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This is a Farmers and their Diversified Horticultural Marketing Strategies video clip.

Watch video clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjSpSYLx_3o

Karen and Jack Manix, Walker Farm. Dummerston, VT

I’m Karen Manix, this is Jack Manix, we’re here at Walker Farm in Dummerston, Vermont. We have a diversified operation, it’s two parts, horticulture and vegetable. We farm about 30 acres organically and we have about 14 greenhouses. And pretty much we’ve been emphasizing the flowers over the last 4-5 years because they seem to be subsidizing the rest of the operation. 25 years ago this summer, we came here to visit Jack’s grandfather and helped him with the chores and really liked it and felt like it was where we needed to be. So he taught us about farming, and we tried milking cows, raising pigs, chickens, making apple cider, on and on. We’ve found a couple things that work real well for us, is growing vegetables and growing flowers. And we also live right on a state highway, which has problems, but it also is a great location. Since we have a farm stand right on route 5, we don’t wholesale, we just retail right here and that seems to be working out.

Well we were very lucky when we got started in this business to get hooked up with some good caterers and restaurant owners that helped us to develop our marketing strategy and they taught us that people eat with their eyes. We’ve learned to display with color and presentation. The same thing carried over into the horticulture where we got hooked up with some upper-end gardeners and landscape designers and we did the same thing there. One of the things we wanted to do was to develop an upscale market where people really appreciated fine flowers and good food and would be willing to pay for that freshness so, we really don’t compete with supermarkets because there’s really no way they can match what we offer every day. And so we developed a marketing strategy with our horticultural and catering friends and they taught us what people wanted or what people would want in the future, because they were privy to interesting things coming down the pike. And so working in cooperation with them, we came up with products that really challenged our clientele. In order to keep our upscale customers, to keep them happy, we send our catalogs of our flower material in early spring late winter and they’re able to pre-order for a fee. And we gather up stuff for them and it’s all ready when they come and they can just put it in their car and go. We’ve also developed a website where people can log on and download our catalogs.

I think that the single most important thing for marketing is to have people working in your stand that understand that making eye contact with your customers, being friendly, making a little chat, giving them respect to the customers is your best marketing tool. For someone to come in and feel like, ‘ok here’s a person that we like’, makes all the difference. We also pay our stand people more than our field workers, because we feel that the marketing is where we need to put our emphasis the most. And, just about anybody can grow a good tasting tomato, but it takes an expert to sell a good one. Especially during tomato season. What seems to work for our farm stand is to have lots of please and thank you’s, all of our employees are encouraged to do a lot of that. And to keep everything as spotless as possible, cleanliness is a really nice attribute concerning food. And quality control, everyone’s encouraged, if they see something on display that doesn’t look up to up standards, throw it out.

One of the things we wanted to do was to connect the people who shop here with our farm so we developed this program we called the wrap-around which means instead of people to stop, go into the front of the stand, get back in their cars and go, we widened our display area with gardens and greenhouses and other attractions to bring them around behind the farm and into the fields, so they could connect with the cows and the vegetables and the flowers and really feel like Walker Farm was a part of their life.

Its really important to keep in touch with what your customer needs, and we have done surveys where we ask them what they’d like to see here, how we can improve. And we usually give them a free tomato plant or free flower for filling out the survey. One of the ways we can keep improving our business is during the off-season going to the seminars and educational meetings and doing a lot of reading. And during the season we take time off to visit other farm stands to do a little corporate espionage and stealing their best ideas and using them here because everything we do here, we’ve learned from other people. The main thing is to have fun with your employees and your customers and your marketing will just take off from there. The message that should be given out to all people is that there’s a lot of money in this business and there’s wide-open opportunities in agriculture and even though you hear a lot of doom and gloom stories especially, unfortunately, from the dairy section this is a great field of opportunity.

This video project was funded by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (USDA).

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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This is a Vegetable Farmers and their Innovative Cover Cropping Techniques video clip.

Watch video clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDXCbJNDeL4

Eileen Droescher, Ol'Turtle Farm. Easthampton, MA.

We’ve been experimenting with a combination of Sudex and red clover planted after a cash crop. The Sudex will winter kill and then the clover will come back through in the spring and remain through the next season.

