Can You Successfully Kill Cover Crops with Tarps? [THE RESULTS MAY SURPRISE YOU]

[@cherrytreepermaculture756]

I'm on a similar scale. I just buzzed down an oat pea cover crop with a battery string trimmer and transplanted straight into the stubble- corn and squash, and planted beans with the corn. The oats were just making seeds so I'm hoping that cutting them kills them. Leaving the biomass on top is going to act as a straw type mulch. First time using a string trimmer on beds, it works great and it's nice that the string doesn't damage the drip line. Possibly the best of both worlds would be the string trimmer then the tarp,or possibly fabric with holes to transplant straight into. One other thing, the soil may not look any better in the cover cropped areas but it would be interesting to look under a microscope and see the microbial life. Thanks for the videos.

[@lesplatten515]

I' live in south Australia home of the brown snake after seeing your friend under the tarp I think I'll pass on this method. Love your work.

[@lindalu8565]

I'm digging how thorough you are.. thanks for the education.

[@joellmoreno6998]

This was extremely helpful and I really appreciate you taking the time to pursue those tough choices gardeners have to make when it comes taking on the risks of a new venture. Which, if you're like me I experience a lot of paralysis by analysis by the sheer amount of different ways there are to pursue a task in the garden. Even deciding which gardening system to try is enough to make someone go crazy cause there's Till, no-till, half-till (tilling the top surface), leaf mold, wood chip gardening, compost bed gardening with wood chip walkways. Nevertheless, specific videos like these really give me a straight-forward answer to a system which on my own would of taken years to figure out through trial and error. So, thank you for this priceless information.

[@richstone2627]

You do you and don't worry about anything else.

[@marcusrichards4488]

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[@marcusrichards4488]

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[@marcusrichards4488]

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[@marcusrichards4488]

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[@brockzalaker4069]

I have been thinking, knock down, quick hit with flame weeder (just to wilt and damage the rye), spray with compost tea to inoculate with microbes to accelerate break down, then cover with tarp. Idea is to weaken the grass, and inoculate it, then incubate the microbes to speed up their reproduction.

[@brianvictor9685]

Great tip on the used billboard tarps! Perfect for occultation and a cheaper, more durable option for any home tarp.

[@jimdixon7830]

I am in Georgia, I find a vast difference in what happens in a months time doing this in summer verses winter.

[@patrickasmawidjaja6531]

Hi Diego, great experiment. I agree with you that tarps over covercrops works better in wintertime. We use breatheable tarps in the winter over covercrops. But for this season we planned to sow between te covercrop rows and then crimp the covercrops right after sowing. This then function as mulch for the new seedlings. Whats your thought about this aproach?

[@patrickasmawidjaja6531]

Kind of a fukuoka style, but with an earthway (sorry) instead of seedboms

[@annburge291]

I loved the rethink conclusions. I wondered If crimped rolling and watering the area with compost tea before tarping may have broken down the plants faster? I personally would have moved a chicken tractor over the area and planted the new crop behind. I'm always looking for grass to supplement my chicken feed.

[@georgecarlin2656]

I think you'd like to eat your cake and have it too in a way (but who doesn't?), imo one can't do the whole cover crop cycle in a simple and easy way within 2 months, typically you sow them in the Fall and terminate at the end of Spring, that way you get tall stalks, lots of biomass and relatively easy kill. If you ever do it again try sowing only N fixing plants, I think your biochar from the soil would welcome some extra N, plus the speed of decomposition of plants is directly proportional to the amount of N you have in your soil (and moisture of course), I learned it the hard way with my clay soil.

[@thomasfuchs9451]

Our property is right next to a patch of large old trees. So every fall we get truckloads of leaves blown on our property. This year instead of raking and collecting it, I simply started piling it into garden beds and let the thick leave layer kill the current vegetation. Took a look after about 4 weeks and the grass underneith is dying nicely.

[@herrf2569]

I had similar results terminating a mix of rye, crimson clover and phacelia this spring. It just doesnt feel right too have no living root in the soil and the remnants where too chunky. next year I think I will mow my winter cover, make a 2 week silage of it while tarping the bed. mulch the silage with or without a tarp and plant my veggies then. for direct seed I ll do some minimal 2-5 centimeter tillage and mulch the silage later.

[@TheAdhdGardener]

I'm super glad I found your channel yo for real. I started my cover crop already but was wondering how to get it into the soil

[@Rymorin4]

I followed the same strategy by just tarping the native vegetation that was dense and 4ft tall fern and perennial grass. A whole summer of that pretty much killed everything. For a quick bed flip you should have a BCS with a flail mower attachment. You could use a powerful weed whacker or brushcutter like a stihl with a steel blade if no BCS. Then if you tarped that it would be good to rake off within 2 weeks I wager.

