Organic No-Till Cover Cropping 3: Weed Em and Reap Part 2

Source

Weed 'Em and Reap Part 2: Reduced tillage strategies for vegetable cropping systems [DVD]. A. Stone. 2006. Oregon State University Dept. of Horticulture. Corvallis, Oregon. Available at: http://www.weedemandreap.org (verified 17 Dec 2008).

Featuring

Ron Morse. Virginia Tech. Blacksburg, VA.

Audio Text

What we do, we plant different cover crops in strips to accommodate the need for nitrogen as well as weed control. In the center and also on the two borders, we plant a grass crop, Sudex or sorghum-sudangrass. This is a type of crop that grows very tall and produces a large amount of biomass and is known to control weeds very effectively. Then next to the Sudex, we planted sunn hemp or Crotalaria and this sunn hemp is a leguminous crop and produces large amounts of nitrogen. One of the disadvantages of sunn hemp is the seed is very costly, up to $4 per pound. Other legume crops that could be grown are cowpeas or forage soybean. In this particular system, these are summer cover crops and they will winter kill and leave the biomass for the following spring.

Organic High Residue Reduced-Till Cover Cropping 3: Weed Em and Reap