How to Kill Cover Crops without Tillage or Chemicals (Hint: You have options)
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- Опубліковано 8 чер 2020
- Killing cover crops on a small scale is one of the bigger question marks in no-till gardening, so I update you in this video on some of my thoughts and how our various trials are going. Because knowing how to terminate cover crop can help to keep that cover crop from becoming a weed.
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We do carton and than wood chipping or chopped oak leaves.. after 3yrs, 90% of the weeds are gone. We do completely no till. Make our own compost. Central Italy
Try trifolium repens (Dutch white clover) as a permanent perennial cover crop that doesn’t need mowing. It grows 2-3 inches tall max. You don’t have to kill it and you can plant into it. It roots 3-5m deep too which helps soil massively!
My 10,000 s.f. garden is in Wenham, MA and my favorite way to kill cover crops like rye and vetch together is with a straight shaft 4 cycle brush cutter tool that has a 10" round blade with 60 teeth. My tool is a Honda 315S and it has all the power needed to cut a thick growth right at the soil level. The rye and vetch fall on the bed and I plant transplants right through the biomass and into the root mat. I've tried a hedge cutter, a scythe, a weed whacker, a machete, and a hedge cutter mounted low on a wheel hoe, but the straight gas powered 10" round brush cutter is the fastest, least work and does a complete job of termination. I stopped tilling in 2004 when my tiller broke and I have been utilizing no-till and cover crops ever since to reduce weeds, reduce watering, reduced use of fertilizers, less time, money and labor spent and better crops.
Goat herder and minimum till gardener here. I use mobile electric netting and my goats to destroy the crop, then tarp to terminate. Something like 1 goat/ 50-100 square feet for 12-24 hours. Nothing converts plant matter faster than a rumen, and goat or sheep pellets are quickly and easily consumed by the soil.
Hey I'm French farmer, If you can easily put English subscribe do it please 🙏. Your video is interesting and some time it's complicated to understand all that you said. Thank for your video
The third thing is that tarps will degrade and be disposable.
Would you consider the 40% Vinegar Concentrate or Citric Acid(USDA Certified Organic Herbicide) to be herbicides? It is the preferred way of terminating cover crops on large Organic No-Till operations while meeting Organic Standards.
It's great that you mentioned the negatives to plastics
You could let animals eat the cover crop. Bonus manure.
We have bindweed in the Southwest. It grows in COILS under plastic tarps. I'm trying to figure out how to permanently eradicate it. Thus far I'm hand weeding it, and it IS diminishing. I'm converting to no-till but it takes some mental adjustments!
Thank you for the jazz in the beginning! Nothing I love more than a little bit of jazz and gardening.
I grew cover crops in 3 3x8 beds and am getting ready to kill them off. I had to look up "milk stage." Some of the vetch has started to flower, so I'm going to go ahead and mow them down now since last frost is in about 3 weeks. Since it's such a small area, I'll be using a string trimmer, then some straw to cover/mulch my plants. Hopefully since what I'm doing is much more small scale, that will work. Either way, thanks so much for the video! I see a lot of articles about using cover crops, but not enough about how to kill/incorporate them into your soil! Since I'm trying to adopt no till, let's hope this "chop and drop" method works!
Jesse you're the best, I love you, and you've changed my life in ways that you probably can't even imagine.
I've always just mulched my cover crops with a zero turn mower. Thx for all the great videos!
Thanks for another excellent video. What I'm testing is letting rye go to full maturity, flattening it onto the ground, and only the next season I transplant salads & squash into the straw. I've heard from several sources that high carbon ratio of straw and rye roots that stay in the ground are excellent for soil life. Big downside: the parts of the garden where I place rye it takes most of my season to grow just straw. I'm going for it anyway as I believe my soil will thank me in the future.
I've been using cover crops and learning how to terminate mostly winter rye for many years. By far the most effective method on my 1/4 acre home garden is to use a 4 stroke straight shaft brush cutter with a harness and a 10" round 60 tooth carbide tipped brush blade. I have an old John Deere S-1400, but there are other similar power tools on the market. The beauty of the 4 stroke straight gas brush cutter is that it has enough power to cut the rye at ground level (leaving no stub) and not slow down. I can cleanly cut a 2' by 32' bed in 7 minutes. This method results in 99% termination, and the bed is immediately ready to receive transplants.
In my big back yard I planted 50# of potatoes this year. I had to scatter them and plant in various places, including just little 2" diameter garden spots surrounded by grass and forbes. I noticed those near the grass were the strongest and healthiest.
The one straw revolution is a great book, he would just cut the weeds, seed the crop he wanted by encasing the seed in clay first then scattering them in the freshly cut area. I believe a second cutting happened to keep the weeds down below the level of the crop. Once the crop took, the weeds were also allowed to grow below the crop.
From my experience of terminating cover crops over the past 20 years as a organic grain farmer, we actually plant into the cover crops at milk stage, let the crops emerge and get to v-1, then terminate the cover crop. But that might not translate as well to market gardening. Our termination equipment is big and heavy.
So pleased to hear this ... most no till use chemicals and they do not seem to understand that we are eating the chemicals, let alone it hurts birds (no insects) and kills the monarch. Thank god for those who think different.