We've had a couple of cold nights, with temps in the low teens (ºF), which has probably killed off most of the growth in the cover crop that I drilled over 3 months ago. This ground had been used to grow an organic food grade hard red spring wheat, which was harvested mid-August. We then disc-ripped the wheat stubble and drilled in a cover crop of radish, turnip, winter pea, sunflower, sorghum sudan and volunteer wheat. The idea is to keep a living root in the ground as long as possible, which ultimately will build up the soil, and at the same time use those roots (and the disc-ripper) to help break up a hard pan/compaction layer that was allowing foxtail to thrive.
I was passing by the group of fields that I filmed for an earlier post and made the following video.
Next spring this ground will have turkey litter spread on it and then planted with organic soybeans.
Thanks, Bruce, for bringing us up to date. It would have been interesting to see the size of the radish if you were able to pull it out.
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