This Sudex was put in after a cash crop in the middle of August. The seeding rate is 3 pounds of Sudex to 2 pounds of red clover per bed. Sudex gives us a lot of biomass and then the red clover gives us the nitrogen. And red clover is something that we can leave in throughout the next year, we do not have to till it down and put it into a crop that will winter kill, because a couple times of mowing and by the following spring, there’s not so much left it goes down very easily.

After the Sudex has winter killed, this is what the field will look like, the Sudex was left in place, the red clover has been mowed four times through the season. It will be left here until spring when it will be spaded down and put into a cash crop. The timing of the planting of Sudex is very important. This Sudex was planted in the middle of August when it was still quite warm, this bed of Sudex was planted 2 weeks later when it had started to cool off so it’s obvious there’s going to be a substantial difference in the biomass created by the Sudex.

This section is an example of needing to respond to something that didn’t work correctly. It was seeded into Sudex and red clover last year, but this spring the red clover didn’t come through very well so in order to reduce our weed problem we spaded in the clover and planted it into straight Sudex at the end of May. We got a great stand of Sudex and this has been mowed three times, it has created a very good weed suppressive situation.

This video project was funded in part by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (USDA).

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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This is a Vegetable Farmers and their Innovative Cover Cropping Techniques video clip.

Watch video clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt8f2FWTr8Y

Eileen Droescher, Ol'Turtle Farm. Easthampton, MA.

Our field space is divided into sections of 30 beds. There’s a section of cash crop bordered by two sections of cover crop. The next season those are rotated such that the cash crops are now in sections where there was a cover crop. Each of our sections contains 30 permanent beds. They’re mostly 300 feet long by 45 inches center to center. We also keep these permanent beds exactly where they are, we use a spader and drive only on the pathways, walk only on the pathways so the beds always remain the same whether they’re in cover crop or in cash crop.

After our cash crop, we would seed with rye and vetch or just rye as the season gets colder. Then the middle of next season, around July, that rye and vetch would be put down and put into a cover crop that would winter kill such as oats and peas or Sudex.

This section was in cash crop earlier in the season, it’s now been spaded down and put into rye and vetch. We are on a permanent bed system so the pathways always stay in the same place. The bed is planted with cover crop, we keep the pathways clean so we’re able to find the bed the next year. We use a permanent bed system, mainly to reduce compaction to help maintain good soil structure.

And so it’s the middle of August, we go by beds, so rye and vetch usually gets put down 5 pounds of rye and 2 pounds of vetch per bed. And since we go bed by bed, we just mix the seed according to the number of beds we’re going to put down at that time. This rye and vetch will be allowed to grow until it starts to head out and then it will be mowed, we usually have to mow twice for the rye and then allow the vetch to come back through and flower and then we would mow again for the vetch and then it will be spaded down and put into a winter kill cover crop such as oats and peas.

This is the equipment we use for planting our cover crop. A simple drop seeder that we purchased from Market Farm Implement, it's adjustable according to the size seed that you’re putting down. We incorporate it with a basket weeder. We use a pipe on the back of the tractor that drags along the bed and that helps to create the compaction necessary for faster seed germination.

This is a field of oats and peas, it was seeded in mid August after spading down rye and vetch. The beds are seeded to about 5 pounds of pre-mixed oats and peas per bed. Any of the legumes that we put down, we do inoculate them prior to seeding.

The other part of our fertility system is compost. We have to buy our compost in, it’s rather expensive so we have been using a lot of legumes in our cover crop and are hoping to reduce the amount of compost we have to use.

This video project was funded in part by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (USDA).

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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This is a Vegetable Farmers and their Innovative Cover Cropping Techniques video clip.

Watch video clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsb7Y2zPCUs

Bob Muth, Muth Farms. Williamstown, NJ.

This is municipal leaves from Monroe Township, our hometown. Leaves were banned from the landfills in New Jersey back in 1987 because they were using up valuable landfill space and we hooked up with the town at that time and started to take them. Initially there were some serious trash problems, but over the years the town worked that out so it’s a very clean product. A lot of people have said that I should be charging some significant tipping fees for these but I’ve never felt that way, we’ve taken them for free all these years and it guarantees that I get a good supply every year.

