Complimentary Blueberry Juice

After going through last year’s photos again I realized one of our most solid crop installations was actually our cover crop. We put more forethought and action into prepping the site than we did our nearly-failed onion crop, which really goes to show what you can accomplish if you prepare and what chaos you will have if you don’t.

The truth is, we were both nervous and anxious about putting this cover crop in, as we’ve never done anything like it. As such we took extra precautions and extra preparations.

There’s a big, big lesson in that.

Perhaps the most important thing was patience.

We selected a site for our cover crop trial well in advance. Knowing that the cover crop had to get up and going meant two things: we had to control for weeds, and we needed to plant just before a rain (so the seed wasn’t sitting there with all the weeds ready to germinate).

To control for weeds we made repeated tillage passes to make sure our site was “clean.” One day we saw that indeed it was going to rain, at least enough to germinate the crop, so we did one last tillage pass, and planted the crop the day before the rain event.

There was no “doing it anyway” or “just go for it” or powering through despite bad timing or farmer anxieties. The success of this cover crop was down to planning, preparation, and waiting. And the results speak for themselves. We now have an excellent cover crop with which we can run trials with, as we scale up our cover crop installations for 2025.

Patience comes into play a lot in our short Zone 4 season…things like corn and beans don’t like cold soil so you need patience (waiting for the soil to warm up is worth it), things like tomatoes or cucumbers can’t get even a light touch of frost so patience is key there as well. And if you’re farming without irrigation, or trying to germinate a cover crop without irrigation, prepping while you wait for that moment when the rain comes is a big game changer.

Good things come.

Graham

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