Managing Spring Cover Crops Without A Tiller

hairy vetch on tomato fence and crimson clover

You did a good job last fall getting cover crops planted.  Now, they’ve taken over your garden and you don’t quite remember what you had planned to do with them. What you’ve done is to grow great biomass for your garden that you can use as compost material or cut down as mulch right where it was grown.  Give yourself a pat on the back!  The next step is to cut it down at the right time as mulch-in-place or cut it and put the material in the compost pile.  At this stage it is all green matter and your compost would benefit from an addition of an equal amount, by volume, of dry, carbon material.   At this time of year my carbon comes from Jerusalem artichoke stalks, or sorghum and cornstalks that I put aside in the fall.  Maybe you have access to leaves, hay, or straw.  If you are bringing in that material from outside sources, read my post Killer Compost to know what to look out for.  Water well when building your compost pile.

cereal rye

Last May I wrote Cutting a Rye Cover Crop at Pollen Shed.  It speaks to the importance of cutting your cover crop, in that case cereal rye, at the time when it has reached its most biomass, just before it produces viable seed.  For any crop, that would be when it is flowering. You don’t normally think of grain crops with flowers, however, you will see where the seed heads begin to form and the pollen will be hanging off it.  If you cut it earlier than that, the rye and wheat plants, like the grasses they are, will grow back.  If you wait too long, seed will form. That’s okay if it’s seed you’re after.  In that case, you would wait longer to cut it and need to make sure the seed has matured. One way to test is to cut a few seed heads and thresh out the seeds in your hand.  If you don’t get seed that looks like what you planted, it’s not ready. After the plant has put its energy into seed production, it begins to die. You will see the rye and wheat plants begin to turn brown when it is time to harvest the seed.  The harvest will be seed and straw and usually occurs here in mid-June.

Here in the Mid-Atlantic in zone 7 our last frost date is around April 26.  Cereal rye is my major cover crop and generally sheds pollen around the end of the first week of May.  That’s also about the time that the farmers who are on top of things are making their first cutting of hay.  This year, however, the weather seems to be all mixed up. We didn’t have much of a winter and warm weather arrived early.  Usually we have a spike in the temperature in the second week of April, fooling people into setting out their tomatoes, only to turn colder before the weather has settled.  The weather did a good job convincing my rye that warm weather was here and it flowered early.  I cut it in the beds where it would be left for mulch on April 20. I’m really interested to see how the rye and wheat do that are in the beds to be grown out for seed. The temperatures here dipped into the 30’s on April 24^th and 25^th after nighttime lows in the 60’s on April 16^th and 17^th. Looking back to my temperature records from last year, I see that the April nights were consistently warmer in 2011.  Last year I cut the rye for mulch on May 10.  It must be the lack of winter this year, not warm April nights that brought the rye to flower earlier in 2012.  My video Cover Crops and Compost Crops IN Your Garden shows my management of this system.

crimson clover with hovering honeybee

It might be that you have grown Austrian winter peas or crimson clover as your cover crop. These crops are legumes which fix nitrogen from the air in the nodules on their roots, returning that nitrogen to the next crop as those roots decompose in the soil.  You could cut these crops at flowering and let them lie as mulch, as with the rye, but their biomass wouldn’t be as long lasting as the rye.  They are best used as green material for the compost, adding carbon to capture all the nutrients as composting occurs.  Crimson clover, not to be confused with red clover, is a beautiful plant that generally flowers here around mid-April.  The legumes can be easily pulled out or cut for compost material and the bed planted soon after.  I wait two weeks to transplant after cutting the cereal rye beds for mulch, but I could transplant sooner than that into the legume-only beds.  If I was seeding into the beds, I could easily do that in a legume bed two weeks after cutting.  If I was only after the biomass and in a hurry to get the next crop in, I would cut crimson clover as soon as it has flowered.  However, I have bees that enjoy it, so I wait a little longer before cutting so they can have the most benefit from the clover blooms. 