The bulk of the township’s leaves come in November, December and early January. I prefer to spread when the ground is frozen cause I get virtually no soil compaction at that time. For me that’s December and January, that’s when it’s a very light work load then I can work on these things all day un-interrupted. We spread these anywhere from 3-6 inches deep. We use a New Holland spreader and it’s anywhere from 3-4 passes going at a slow rate with the spreader wide open.

When I started with these I had what I would call a lot of wives tales, people telling me how it would ruin the ground, how it would destroy your pH, you’d need tons of lime to counteract the acidity. It didn’t work out that way at all, I always had a good soil testing program and I saw that 2 or 3 years after we had applied leaves nutrient levels going up significantly especially minors and the pH numbers were actually starting to climb when I was actually expecting them to go the other way. They’ve been a godsend for us.

Normally we like to flail mow very low to the ground, however if there are any residencies or houses nearby we always mow higher and spread into a stubble and that way we don’t have leaves blowing off the fields and creating angry neighbors. This ground was just in vegetable crops and it won't be back in vegetable crops for another four years or so. We put leaves on the front part of the rotation because it gives them ample time to break down. And so they wont create problems later with tying up nitrogen and clogging up the mulch layering equipment. There’s your leaf application right there, that’s all you got left after four years.

Once thing I’ve seen over the years, if you could take leaf mulching and link it with a good cover cropping system, you can really help yourself. Over the years since we started this, we’ve slashed our fertilizer probably by 60-70% or more. There’s no need to apply, it’s already here.

This video project was funded in part by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (USDA).

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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This is a Vegetable Farmers and their Innovative Cover Cropping Techniques video clip.

Watch video clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8n9AamByA6c

Bob Muth, Muth Farms. Williamstown, NJ.

This is Sudex, it’s our main summer cover crop, we like it a lot, because it helps alleviate soil compaction, you can also use it for nematode and disease suppression. Normally we like to plant Sudex around Memorial Day, but this year with the wet weather we got significantly delayed we were planting in June and into July. I spread or plant mine with a Vicon seeder - I’ll sling it out around 25 pounds to the acre and then lightly disk it in.

This is the stage we like to flail it, when it’s about head high or a little bit above, this’ll be about 4 tons of dry matter per acre. Some people tell me that planting Sudex can create a significant weed problem but that’s not a problem as long as you mow it before it shoots those seed heads, that’s why we like to see it mowed it when it’s about head high, not much bigger than that.

Another advantage of Sudex I’ve seen over the years is good weed suppression. If you grow this for a couple years you can significantly reduce your weed population. There’s no light in there for those weeds to get established and grow.

This video project was funded in part by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (USDA).

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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This is a Vegetable Farmers and their Innovative Cover Cropping Techniques video clip.

Watch video clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7Y9R_luHpM

Bob Muth, Muth Farms. Williamstown, NJ.

Our rotation strategy is one year in high value vegetables or small fruit, in our case it’s strawberries. Then it’s going to be followed by 3 sometimes 4 years where the ground’s rotated out. So in effect we’re only farming about 20% each year of our total 80 acres. I implemented this rotation back in 1987 and I know at that time some farmers thought it was crazy to be resting that much ground in an area where there’s high land values, but over the years I’ve realized some real benefits. We see pest and disease pressure remain at manageable levels, soil fertility has gone way up, and stuff grows a lot better simply by prepping that ground between those high value crops.

I think it’s important to note that that 80% that’s setting fallow is not just laying out there just idly growing weeds, it’s being rested by planter design and it’s all part of the total farm management picture. We’re doing that to improve soil organic matter level and to put the ground or make the ground in much better shape. It’s easier to grow bigger and better crops with each passing year.

For us when a vegetable crop comes out or a small fruit crop, I’m immediately thinking 3, 4, 5 years down the road and what I try to do is implement that rotation so that ground will be in much better condition. It starts by, when the crop is finished, simply leaf mulching. We spread municipal leaves up to about 6 inches deep. That’s the maximum amount you can spread in New Jersey by law. Those leaves are worked in the following year, we then plant either hay or Sudex, that hay or Sudex will stay in for about two to three years, we’d then plow that out and we’d go back into rye or rye vetch and then back into vegetables once again. So at the end of that time literally that ground is super-charged, it’s ready to go.

