Wooly Pod Vetch: Spring Annual Growth and Nitrogen Production

0:00 This is wooly pot vetch. Wooly pot vetch is a cool season plant, so we're actually surprised how well this looks. Like, this is a June planting and it's now the middle.

0:09 Of September you can see it's really entangled. It's got a tremendous amount of growth, and if we were able to pull this up a single.

0:18 The plant is probably five or six feet tall. It has been blooming for quite some time and it is still blooming. Of all the batches, wooly pod will be the

0:28 Most productive batch when it's planted in the spring or the summer, much more so than hairy vetch, which is a winter annual and really needs to go through a.

0:36 Cold-weather vernalization period to achieve full growth. So wooly pod is a spring annual. It's not always going to overwinter in northern areas because

0:46 It's not a true winter annual but it is one of the more cold tolerant spring annuals and so it will overwinter probably from central Kansas on south.

0:58 You'll see a lot of the times that will overwinter. You get north of that and hairy vetch is what you need to go with if you want it to overwinter.

1:16 Roller crimped it just melts down and makes a beautiful mulch that's excellent at retaining moisture, easy to plant through once it all melts down.

1:28 Together and for moisture conservation.

1:32 For nitrogen production your vetches are a great choice and a good crop. Events like this.

1:37 I don't know, we'd have to do a sample, but Dale, I would say this is at least a hundred pounds of nitrogen produced out here if not a little more.

1:45 Yeah, and it's gonna be a slow release form of nitrogen so it's not going to leach away when you get that 9 to 10 inch rain sometime in the early part of the growing season. So very, very good agronomic characteristics on this.