We're even putting up hay at this stage.

10:46 Because of that beard, what there's a lot of beard and triticale ease out there. And they're good but it requires a higher level of Management because you need to get the cattle out there or get the swath out there before this beard gets extended. Yeah, the lack of a beard definitely gives you more flexibility in how you use it. And so we we try to gravitate more towards the beard list varieties.

11:11 This is a variety called winter max. Again, it's one that we're just evaluating. It is a product out of I can't remember if it's New Zealand or Australia, but they sent us a bag to try. To me, it looks like it'd be a great grain producer. I don't know that the forage value in this would be as good as some of the other ones that we have, but looks like it make a lot of grain. Yeah, and the beards don't seem to be very objectionable. No, I think I'd say it's on letted.

11:48 These next two to our spring triticale e's. Spring triticale e's generally don't over winter, but these these two are a type of spring pretty cavity called facultative, which means they can act as a winter triticale but they don't have to burn away, so they can be planted in the spring. So these were planted in the fall and these are a couple of different varieties that we're kind of looking at. Usually we wouldn't plant them in the fall. We would plant them in the spring and they would look different. We have those in our spring planted plots that we can look at at another time, but this just goes to show you that even in a harsh winter some of these things can make it through pretty well. Again, I think probably having the protection from the wind helped, but it still got very very cold and they made it through pretty good. So we're not going to talk about these a lot here, simply because they were planted not necessarily in the right time frame. I we would still always recommend a winter variety planted in October, but we wanted to see what it would do. And it actually did pretty good.

13:03 We want to contrast to Ryan the feeling. Yeah, go ahead and talk about that a little bit. A lot of people kind of tend to use rye and triticale interchangeably, but there is a real difference. You can see the rye has a much earlier maturity. Of course, this is spring triticale compared to compared to rye. But rye ends to head out fairly early. It is more winter hardy and more winter active than what your triticale czar. If you're looking for winter grazing, strict winter grazing, so here's taller than the spring but shorter than the yeah rye. The rye tends to get very leggy. It comes on earlier, so you can graze it earlier, but it also loses its quality much earlier. If you're looking for grazing on into in this area on into May, rye just loses quality very quickly. If you're looking to graze in February, rye is going to be much superior. Rye has some values that we really like, and one of them is weed suppression. And rye is in the well of Pathak plant contains compounds that reduce the the growth of other plants. A lot of weeds, mares tail is one of them. Palmer amaranth and other pig weed species is another one. But the the winter activity of rye makes it very popular as a grazing plants. Grape from the winner not so good in later spring as far as finally, if you measure the.

14:50 Yield on April 1st the rise is gonna really beat the triticale if you measure it on May 15th. Triticale is probably going to go.

14:58 And you know, it's amazing how fast this rye caught up because when we came out here April first, normally this rye would be knee high and really going. You know, it was maybe four inches tall because of the cold late spring that we had, but in spite of that, look at how much it's caught up. I mean, this stuff's five feet tall now, and normally rye will get between four and a half and six feet tall, and so it's really caught up fast. Can be good grazing like Dale said, but you got to get on it early. I kind of jokingly tell people if you're gonna graze rye, you need about a thousand head of cattle for a month, and then you need to go somewhere else with them because you got to stay on it and keep it vegetative. Once it heads out, cattle aren't gonna eat it very well.

15:45 Yeah, and some people will mix rye with other cereal grains to extend that quality period for mix rye and annual rye, but to extend that quality grazing or do a sequential deal. And that's one reason we're so excited about the Willow Creek is it gives you an option to go to after rye or triticale. Yeah, because you could be grazing this rye in February and March, be grazing triticale in April and the first part of May, and you can hit that Willow Creek from the middle of May in through June. Yeah, have a nice program.

