Cover Cropping for Soil Health | No-Till and Low-Till Strategies

I am learning a lot from these videos. I live in a slum in East Africa, and am trying to do sustainable agriculture demonstration projects for the indigenous people. Lots of challenges to face here. The soil is compacted clay, like solid concrete, so migration to a no-till strategy is challenging. Secondly, you can not run down to Home Depot and pick up a bag of this or that, or a tool or whatever. Being on the equator means a year round growing season, but that also means there is not cold weather to kill off bugs and pests. Soil amendments and so forth have to be locally produced, which is a challenge, as a sustenance farmer barely surviving is hesitant to plant less corn in order to grow mulch, or is hesitant to plant a cover crop instead of a food crop. We have found integrating animals into the cycle helps. Raising rabbits encourages a farmer to plant some grasses for rabbit food, which can then also serve as a mulch or cover crop. The rabbit poop serves as a fertilizer and soil amendment, and the waste feed from the rabbit cage can also be applied as a mulch. The rabbit urine is a natural pesticide and foliar fertilizer. People will start raising rabbits, as they see it as both an income generator and a food generator. Many, many challenges here, but I continue to learn from your videos.

Nice touch to have the sponsor do their own ad so we saw the who & not just the product😊

I love the method of cover cropping. I’m starting new gardens on dense clay. My initial cover is peas and giant carrots! I’ve never heard of anyone using carrots as cover crops? I let a few of my giants go to seed last year so have literally thousands of seeds. They are really hardy, don’t need much in terms of fertiliser, and somehow accept the challenge of getting as deep into the clay as possible. Then I run my chickens over them, who eat the greens and tops, and then (most of) the roots decay into the soil. Aeration and microbial feeding. Any left over I can pull and give to the horses, or eat. Only on a small scale, but gosh does it work well!! Hope this helps a fellow nerd. You’re awesome!

Walk of shame!! 😂 You just saved hundreds of people from making that mistake. You’re a superhero! ❤

One thing I have always respected about you is that you share the facts. Wins or losses your honest and makes the rest of us feel more human when we have fails. 4 years in we have fails weekly which can be very discouraging it’s nice to know a pro like yourself can have failures too. Keep it up your awesome ❤

My favorite part of my YouTube experience is another person calling me a nerd when I watch farming videos. I did this during my time in the military. I always called my Soldiers nerds out of love and respect for what they did.

Hang your head up, we learn from our mistakes😉🇦🇺

I just did a cover crop. XD I used every plant you talked about. Hairyvetch rye, buckwheat, Red Clover, white clover, brassicas, literally everything in my small backyard weed paradise! I’m so happy about my beautiful weed garden and it’s turning into a beautiful meadow now full of flowers and beautiful and cover crops! I’m going to let it go wild for the summer! To help the bugs out this year.

Yeah, we harvest the top part of our daikon radish from our cover crop then cut it and mix it with an Asian veg green mix. Then sell it with rotisserie chicken and the mix. Pickup only. We also do a we also do a soul food mix greens, mac, rotisserie pick up only. It depends really because sometimes deer can get into your cover crop. If you end up doing this and you have deer pressure and are unsure if you recently had some in your field for food safety setup a trail cam. The best part if you put the trail camera on wireless it can dump the pictures into a hard drive you can check later. For dates and times of what visited the field. I always wish that folks would get together and create an OS for small and medium farms that is open OS. So it can feed the world better. Because if John Deer or someone else does it. Gonna cost an arm and a leg and be uncost effective for so many farmers. Really covercrops are so under explored by most of farming. Here in Cali you see so many farmers who's fields are desprate for cover crops. But so many farmers don't own the land they produce on. Which means you got renter mentality on those fields. Which basically hurts the whole state in water retention. The whole state should be cover cropping no dig mulching up extreme but land is so expensive and the people who own nickle and dime the people who produce and there's just so many hands in the pot. Not the people who got a hand in the pot are doing the sweat work.

No-Till Grower virgin here... you had me at "nerds" then laid me out at "citations," your sense of humor was the cover crop on my fields - I'm in love!

I love the idea of planting food for cover crops especially root veggies where you can chop and drop the tops of the ones you take to eat. Great idea

Yesterday I used the 'standing-bar-crimp' method on winter rye yesterday, then a manual post hole shovel to cut windows through the rye mat and transplant into those windows. Basically treated the flattened rye like people use black plastic weed barrier. Looked nice, I'll see how it performs.

My garden was flooded by a heavy spring rain which laid on the surface for several days, compacting the soil. I sowed some peas and oats April 15th. By June 15th, the area of the cover crop was very crumbly soil while 6 inches away was hard as a rock. I’m surprised the soil changed that quickly.

After 30 years of composting for mulching my annuals I stumbled on a quicker, easier, richer mulch: SHREDDED LEAVES. My neighbors trees dropped too many leaves for her to manage in the fall so I volunteered to "clean up". I bought an electric leaf vac/shredder, 15-1. It came with a canvas bag which I slung over my shoulder, requiring frequent stops to empty. (This would have gone much quicker if I had help from someone pushing a large cart to trap the mulch.) I put the mulch in my 140 sq. foot, raised bed. It slowly, over a few winter months, broke down, leaving dark soil. I will NEVER compost again. Remember: Keep a cover crop, even if it's just weeds. Why? Building soil is done by ROOTS IN THE GROUND. Observe nature, learn, follow. Don't make work by fighting nature or following traditional farming/gardening, e.g., turning over the soil. Does nature plow? Hell no!

Yesssss “nap seed” 🙌🏻

Off topic, but do you grow strawberries? Could you do a video on no till and companion approaches to strawberries. Also Id love to see more on perrenial crops. Thanks! Love your work.

I have been feding my lemon tree, whatever I prune from it cut into small pieces and mulch, so far it is doing great, I also give it from time to time organic laundry soap water, and the tree is better than ever, considering it was an old tree which used not to produce anything for years, I think I am in a good way. I now plan to feed it weeds also turned to small pieces once dried.

I am one of those people that are afraid to sow a bed with cover crops, for the fear that I'm going to be left with a bed full of some sort of plant matter, for months & months & months, & have a hard time getting it to break down & then having to pull all the plants up... lol. I see you mowing some of these cover crops & it looks like a bed of thick grass & I have this fear that it would just regrow, or just take way too long to break down & I would have trouble getting anything to grow in it. I would love to see a video where you film what it looks like during the entire process, when it's time to terminate it- what tye bed looks like right after you crimp or mow, then an update each week until it has broken down enough for planting... I know that would probably be a time consuming video but I think it'd really help those of us that are afraid to start cover cropping for the fear that were just going to basically cause a "weed" problem in our beds. I bought a pea & oat mix, but have been afraid to try it 😩

I think the whole cover crop process is starting to sink in for me. This video was very helpful!

Left for work yesterday morning and forgot to put my tobacco starts in the shady area. I wont have to worry about growing much tobacco this year now lol. Mistakes like this make me better. I will not make that mistake again. Thank you for your awesome content!!!