Hay is a significant part of our rotation, we grow both timothy and orchardgrass on the place, I prefer orchardgrass cause it’s a little more drought tolerant. One of the advantages that I see, it’s good not putting a plow on the ground for three years, you can really enhance your soil structure through the rooting action of that hay crop. You’ll never get rich growing hay, but there is a significant horse population in the area now, these are pleasure horses and there’s a waiting market for good high quality hay, which we can provide. It’s a source of income for you when that ground’s being rotated out.

This video project was funded in part by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (USDA).

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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This is a Vegetable Farmers and their Innovative Cover Cropping Techniques video clip.

Watch video clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6vQp-_NYto

Lockwood 'Pooh' Sprague, Edgewater Farm. Plainfield, NH.

What we have here is a crop of Japanese millet on a piece of fairly heavy ground, that we’re not using this year, so we’re using a longer season cover crop here to build organic matter in the soil. The ground was well prepared when we got on to this, we broadcast about 3 bushels to the acre which is very heavy as you can see, but we figure if you’re going to grow a crop and the fertility is there you might as well put it on heavy especially with cover crops.

I like the Japanese millet over the Sudan because it’s a little easier to incorporate. If the Sudan and Sudex get ahead of you, which they some times can when you’re picking vegetable late in the summer, it can get quite woody and it’s very hard to incorporate in the fall.

It’s now about the 15th of August, hopefully another week we’ll get someone down here with a heavy set of harrows and we’ll harrow this up, probably once over we’ll chop it up and expose a little of the dirt and we’ll come in and broadcast either peas and oats on top of that or hairy vetch and winter rye and disc it in lightly and that’ll give us a winter cover crop.

This video project was funded in part by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (USDA).

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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This is a Vegetable Farmers and their Innovative Cover Cropping Techniques video clip.

Watch video clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PueBYl53WQ

Lockwood 'Pooh' Sprague, Edgewater Farm. Plainfield, NH.

We use a summer smother when we have finished up a short term crop like peas, in particular when we’re not going back with something immediately; we’ll use a summer smother to suppress weeds and add some organic matter. Buckwheat is probably the simplest summer smother for us to manage. It’s very quick, we seed it anywhere, I think the recommended rate is a bushel per acre but I’m sure we glom on pretty close to two or even more sometimes. It’s very quick, it’s very easy to work down, we have a set of fairly heavy harrows, and we can go in right now on short order and incorporate this with a set of harrows as well as put on a winter cover crop at the same time so it’s very easy to manage in terms of the machinery that we own.

This video project was funded in part by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (USDA).

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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This is a Vegetable Farmers and their Innovative Cover Cropping Techniques video clip.

Watch video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqdaY38YgcA

Lou Lego, Elderberry Pond. Auburn, NY.

One of the things that we think is unique that we do here is that we use a lot of hybrid mulching. We’ll have a living cover and then within that living cover crop area we’ll put rows of plastic within a living mulch and use the advantage of the living mulch to keep the plastic covered and to give it longevity and also again to make it a more workable environment so there is no bare soil between those sheets of plastic.

This is the first year of one of our hybrid mulch fields it was planted in rye in October, the way we would normally do this, is we would plant the whole field in rye and then come in on the same day and lay the plastic. This year we tried something a little different we tried planting the rye between the rows of plastic. And don’t really like that as well because we ended up with a bit of a band along the plastic.

Plastic in these plantings is all 1½ ml embossed plastic, in this case it's black although other colors work also. We lay it with a mulch layer - the most basic plastic mulch layer that you can lay, it’s not a raised bed, it’s flat on the ground as far as moisture. And after the fifth year the plastic, amazingly because it’s been protected by covers and by high growth in the aisles, is very flexible, so we come through here with a mulch lifter, it comes out in one piece.

In this case we’re planting tomatoes into the hybrid mulch system. So the way we’ll do this is to burn holes as a three-foot spacing. We then take a shovelful of manure and a shovelful of mulch on either side of the hole. Then we come in and set the plants with manure mixed into the soil and then cover the plant with mulch to keep any weeds from coming up in the hole. We then set a cage on top of that hole for the tomato to grow up into.