[@VastCNC]

Thinking back on your sled experiment, a thought just popped into my head of a manual roller crimper. Bed frames can be found free all the time as a source of angle iron, cut them down to a little over bed size, bolt them together back to back in a T shape, drill holes and loop some rope as a handle. Stomp and move forward. Meh. Just a thought.

[@barbarasimmons4158]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/Y6rSZZiQa92JqrM

[@bgschust]

This is really helpful even when it doesn't work because it shows us what alternatives to keep in consideration. The process of elimination is part of trial and error.

[@TheHivefl]

See here in FL the hot summer months are when we CANT grow. You can plant crotalarias of some kind like sun hemp, or sorghum, maybe cowpeas in June. Then tarp them in August and they are TOAST in less than 4 weeks.

[@DiegoFooter]

How do you knock down before tarping?

[@8082Speed]

Diego, have you tried tarping for a week then applying 4” of fresh horse manure on top with a trap for 3 weeks? It seems the added heat would break down the horse manure, the cover crop has “burned” down, and the bed would be ready to plant. Love what you’re doing. Thanks

[@8082Speed]

Tarp

[@rachel18809]

I agree with doing some physical work prior to putting the tarp on such as digging it in a little but not to much so that the rest can be broken down.

[@nathanlau3275]

Interesting to see your experiment over time, your initial thoughts, and your closing thoughts all in one video. Thanks for taking us on the journey with you. What if, instead of covering the crop with a tarp, you covered it with wood chips, or compost and then wood chips? Yes, it's more work than just covering with a tarp, but I think there would be a greater benefit to the soil. I guess it would depend on the crop, though. You couldn't do it with vetch or mustard. I think that if you leave a cover crop living, then once the crop goes to flower and seed, they'd pull all the nitrogen back out of their roots. So what plants would you consider for perpetual cover that would not have the nitrogen drawback?

[@charlespatterson8457]

I use the pile of wood chips method Pile everything next to the bed I’m useing etc

[@vonries]

You might want to take a lawnmower to it first. Haul the tops to the compost bin if you think you must, but I'm thinking a composting mower might do the work in place. Then you still have the roots in the soil as you originally wanted.

[@johnjude2685]

Tilting My garden is 50'X 50' First season of Tilting I removed 7 wheelbarrows of fist size stones. For 5 years I removed less wheelbarrows loads.and the average size rooks got a smaller average until 2 season the average rock removed was around 2 inches average and only 3 wheelbarrows loads. 6th. Year I started no tilt 7 th year no tilt and improve garden and loads of worms,and late season lots of spiders. Best green beans I've had noticed no bug damage and no bug killer all season. Yeah my experience seeing a change, Seems to the better. Thanks

[@john1boggity56]

Just buy bulk compost - I love the idea of cover crops and they certainly have their place, but flipping beds quickly is far more profitable and effective...keen to hear other views. This is a great posting btw - thank you Diego !!!

[@gava5271]

Might running the watering system on its regular cycle help with the composting under tarp? At a minimum it might dissuade the snake.

[@FubarKen]

What if you mowed with a mulching mower or chopped and dropped before tarping?

[@DiegoFooter]

I think it would for sure help speed things up.

[@mhkoo1]

@@DiegoFooter yeah, not only mulching would help but some inoculation with bacteria that break down the plants would help. So I suggest to mulch and then either sprinkle bacteria-rich soil or spray a compost tea. Temperature is also important. Do have an idea what temperatures you had during the experiment ?

[@DiegoFooter]

The temperature range was probably 45-85 at various points throughout the experiment. Obviously night temperatures were cooler and days were warm. I am not convinced that warmer temperatures would have helped that much because a lot of soil biology shuts down or slows down when the soil heats up.

[@infiniteadam7352]

Should have mowed it with the mulcher mower, smaller breaks down faster, next you need microbial life to digest the organic matter so use JMS method after mulch mower, and make Lab, Lactobacillus and spray that. Then cover, that should only take 2 to 4 weeks. Also remember that bacteria likes it hot as well, it looks like this bed was in the shade.

[@SimpleEarthSelfReliance]

Thanks sir I just bought a big 40m tarp to cover my Bermuda crap here in South Africa (South in the winter rainfall area) It seed,s to be working so far but I'm not sure it's warm enough to destroy the seeds due for germination in September Your trials seem positive enough I hope to see the same Bit disappointed at how long it takes

[@charlespatterson8457]

Thank you

[@rulerofthelight]

Add compost on top of cover crop to get the worms in there early and double up your tarps... Thats how I flip most of my beds, harvest, broadfork, compost, tarp, tarp. Takes 3 weeks in the peak of summer, 6 months through the winter.

