Winter Warrior Hairy Vetch: Cold-Hardy Nitrogen Production for Your Fields

0:06 Okay. Well, we are standing in one of our Harry Vet trials. So, these were fall planted and now it's, you know, early early June here in South Central Nebraska. This is a winter warrior Harry veetch. So, this is has been a really good product for us for a couple years.

0:20 Now. It's grown up in Canada, so extremely good cold tolerance. When it comes to veetches, you want to know where your seed's coming from and make sure that it's going to have the cold tolerance that you need for your location. So with Canada grown.

0:31 Environment, it overwinters pretty much everywhere. You can see it's just a really nice plot. It's in full bloom. Beautiful purple flowers. We're fixing a ton of nitrogen. It wouldn't surprise me if we have over 200 lb above ground here in the biomass.

0:46 And when it comes to nitrogen in hairy vetch, it really is a hockey stick kind of growth in the spring. So if you're looking to fall plant vetch and you want to grow a lot of nitrogen for next year's corn crop, you know, if you go out there in early March, probably

1:00 Nothing's really there. It's suddenly in April, you'll start seeing some plants and filling in. You know, late April, early May, that's when you really start taking off. And in a couple days in May can mean real pound accumulations in terms of nitrogen. So, you can't plant a

1:13 We plant in October and expect 100 pounds of nitrogen May 1st. You know, you're going to have to get into May a little bit before you get there, but before you know it, you'll have the nitrogen you're looking for. So, excellent cold tolerance, great for the

1:26 Pollinators. There's a lot of bees out here crawling around today, and just a really good hairy vetch variety.

1:34 So winter warrior is one of the newer varieties of vetch that we're carrying. Once we saw it, we really liked it because it grows well fall planted and

1:58 Spring, not have to verilize and still give us a lot of growth. So it's a real flexible variety. Now, I wanted to show you because, you know, when you go out here and you look, this is, you know, maybe 2 feet tall, but if you get out here and look at what these plants are.

2:13 Like, I mean, this vetch plant is, you know, more than 6 feet tall. It's just very viny. Has these long tendrils, and if this had something to climb, it would climb all the way up to the top of that. So again, vetch in a mix is awesome because it'll climb up.

2:31 Whatever has a little bit more of a structure. Then I also dug this up because, you know, we've got good nodulation coming on here. The veetch nodules are relatively small, so sometimes they're a little hard to see, but we've got good nodulation from

2:47 The roots. We've got some good pink color in there, showing that they're actively producing nitrogen. So you should always be looking, digging up your legumes, checking to make sure they're nodulating, fixing nitrogen, and doing the job that they're there to do. So we're excited about this variety. We think it's one of the top ones. Again, Canadian grown. We're growing some in northern Montana. So we're very confident in its ability to overwinter.