With the rye it’s important to let it grow as tall as it can and as vigorously as it can. The rye is cut, the reason it is cut is to protect the plastic from the sun and to make it last a long time, it also is a good crop with improving the soil and keeping the weeds down. There are two ways to mow the crop, either with a tractor mounted sickle bar mower or a large tractor mounted sickle bar mower, or what I prefer to use is a smaller walk behind sickle bar mower, where you get a little better control and can determine where the straw is going to fall a little better. The goal was to try to get it to distribute somewhat evenly between the plastic and the ground.

In this particular planting of tomatoes we will let this rye that’s been cut, re-seed. Later in the summer when it thins out a little, we will go through and seed annual rye grass with clover, over-seed it right on top of what’s here. Then that annual rye grass will die next year, the clover will take over and that’ll be the permanent alleyway mulch for the next five year rotation. The clover is mowed several times a year to keep it down depending on the crop. With a high crop like tomatoes, clover can be allowed to grow pretty aggressively. With a low crop it’s useful to keep it fairly well mowed, it actually likes being mowed, it comes back with increased vigor, so it’s a good crop for that.

These strawberries are growing in our hybrid mulch system. They’re growing on black plastic in here, the plastic has been in now, this is its 5th year, it’s had 4 previous crops on it, including melons and tomatoes and peppers and cabbage. Now it’s in its final cropping with these strawberries.

To maintain the fertility in the plantings for the four or five years under the plastic, it’s very necessary that the field have been in alfalfa or in a good nutritive cover crop for three years prior to placing the plastic in the strips. Then in addition to that we’ll use pelletized chicken manure in the holes at planting to give it a boost for the growing system. It’s amazing when you rip this plastic up in the final year, next year when we take this up, the soil under this will be absolutely beautiful.

This video project was funded in part by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (USDA).

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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This is a Vegetable Farmers and their Innovative Cover Cropping Techniques video clip.

Watch video clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNwkg3AwNkc

Lou Johns and Robin Ostfeld, Blue Heron Farm. Lodi, NY.

These beds have rye and hairy vetch blended together, broadcast together over the entire bed, these will get mowed generally twice if not sometimes three times with a flail mower and then turned under with a rotovator. The mowing is for two purposes, one is it takes the vegetation and breaks it down into smaller pieces so it incorporates better, the other purpose is to arrest the vigorous growth of the rye and hairy vetch. One of the things we’ve found with mowing the rye and vetch is, the timing and height can be critical in allowing it to re-grow and giving you sort of a whole other flush of vegetative growth sometimes really encouraging the vetch. On the first mowing cutting it to about 6-8 inches tall, taking it down from say a foot to two feet and that seems to give you a really good re-growth and encourages that vetch. Right before incorporation I try to mow as tight as I can get it cut, again to chop the material as fine as possible and so the stubble isn’t as much of a problem for breaking down.

So this is what it’s all about, growing cover crops, when you get soils that look like this that are just impregnated with roots from the cover crops, like spider webs through this thing making habitat for earthworms and then you have soil nodules from vetch there that are just going to feed a crop that’s coming later.

This video project was funded in part by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (USDA).

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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This is a Vegetable Farmers and their Innovative Cover Cropping Techniques video clip.

Watch video clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BO1GiPg0cPw

Lou Johns and Robin Ostfeld, Blue Heron Farm. Lodi, NY.

These are oats and field peas that were planted about mid April. They fit in to our cropping scheme, because we grow a lot of late fall harvested crops. They’re harvested in late October or November when it’s too late to establish a rye and vetch cover crop. So they’re left open over the winter and as early in the spring as possible we get the oats and field peas on. The oats are broadcast just by hand. We put the oats in a bucket and we use other small grains that we might have around. We walk down the tire tracks and throw handful and directly apply them to the bed. Then the peas are drilled with our four row Planet Jr. seeder - the reason we do that is because the peas need to be drilled more deeply than the oats and the peas seed needs to be economized because it’s quite expensive, so we like to plant just the four rows rather than broadcast the peas over the bed. The oats are incorporated before we drill the peas. By drilling the peas with the seed drill, we are planting them directly where the vegetable crops will be planted, so the nitrogen is right where it needs to be. The pea seed is inoculated before planting. We like to let it get at least a foot high, then we mow with the flail mower that chops it up and makes it break down more quickly so it’s incorporated more easily. Then we’ll use the rotovator and till it under. Normally the succession that we use because these beds would be ready to be plant in July, is then we would follow it with transplanted Brassica like broccoli or cabbage without any additional compost being needed.