Sometimes hairy vetch is planted in the fall to precede tomatoes.  I’ve done that in two tomato beds this year.  I prepared the beds last fall and moved the tomato trellises there at the same time. The vetch grew up and I cut it April 25.  My tomatoes are ready now in the coldframe for planting out.  I started the seeds there on March 16.  Having grown in the coldframe, they are already acclimated to the outdoor temperature fluctuations.   Sometimes hairy vetch can be a nuisance in the garden.  In the past I’ve used it as a companion to the wheat and rye and you can see that in my cover crop video.  You can also see how it became a problem in the rye.

It is good to plant a small amount of a legume into your grain crops and the legume I use now is Austrian winter peas, a winter hardy variety of field peas. Both the vetch and winter peas will grow quite tall and could pull down the grain if left to grow.  That doesn’t matter if I’m just cutting the crop to lie down as mulch, but if I want the grain later in the season I need to pull out the vetch or winter peas.  Austrian winter peas are much easier to pull out than the vetch.  If you are growing grain on a larger scale than your garden bed, you might choose red clover as the companion to the wheat or rye.  You can seed it into the growing grain in the spring.  The red clover will grow some and provide a nice green cover when the grain is harvested, then it will keep on growing and a harvest can be taken the first summer.  Let it grow over the winter, then harvest twice the second summer.   After that it is time for another crop for that space.

You can find the best cover crops for your location and situation by reading Managing Cover Crops Profitably, 3^rd edition, available from www.sare.org.  Be sure to read all the text, not just look at the charts.  There is a lot to learn and every time you think you have it down, something else comes along to figure out.  The important thing is to let the soil and the garden guide you.

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Beekeeping: Lessons Learned

bees on their porch

Beekeeping seems to be all the rage these days.  Bees are a really important part of our ecosystem and people are beginning to realize that.  Actually all insects are important, it’s just that bees are more noticeable and you can “keep” them.  This is the fifth year I’ve had bees.  When I started, I was really a newbie.  As much as I know about growing vegetables, I knew little to none about having bees.  I had to pore over the Dadant catalog and read the beginning beekeeping books.  Just as gardeners can get loads of good information from seed catalogs, new beekeepers can learn much from the beekeeping supply catalogs.  A friend loaned me a series of video tapes that helped. I still have a lot to learn, but four things I would pass on about beekeeping are:

1. Whatever they are selling the honey for at the farmers market is probably a bargain, compared to getting set up and producing your own.

2. Provide a watering hole for your bees or they will become unwelcome visitors at your neighbor’s pool or fountain.

3. Join a bee club.

4. Find a mentor or friend to go through the experience with you.

Cindy's three hives

Getting started with bees is not the same as adding a few chickens to your backyard.  You could make any sort of shelter out of found materials for your hens.  Bees, on the other hand, need special housing if you want to manage them easily for a honey harvest. In the wild, of course, they do well on their own without our interference.   The regular box hive is what most people associate with beekeeping.  It was refined about 1850 by Rev. Lorenzo Langstroth with his concept of “bee space” making it easier to remove the frames.   New thinking is going the way of top bar hives.  I know a few beekeepers who have started using a top bar hive, but I don’t know if they’ve extracted honey yet.  I understand that you have to destroy the comb to get the honey.  That leaves you with plenty of wax to make into candles, but the bees have to produce that much again for a place to store their honey.  With the Langstroth hives, the frames with comb and honey can be spun in an extractor to take the honey and leave the comb intact.  There are pros and cons for both hives.  If you want to learn more about those top bar hives, there will be two people speaking about them at the Mother Earth News Fair in Seven Springs, PA in September.  Their websites are http://www.goldstarhoneybees.com/  and http://www.beelanding.com/.  I’ll be there as well.  

I started with one hive, buying a beginner kit, plus the coveralls, plus whatever additional equipment I needed for the one hive from Dadant.  Adding the bees(which might cost about $75), I probably spent about $350.  Since the first year the bees are building their home by producing comb in the two brood boxes and storing their winter food, they generally don’t have honey to spare.  I was looking forward to extracting some for myself the second year.  My bees, however, didn’t survive the winter.  There are so many reasons that may happen.   They can have food in the form of honey or sugar water in the hive and if it’s not right next to them, they’ll just crawl into their little cells and starve.  The weather is a big factor and even if they look great at the beginning of March and you pat yourself on the back for getting them through the winter, a cold rainy spell could take them out two weeks later.  I found out after I started with one hive that it’s recommended to start with two.  That would make the cost be about $500 to get started.  So while you’re learning if you even like to use honey on a regular basis, what you can buy at the farmers market is a bargain.