[@Organicagain]

Thank you for the tip about billboard tarps. Non UV treated tarps are a disaster waiting to happen!

[@calebleger1343]

Yo. The billboard tarps! Thanks for the gem!

[@poodledaddles1091]

thanks

[@Mr_Grimm13]

I wonder what would have happened if you had sown worms under the tarp at the end of week one or two? Would the purchase of red wigglers instead of what you would spend on fertilizers for the next crop be good to improve the soil better? Would the tarp encourage them to stay on that area longer in a concentration? I do find you video's interesting as they are kind of the science guy for gardens.

[@2001lextalionis]

Thats an interesting idea. I would think we want to keep our worms happily devouring plant matter to produce the castings. I suppose if we have extra worms...

[@c3mac55]

You are lucky to have that beautiful California King Snake patrolling under those tarps!! Did you consider using a lawn mower set high to chop up the vegetation prior to occultation?

[@DiegoFooter]

I did, but I don't have a lawn mower, so that wasn't an option.

[@seattleareatom]

Clear plastic one sunny day on a turf will fry/kill/destroy the grass which looks like it was sprayed by Round Up.

[@masonkoller8962]

Hey Diego, outa curiosity, what is your job when your not gardening. I don’t have one because I’m still in school n’ all that. Just wondering 😃

[@gavinmatthews5618]

Flail mow/rotary mow then tarp

[@FOR8YESHUA]

Diego Footer + Have you done a trial of bringing in goats to eat cover crops, or even using your chickens? Have you considered white clover as a permanent cove crop and plant it transplants.?

[@DiegoFooter]

Goats - no. It would work, it just isn't something I am looking to do. Clover yes, that was last weeks video. :)

[@nancywebb6549]

I just use the cover crop as a mulch and plant into it.

[@richards5110]

It would take a *lot* of organic matter to make a real visual/textural impact on the soil. One square foot of the top layer of a garden bed is some 60-odd pounds. You'd need 0.6 pounds of actual organic matter (discount water weight of the plant) entering the soil after decomposition to add just 1% organic matter by weight to just that top layer. I doubt there was anywhere close to 0.6 lb/sqft dry weight in that stand of rye, and as stated, it hadn't even fully broken down.

[@KellyCrenshaw]

Was that a snake under the tarp at 19:07?

[@charlesabbethy490]

I feel the idea of terminating the crop sooner, then shredding the crop with a mower, and finally adding the tarp would create a fully digested cover crop in a timely manner.

[@VASI_LIKI]

One suggestion is that before covering the crop with the tarp, you could add the bacterial base that is made using the rice water, milk and mollases process (it takes 21 days to ferment in order to produce a 100Litre drum before using for Komposhing) ... when you use 100mL of this per 9Litres of water feeding it speeds up the process to 21 days. You also need to sprinkle some burnt wood ash and also some carbon. The process is in this video ... be patient it is around 8 minutes into the video. But this guy is brilliant, nice to see the whole video, he has inspired me. kzbin.info/www/bejne/sKS3pKGFpL2Bms0&feature=emb_logo

[@simmonsjn8]

is it bc you ran water on it, that the worms were not able to access it as much?

[@DanielHarvey1980]

leaving it as mulch entices worms to come up and eat. hence soil aeration.

[@maxfreeman3764]

The Rye is still there 7 weeks later because you left it rooted, all the rye is doing is trying to grow to reach the light. You were watering it and keeping it alive. This will have been happening for a while until the plant runs out of energy. Next time, uproot the rye before you tarp and it'll be long gone in 7 weeks

[@DiegoFooter]

I think there is some truth in that. The rye would have done that initially, but after no light it was clearly dead or on its way there after a few weeks. Uprooting might or might not speed it up, but that would defeat the whole purpose of killing it with the least amount of work principle that I was testing here.

[@maxfreeman3764]

@@DiegoFooter yeah I agree with you on the amount of work, it's more like speeding up decomposition and suppressing weeds on a chop and drop. Would cardboard and compost be enough for cover crops? If so it works great as you can plant in it right away as the cardboard has broken down by the time the plants need to root through it and its amazing for the soil. Compost dressing and the decomposed cover crops would be lush

[@DiegoFooter]

It would work, but it is a massive amount of inputs to have stored on site. I am trying to move towards a system that uses less compost and less total inputs.

[@Rymorin4]

LOL diego with the dad vibes on that gucci mane

[@cherrytreepermaculture756]

Something you said at the end about a perpetual cover crop. I've been intrigued for a while by Elaine Ingham's idea for Market gardeners, to have a low growing, multi species polyculture cover crop. Haven't tried it but she had a list of crops at one time on her website sorted by climate.