16:17 Just looking at a few different varieties here. These two that I'm in right here, this one over here is a variety called Aroostook. It was developed up in Maine, but it's a very early maturing, fast growing plant. This is Elbon, which is kind of the flagship of what we use. It's from the Noble Foundation in Oklahoma. They're very similar in the fact that they both are going to be the first things headed out. It's a little hard to tell. I would say that the Aroostook may be headed out and flowered a day or two earlier. Most of the pollen is off of this already. There's still some pollen shedding on the Elbon here, but they're gonna be very similar. So if you want the thing that's going to mature, head out, and grow the fastest, either Aroostook or the Elbon are going to be the best choices.

17:06 From a grazing standpoint, I would probably go with the Elbon because it was bred specifically for forage. And I think planted earlier—again, these are planted October 17—planted earlier, I think you'd see a little more fall growth from the Elbon than you would Aroostook. It's definitely going to be more winter active than the Aroostook. It's what we refer to as a southern rye that's going to be more winter active than the Aroostook, which is going to be more winter hardy. Yeah, but we've never really seen issues with Elbon surviving winters up here, and we've even had it up in the Dakotas and it seems to do well.

17:50 The next to that we have here are—well, I'll start with the one on my right over here. This is what we call VNS Northern Rye. It is variety not stated. We don't know.

18:03 Exactly what variety it is, it's probably most commonly what people use if they're not specifically looking for a variety. As you can see, there's absolutely nothing wrong with it. It's a great cover crop, it's a great weed suppressor. It is not gonna head out and get mature quite as quick as they help on or the Aroostook, but it's probably not too far behind. The other thing that we really like about El bond is seed size. Alpine has probably the smallest seed size of any of the rye. This is a little bit larger seeded stuff, so this is just kind of common VNS northern winter rye.

18:40 This is one that we've started growing in the last couple of years here, and we call it Yankee rye. It's one that we've been using and it's got some characteristics that we think are gonna fit pretty well. Dale, once you talk about that a little bit?

18:56 Well, I think you can see that if you compare this to the El bond, it just seems to be a lot lot leaf here. The leaves seem to be a little bigger, there seems to be more leaves. We think that this is a, it's going to be kind of intermediate between triticale and rye. I think it's got a little bigger stem, a little more of a hollow stem. Doesn't it?

19:20 Yeah, yeah it does. I think it will, for people that are wanting to determine a try with roller crimping, I think this is going to be easier to roller crimp. You can tell that wind and the rain that we had, it's kind of laid it over a little bit more, and I think it's that bigger, more hollow stem. It doesn't sit.

19:39 That's why it's kind of like it's very wiry, very tough, doesn't go down very easy. But this, like like you said, it's a little more like triticale. It's not triticale, but it has a few more characteristics like that. Yeah, it seems to be leaf here. I think it's going to yield more forage in the long run that won't be quite as early as the elbow. So I think it, I think it's going to fit that gap between train catering. And in this upcoming year, we should have we've got seven or eight hundred acres of this under production in South Dakota, so we should have a decent supply of this. We've just kind of been testing it up until this year.

20:20 Yeah, so this is called Yankee rye.

20:34 And we're gonna move on to winter barley. We've got we've got two good winter barleys here. They both overwintered quite well.

20:43 Winter barley is probably one of the shortest season of any of the winter cereals. Rye may, the elbod may head out slightly before these, but these are going to mature faster. As you can see, we've got a bearded type. This is a new one that we're trying called Saturn. One of the knocks against winter barley, Dale, up in our part of the world up here is that the winter hardiness is just a little unproven, a little unknown. So for that reason guys, I think have been a little hesitant to do much winter barley. So we've been looking at it for the last several years. This is Saturn, this is P9 19 at the University of Nebraska breeding program, and they both overwinter pretty well. We've been using 919 now for probably four or five years. It really has come through the winters pretty well.

21:35 When you plant these in the fall, you're gonna get some growth most likely. Everything above the ground is gonna kind of burn off during the winter and you're gonna think, man, I wasted my money, that was bad, because it's all gone. But just give it a little time, it'll green up and it'll start growing again.

