Mackane Vogel here with this week’s cover crop connection. Earlier this month I visited Jim Hershey’s farm in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania. And while last episode you had a chance to see what his plans are for the upcoming Pennsylvania No-Till alliance Field Day, this week I thought I’d showcase one of Jim’s latest experiments. Check out what he’s doing to prove that cover crops can work in a garden environment to suppress weeds and help grow healthier vegetables.
“So we will demonstrate how you can actually raise vegetables in your garden with the use of cover crops. Now typically, you wouldn't plant these cover crops in the spring, you would plant something in the fall. So it’s somewhat — but this is what I think is cool. This here was undisturbed soil, no cover crop seed planted, and look at all the weeds coming up. So you already got an issue going on here that would give you a challenge. That’s why people struggle with gardens. How do I take care of the weeds? Well, that over there would help. Now, that’s not — I mean to get the whole story there — you likely are going to have to either keep the cover crops trimmed down or lay newspaper down. But it’s still better than pulling weeds. So, that’s one project we got involved in because someone at one of our events — it might’ve even been at the state farm show — when they saw the rainfall simulator and they saw the cover crops, they said ‘well could I do something like that in my garden?’ and we said, ‘yeah you can!”
Hershey says the cover crop mix he used includes oats, buckwheat and crimson clover and he intends to plant tomatoes, lettuce, cabbage and peppers for the experiment. Well stay tuned next month for an upcoming Cover Crop Podcast series detailing all the farms I visited in Maryland and Pennsylvania this summer.