[@ajb.822]

The no-till growers channel here on YT may have info on that. Farmer Jesse has talked about his experiences with living mulches & pathways cover crops in some videos.

[@backwoodsbaby9729]

What if the cover crop didnt decompose quickly because you used a uv blocking plastic??? What if you used some clear painters plastic tarp?

[@DiegoFooter]

Clear plastic won't kill a crop, it will keep growing.

[@TheNewMediaoftheDawn]

100% it is beneficial to the soil, just at a slow rate due.to the small layer of biomass there... It would take 5-10 years of doing that to notice a difference visually. If you have extra beds it’s a good method or winter time, but not with limited space...

[@ChristopherPisz]

Instead of taking the bed out of production for 2 months, why not cover it with cardboard which will degrade, and then throw on compost, plant into the compost, and grow while the cover crop breaks down? i.e the "no-dig" method on top of the cover crops. Amazon boxes are everywhere. I covered my 2000sqft backyard with them and am loading compost on top. Working well in my caliche soil so far.

[@CairnOfDunnCroftPermaculture]

I'd pay extra for porn star tarps! Sadly we don't get too many porn billboards in the Scottish Highlands.

[@antmen5435]

You should see if weight help

[@inigomontoya8943]

If you had the option you could fence livestock on it like goats and in a short amount of time it would be nothing but poop

[@nirmal6362]

Tarps slowly degrade with age and heat it exposed to - therefore u go for hay, or rolling cover crops just like farmers do at larger scale.

[@peaceandlove5214]

I love cowpeas only.

[@codysmith605]

Tarps work awesome for killing rye only takes two weeks in the summer.

[@DiegoFooter]

What's left of the rye when you pull the tarp up?

[@waylonbreaux2366]

We use tarps on the farm and they work great

[@DiegoFooter]

Meaning what? What are you starting with and ending up with that is great? I am wondering if there is something I could do differently.

[@kevina1084]

At 19:01 is that a snake?

[@cqammaz53]

1 month

[@MartinaSchoppe]

The tarp killed the cover crop, so it did work. And it probably did not take 7 weeks to kill it. As soon as it was killed, you could have pulled the tarp of and planted the beds, leaving the killed cover crop on the beds. As you probably plant tomatos individualy by hand, it does not matter, if plant residue was still there - it wood even be good. Because. Mulch...

[@DiegoFooter]

That is a fair point, but I was going for complete removal not just kill. As in could the soil ecosystem remove it all down to clean bed.

[@jimbrockmann9756]

Rent a walk behind mower for two hours, not that costly.

[@guyranting]

Dude there's a snake at 19:18

[@DiegoFooter]

Yes, a nice one.

[@wilburnprice9886]

It killed the cover crop, that was the objective. Soil improvement takes longer.

[@richstone2627]

Ain't nobody got time for that.

[@taylorkuhla4327]

If your end goal is increasing soil life, you are doing the opposite by laying down plastic. There are studies showing that even when you cover soil with landscape fabric where water can pass through, you are still suffocating the microbes. So a tarp would be even worse. Wood chips is the only effective barrier that lets the microbes breathe. And you can put a foot of them down. Sure, it's labor intensive, but the best way is not necessarily the fastest or easiest way. Also, the advancing eco agriculture channel has a video about a guy saying if the purpose of the cover crops is to feed/multiply microbes via exudates, you might as well toss sugar into the soil, because that's what exudates are providing them. But tossing in sugar is much faster - so if you are after speed, do that. After hearing that, I'm not sure that KNF works because of all fancy recipes and nutrients of the inputs or just because most of the inputs are full of sugar.

[@DiegoFooter]

Why does soil covered by anything always look better and seem more active then the surrounding soil then? It's not an airtight seal so I don't think microbes are being suffocated. I would be interested in reading studies on that. Can you link to them?

[@taylorkuhla4327]

​@@DiegoFooter I haven't read the studies myself. I was in a lecture by Dr. Linda Chalker-Scott and she referenced the studies. She showed graphs comparing wood chips, fabric, and a couple other materials in relation to something like (or revealing) microbe activity. The master gardener community doesn't talk about anything without science behind it and she has some major credentials. I would reach out to her and even interview her if you can. She dispels a ton of myths, for example, no one on KZbin knows how to properly plant a tree. :)

[@DiegoFooter]

Thanks!

[@svelanikolova5776]

The tarp is useless. The water has to go in the soil in yiur mulch

[@2ndSprings]

Turn the tarp over.... That'll change everything ;-)

[@Big_Guwop713]

GUCCCI!!!

[@Matthy5k]

Is nobody going to mention the snake? Perhaps you need a tarp that lets some oxygen in.