21:51 Whereas like the rye and the triticale, that above-ground foliage never really burns off. In fact, sometimes a rye never really goes completely dormant. So the barley is not going to be nearly as aggressive as those other ones, but for that reason and because of that, this is less challenging to plant corn into. Yes, doesn't have as much allelopathy. In fact, it's still good at controlling weeds. If you look down through here, there's, but very, when you come, if you can come over here and look at the alleyway here, you can see quite a bit of mare's tail. But you look in between the rows here, there's not much.

22:29 We hear occasional bad reports about planting corn into rye, as rye tends to be pretty aggressive, but we don't seem to hear those negative reports on barley.

22:51 One of the drawbacks of this P919 is this little loose smut and we tend to lose a few heads on that. But one nice thing about the barley is even after this heads out (and we said it heads out early, which is a real advantage if you want a roller clamp ahead of organic corn or something like that), it maintains its quality even in a pasture situation very well after heading out. It doesn't get as tall as the rye or triticale, but the forage yields have been fairly impressive, no taller them, and a lot of that is coming from the head.

23:41 The 919 is what we would recommend if you're wanting to graze, especially graze later in the season, have good forage quality. The Saturn is more of a feed barley or a green barley, and so the market there would be, I mean, you can, if you want to grow it all the way out for grain, you certainly can. In fact, there's an increasing number of feed lots and dairies that are trying to go completely GMO free. They're looking for barley for grain for their feeding operation, so could be a potential market there.

24:12 But probably the main reason that we would use this would just simply be as a fall-planted cover crop for spring-planted corn, where the grower does not want the challenge of rye. Because if you get a wet spell and you can't get in and spray that rye, it can go from eight inches tall to three feet tall in a matter of a very short period of time. So barley's not going to get away from you, and from that respect, we're looking at it as a cover crop ahead of corn.

24:42 One advantage of barley grain is it does have a reputation for imparting a very good flavor to meat. Yep, so barley-fed grain, herds of barley benefit, feet as a is in demand in certain locations. And you can make beer out of it too. I've heard that.

25:08 All right, this one here really surprised me. I did not expect to see this. This is Cossack black oats. It is a, I wouldn't say it's a true winter oat noodle, but it certainly has more cold tolerance than the white oat species. We have seen it over winter before, but not always.

29:03 That Pacific Northwest area so again we generally don't see winter peas over winter this well and you have to plant them deep and we did probably have these planted two and a half to three inches deep which helps. Again, you're gonna see everything that grows above the ground is gonna freeze off and you're not gonna see in the spring but then they come back and they regrow and again this is a great amount of growth but I wouldn't want to tell now to have to plant my corn but everything was later this year than it normally would have been but if I could get this kind of growth by mid-May you're in and you're out this would be a phenomenal cover crop. This would be easy to kill with a roller crimper, very easy to plant corn into, and good forage quality as well if you want that option.

29:48 One other thing I really like about peas, spring peas, winter peas, everything is they make a very good nurse crop. If you can come and look at this we've got some clover coming in underneath this. Look at that. If it used to be very common to see wheat or to see clover into wheat and that practice worked years ago when we didn't fertilize wheat very heavily. Once we came out with semi-dwarf wheats that could take heavy levels of fertilizer, the practice of seeding clover into wheat just went away because we're putting on so much nitrogen the clover never nodulated. That doesn't nodulate then grow well. Well, because peas are another legume they don't need nitrogen fertilizer so this clover underneath here is going to nodulate very well and if you are organic that's a way of getting your clover started in the spring. If your conventional, peas and clover tolerate a lot of the same herbicides so you can use the same weed control for both crops and once you harvest the peas either for forage or for grain that clover comes on and then you've got your next cover crop already established so you can plant on a short term and long term cover crop in the same pass.