This video project was funded in part by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (USDA).

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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This is a Vegetable Farmers and their Innovative Cover Cropping Techniques video clip.

Watch video clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3uhf3ZtqH8

Lou Johns and Robin Ostfeld, Blue Heron Farm. Lodi, NY.

About 10-12 years ago we started converting our fields to what you see now in a permanent bed situation. Primarily because our soils are quite heavy and we stared running into a lot of problems with compaction. So the answer we came up with was to create permanent tire track to carry all the weight of our tractors and all the foot traffic that is very common in vegetable production, you just have constant traffic, so it's been very effective. The tire tracks on the farm may look like nice grass and green growth but for the most part what you’re seeing is a whole host of native grasses, weeds, clovers, you see a lot of dandelion, which may seem like it would become a weed problem in the beds but it doesn’t.

One of the advantages we’re finding and we had kind of hoped for in our permanent tire tracks, is they’re becoming a very viable habitat for beneficial insects, spiders, a lot of people also talk about them being a haven for soil bacteria that might not be staying in a permanently cropped farm soils. Even though it may be anecdotal evidence our use of control sprays for insect pests has dropped to almost nothing over the last, say 10 years. I think that it has a fair amount to do with the amount of habitat we’re creating for beneficials. Within the permanent bed system, we do maintain a fairly rigorous rotation system with our cover crops and our seeded and transplanted vegetable crops, using spring-seeded cover crops, fall-seeded cover crops, sometimes summer-seeded cover crops.

This video project was funded in part by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (USDA).

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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This is a Vegetable Farmers and their Innovative Cover Cropping Techniques video clip.

Watch video clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQElJLlng9M

Eero Ruuttila, Nesenkeag Farm. Litchfield, NH.

This is my spader, which is the primary tillage tool on the farm. I use it for incorporating pretty much all of my cover crops. It needs to operate at slow speed and so that’s one disadvantage that when you’re bringing that organic matter into the soil that I can’t move very fast, because there’s a lot of biomass that’s chopping in there. But once it’s in the ground and I’ve made a couple of passes, then I can go in with a field cultivator and do a very rapid pass, make a nice smooth seedbed and then I’m ready to go. It’s like a number of shovels and it just cuts clods does a good job of chopping the straw into the soil but you get nice clods in that and over time they can break down slowly and that’s much gentler on your soil structure and it doesn’t oxidize all that organic matter you’re trying to bring into the soil.

When I first came here there was a rototiller so that’s what I learned on for primary tillage, but I really didn’t like what it did to the soil it really beat the soil up like an eggbeater, and I heard about spaders being much better for soil structure and better at incorporating biomass without oxidizing it. So this seemed to be a much better implement for improving my soil quality and that’s really important for me as a, doing the best I can for my soil.

This video project was funded in part by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (USDA).

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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This is a Vegetable Farmers and their Innovative Cover Cropping Techniques video clip.

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Eero Ruuttila, Nesenkeag Farm. Litchfield, NH.

What we’re doing here with green manure cover crops is I’m using them to confuse Colorado potato beetles. I cut strips, plant the potatoes, I try to do my weed cultivation and hilling so that the potato plants are well established and then at that stage I knock down the rye and vetch and usually by then it’s late June early July and by then that’s the first of the potato beetles coming into the field. They don’t need to have a big mulch on the ground like I would put on the tomatoes, I just want to have some contact with the straw on the potato plants.

With this method I’ve never had to spray more than twice for potato beetles and at best it’s a spot spraying - I don’t spray the whole field because in a good portion of the field there won't be potato beetles at all. It’s usually on an edge where they’ll come in at the end of the rows, or on an edge where solanaceous crops were the preceding year and you’ll find a few rows.

This video project was funded in part by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (USDA).

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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This is a Vegetable Farmers and their Innovative Cover Cropping Techniques video clip.

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Eero Ruuttila, Nesenkeag Farm. Litchfield, NH.