Providing water for my bees is something that took me by surprise.  Luckily,we  have great neighbors who welcomed them at their fountain, which is right next to their door.  Thanks Willie and Joyce, for being so nice to my bees!  When I realized that was happening, I put out a bird bath and keep it filled.  Now, they spend more time at home in our yard.  Some of my beekeeping friends have neighbors who are not so welcoming.

Joining a bee club in your area is a good idea.  You will meet others who really know what they’re doing, along with people who are just learning like yourself.  Bee clubs have speakers and often sponsor classes.  Some clubs own equipment such as extractors that members can borrow.  I joined the Central Virginia Beekeepers Association–East and have made many new friends in the process.  Besides learning much from what goes on in the meetings, one of our members, Paul Hodge, puts out a monthly to-do list for us.  It was through his encouragement and guidance that so many of us have divided our hives and started a nuc this year to raise new colonies.  Thanks Paul! 

Hook up with a mentor and/or friend for this journey.  You can most likely find one at the bee club.  Sometimes they have a list of members who have volunteered to be mentors.  Just ask.  A mentor can take you through the initial steps of knowing what to do and can be a resource to call on for help.  A good friend is someone who will join you regularly working your hive and extracting honey.  A local mentor in my area was Mr. Mac, who passed away the year I got started in bees.  I never met Mr. Mac, but I’ve sure learned a lot from him through those that he mentored over the years.  “Mr. Mac always said…..” peppers many conversations.  Thanks Mr. Mac, for teaching so many people, so that they can teach me!

straining honey into the jars

This year I have three hives.  One is a strong hive that made it through the winter,  one is a split that I made from that hive this spring, and the third is from a package that I ordered in December for April delivery, not wanting to assume my bees would overwinter.  I have honey this year!  It is the first appreciable amount from my bees that I’ve had.  That strong hive filled two supers of honey for me.  My bee buddy, Angela, and I extracted it recently along with a super from her bees.  Until now, I may have had a few frames of honey from my bees that I extracted by cutting off the cappings and leaving the frames upside down in a picnic cooler so that the honey would drain out. I put canning jar lids down as spacers to hold the frames off the bottom of the cooler.  I have gotten together with Angela before to extract honey and we uncapped it over canning pots to capture the wax.  This year I splurged and bought an uncapping tank from Brushy Mountain Bee Farm.   This tank is actually called a multi-use straining system in their catalog.  Angela owns the extractor we use. 

bees cleaning the uncapping tank

Uncapping requires a long serrated knife and special ones are made for that job.  A five gallon plastic bottling pail is good to have.  Even the years I didn’t get any honey from my bees, I still had honey when another bee buddy, Freda, gave me her surplus.  The extractor has to be drained periodically during the process and you have to put it somewhere in a hurry.  You bottle it from that bucket.  A strainer that fits over the top of the bucket is good to strain out the bits of wax and bee parts that may come off the frames.  I have such a strainer, but couldn’t find it when we extracted, so in the picture you see it being strained as it goes into the jars.  I much prefer straining it as it goes into the bucket.  When you’re done, just leave the sticky equipment outside for the bees to clean up. 

There is so much to learn about beekeeping and I hope you decide to jump in and be part of it.  Go ahead and join a bee club even if you don’t know when, if ever, you will get bees.  Older beekeepers are probably looking for volunteers to do some heavy lifting for them while tagging along in the beeyard.  That could be you!

For those who are local, beginning today I am giving a series of talks for three weeks at Midlothian and Bon Air Libraries in Chesterfield County.  I’ll present Feed Your Family from Your Own Backyard, Part 1 (GROW BIOINTENSIVE), Part 2 (garden planning), and Part 3 (cover crops)  Tuesdays at Midlothian and Wednesdays at Bon Air.  Contact the library for more information.  Attendance is free, however registration is recommended.  See you there.

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