31:20 This next one at the end, you'll ryegrass. Annual ryegrass again is just one that we don't typically think of as being planted after the middle of October but again this overwintered here quite well. This is a diploid type which means it's the more winter hardy so like winter hawk or KB royal are examples of diploid type ryegrass that have the best cold tolerance. A lot of times we don't recommend this to be planted after the first of October up here in Nebraska just simply because ryegrass needs to get better establishment before it goes into the winter dormancy in order to survive. So whereas cereal rye could be planted in December, annual ryegrass has to get some roots down and be established in order to make it through so this did very well. I really came on fast in the spring once it started warming up. As you can see, annual ryegrass is a much finer stem plant than what cereal rye is. It does not get nearly as tall. Now this has already gone to head so we would have wanted to have terminated this far, far earlier. It's much easier to plant into because they're significantly less biomass. The thing that makes this such a great cover.

32:34 Crop is even though this is only maybe 30% the height of that cereal rye, the root system is probably equally as deep as that 5 foot tall rye it has. It may not get as deep as rye, but the density, especially in the surface layers, this tends to take winter soils and heavier clay than the cereals much more tolerant of wet heavy clay.

33:07 Some other advantages of the rye grass: it will regrow after grazing very, very well. Rye grass is used as a lawn grass because it recovers from frequent close mowing over and over and over again. It maintains—it doesn't green up as early as the cereals, but it maintains quality later. It's a very, very nutritious plant.

33:30 I am a mix of rye and annual rye grass to get the best of both worlds. One drawback of rye grass: it is harder to terminate than rye, either with herbicide. It seems to be much more resistant to Roundup than what rye is or any of the other winter cereals. And a lot of that—if you look at this leaf surface, it's very shiny, very waxy. That tends to bead herbicide solutions off the leaf. It's got kind of a waxy cuticle, and spray solutions tend to slide off.

34:08 So your choice of adjuvant: if you're using a fully loaded glyphosate, it's not fully loaded enough for rye. And weather conditions are absolutely critical for killing rye grass. There's a lot of good information on the internet about how to kill rye grass, but you have to really, really pay attention to the weather and have the right conditions or you're just wasting your money. Over 50 degrees, add additional surfactant, ammonium sulfate is really critical, and do not tank mix with atrazine or Sharp. Now though, that's a couple big no-nos. Don't spray on a cloudy day, don't spray late in the day. Yeah, part of it is that waxy cuticle, but it's also a very, very deep and extensive root system. And you don't have near as much plant area to translocate that chemical down to kill that root system.

35:03 So it's a great cover crop. You know, if we can get it over winter like this every year, I'd sure recommend a lot more of it up here. But definitely, as you go south or as you move east into wetter areas, there's a lot of this that's flown in prior to harvest. Yeah, on both seeding rate is much, much lower. I mean, you're looking at 20-25 pounds for a Pierce and rate versus, you know, 60, 80, 90 on some of the cereals. So for aerial seeding, where it's nice to get as many acres as you can out of one tank, there's a lot of rye grass used for aerial seeding. Smaller seed germinates from the surface better than most year cereals.

35:44 This is all planted in October 17th. We move into our hairy vetch section. We've got three different types of hairy vetch here. This appears to be a much longer season hairy vetch. This is one called AU Merritt, was developed at Auburn University. Again, we don't use a lot of this. We're just kind of using it as a comparison in a trial. This one that I'm standing in here is the most common one that we use. It's what we just call our Montana hairy vetch. We have a drone in Montana.

36:17 It's just the B&S, a variety not stated, but you can see it's very much in full bloom. You might catch a bumble bee flying around here, and you can tell that this is in full bloom and it has a real attraction to pollinators. This is all your batch is a very, very high pollinator value. So hairy vetch is the most reliable overwintering legume that you can plant in the fall.

36:55 It's not cheap because it's a very, very hard crop to harvest. It's easy to grow, it's difficult to harvest, mainly because it's so indeterminate. You see it blooming like this—this will continue to bloom for another four or five weeks like this if we allowed it. So it's going to have pod set all over the place, very, very good, aggressive nitrogen-fixing crop, and probably the go-to crop for the organic guys to produce nitrogen ahead of a corn crop. Yeah, it makes a great mulch, and the mulch is very easy to plant.

37:32 This, you know, my stand here is a little sporadic again. I might have been running out of seed when I got down to this. Looks like it looks better down there. Yeah, so you know, for full coverage—if you want to do maximum weed control, maximum nitrogen production, you probably need to be planting 30 pounds, whereas in a mix we may only put anywhere from four to eight pounds max.