So what we have here is a strip of hairy vetch and rye, I started to turn it over probably mid April and everything was broken down enough that I was able to transplant my tomato plants probably about the third week in May. And meanwhile the rye and vetch on the beds next to it were continuing to grow. Just about at this stage is the point when you want to knock it down. What I’m looking for is for the vetch to start to go to flower or for the rye to be at pollen stage. And what I like to do ideally is to cultivate once with my tractor and then I’ll knock it down with the mower and then once it’s down we’ll use the straw as a mulch for the tomato plants and then we’ll bring in some stakes and do a basket weave system to bring a trellising for the tomatoes up out of the mulch. I’m using the straw from the strips to start with the mulching process but I try to have a block of rye and vetch nearby as you can see behind here and I’ll mow that down as I start to mulch these - I’ll have a good close by area where I can bring in more mulch without taking a lot of labor moving mulch from one area to another area of the farm.

I look at the cover crops as biomass, two things that are very important for the farm is nitrogen, the nitrogen fixing from the legume that’s part of the green manure, and biomass is very important so I want to maximize my biomass which is bring it to full maturity. Strip system with hairy vetch and rye overwintered and then cutting strips in the springtime I use it for wide spaced crops or crops that I choose to grow at a wide spacing that may not traditionally be grown at a wide spacing. Pumpkins and winter squash easy to plant at ten foot centers that works very well so I can have five foot wide beds with the adjacent 5 foot wide strip of hairy vetch and rye. Tomatoes I have a wide spacing so I can get a good air flow for disease.

This video project was funded in part by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (USDA).

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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This is a Vegetable Farmers and their Innovative Cover Cropping Techniques video clip.

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Eero Ruuttila, Nesenkeag Farm. Litchfield, NH.

As soon as I can get on the ground, I’ll seed field peas and oats, spin it on and then lightly harrow it in. And one of the things I really like about it is that it also brings in an early income, our earliest income in the spring, because the young pea shoots are very popular with the restaurant trade and also with Southeast Asian or Asian chefs. And usually within about 4-6 weed of seeding I have something I can start to harvest. That’s a really good starter for the springtime. The pea tendrils, pea shoots, pea tips different names for it, its not something you can sell tons and tons per acre, I have tons of and that’s one of the reasons I’m growing it for, the biomass of the nitrogen that the peas are fixing. But in a normal year I can realize gross sales of between 8 and 10 thousand dollars on 5-7 acres that might be seeded to field peas and oats.

This video project was funded in part by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (USDA).

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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This is a Vegetable Farmers and their Innovative Cover Cropping Techniques video clip.

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Cliff Hatch, Upinngill Farm. Gill, MA.

Delayed planting of strawberries reduces labor costs by reducing the time that you have to tend the berries in the field. Berries have to be hand hoed every seven days to keep the weeds out of them. Every week we shorten the season we save that hoeing and that labor. We developed our delayed planting system with the aid of a SARE farmer grower grant. We received two, two year cycle grants on which we basically trialed planting densities. We’ve trialed everything from 6 inches up to like 36 inches apart for planting systems and basically what we’ve found is that if we’re going to plant in July we need to reduce our spacing down to about 6 inches. If we’re going to plant in June we can have what you see here which is about 10-12 inches. If you’re planting in May you can go with the customary spacing, which is about 24 inches apart with your plants. If the rye comes off early we can plant our plants farther apart, if the rye come off late we take more plants we just put them in closer to compensate for the lack of season. Usually we harvest rye first of June and get it baled in the first week of June. But some years, this year is a wet year, we’re into the second week of June and we don’t have all of our rye harvested yet, we’re still getting that put by.

This video project was funded in part by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (USDA).

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

eOrganic 6028

This is a Vegetable Farmers and their Innovative Cover Cropping Techniques video clip

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Cliff Hatch, Upinngill Farm. Gill, MA.

This is rye left from last year, last year’s crop, we harvest this in June. It’s mowed when the plants have reached maximum height and they’re just casting their pollen, it wants to be mowed before there’s any seed set cause otherwise you’re just spreading weeds on your field. But the early mowing gives you a chance that any weeds in your field won't have set any seed. And they’ll be green if they’re in this bale but it’s the most weed free mulch available, June harvested rye. If it’s mowed with a mower conditioner you’ll have much better drying results it’ll usually go through your chopper a lot better too.

What we try to do is mow our rye, bale it up, have it ready for our fall when we have to put it on as mulch. Most years we’re not planting berries till June or July depending on how the season goes.

This video project was funded in part by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (USDA).

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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