37:58 This is a variety here called Purple Bounty. It was released by the USDA a number of years ago. It is kind of billed as one of the earliest maturing, earliest blooming batches on the market. So for guys that want to get it to this myth bloom growth stage as soon as possible, the Purple Bounty is probably the best choice. May not be overall as productive as some of the others, but it gets there quicker. Yeah, if you're wanting to roller terminate bench by roller crimping to plant a corn crop, of course you want to get corn in the ground earlier. The earlier flowering of the Purple Bounty is a real bonus. So a lot of the organic guys that want to kill with a roller crimper, this is the variety they gravitate towards.

38:45 Okay, then we got a little bit of woolly pod batch here. They kind of got taken over by volunteer rye and triticale back there. Wooly pod vetch is a spring annual, so again we would not typically plant it in the fall expecting it to overwinter. The section right in here did very well. As you move south, it acts as a winter annual, so it's every bit as good as hairy vetch in Australia and New Zealand. They commonly use it, but woolly pod vetch is a spring annual. So when it's spring planted, this will grow faster and bloom quicker than any of the other vetches.

39:19 When it's fall planted like this, you can see it's kind of behind the hairy vetch in it as far as where it's blooming, but if it's spring planted, this would be ahead of that. So if you're further south, this is going to be a better choice, or if you're doing a spring plant, woolly pod vetch is a great crop to include. Very deep rooted as well. Yeah, can you bring that camera in back here? They just tend to be very tiny plants. Give them something to climb. You can, I mean, you get the trellis effect where, you know, if you have vets growing.

39:56 By itself it just makes a mat and basically you get one acre of leaves on one acre of ground. If you give it something to climb you get this corrugated canopy where you can get two or three acres of leaves on an acre of ground. That's one of the real beauties of having diversity in your mix and having tall plants, binding plants, and so forth. You can see with this veg taking advantage of the structure of the rye here and the triticale you've got more leaves here on the acre and so that's the same phenomenon is also happening below ground and it's hard to observe obviously what's happening below ground when you're standing above ground but trust me it's better.

40:49 The last one of the winter legumes that we want to look at is winter lentils and again we had a lot of volunteer. This was plots last year as well so I had a lot of volunteer from previous plots out here and we didn't do anything to try to clean it up for you but I wanted to show you what you know winter lentils are another option for an overwintering legume. It's not nearly as aggressive as vetch, which can be a good thing or it can be a bad thing. So if you're looking for something that's not nearly as competitive, it's not going to be by any like that vetch can get, winter lentils are a really good choice there. They're a smaller plant, their small seeded but they're just kind of a good plant. You know, we've actually had more consistency with winter lentils overwintering than winter peas over the years so this would be another option. It's not going to have the forage value that some of these other things do but as a companion crop I would never plant these by themselves unless you were trying to grow the seed production on them but as a companion crop mixed in with some of these other things it's just a nice little plant to complement other things.

42:01 One against one drawback and strength simultaneously of lentils in general and you can see it's letting some weeds through that's kind of a bad thing but if you think about it, one place I like to use lentils a lot is when people plant a perennial pasture and which you know perennials come on very slowly and don't necessarily hold the ground from erosion initially. I like to throw in a few lentils into that situation because they have a leaf structure that does not let some sunlight through to the developing plants underneath. They're a very short-term plant so they give way very quickly. They have good grazing value, palatability if you want to do a flash graze and take but I like to throw a few lentils in to a perennial planting for that purpose, rosettes control, some early nitrogen fixation, etc.

42:56 Alright, that kind of concludes our overwintering plot tour. Again I'm Keith Burns, this is Dale Strickler. You can get a hold of us, you can email me Keith at green cover seed dot com or you can email Dale at Dale at green cover seed dot com or give us a call at 402 446 9678 four. We'd be more than happy to discuss any of these species with you. Thank you for taking the time to watch.