High Diversity Mix: Season-Long Cover Crop Blend

0:00 [Music]

0:04 This is one of my favorite mixes. This is what we call our high diversity mix and it's called high diversity because it's got a lot of things in it. There's probably 30 to 40 different plant species in this.

0:17 Make this up for people who want the maximum amount of diversity without having to go through the smart mix calculator or make all those choices and pick all those things out. So we kind of have this packaged up for you. It's got cool season things, it's got warm.

0:30 Seasoned things, it's got legumes, it's got grasses, it's got brassicas, it's got broad leaves. It's really a good representation of just about everything that we have. And so we like this because this will fit just about any situation. We wouldn't want to plant it too late in.

0:46 The season to where the warm season things would die after 30 days and then it freezes, but the cool season things typically will grow pretty well in the heat. And in fact the brassicas look much better here than they do in our monoculture clots because

1:00 They're not growing with all that harsh sunlight. Nathan, why don't you just comment on some of the things that you see growing in here? Kind of, you know, we just stepped in here. What do you see just right at your feet here?

1:08 Yeah, so kind of starting at the top of the.

1:11 From the canopy you can see all of the sorghum, sedans, the millets. There's some sunflowers right here that kind of fill out the top. Some of our mustards are at this point in the season they've run their course, and so now they're just kind of mature plants standing as you go down a.

1:26 Layer then you start to see the buckwheat. There's a hairy vet that's climbing up in here vining around. They're really in prolific bloom right now too. Yeah, it looks really good for considering that we're in August now and it's hot. The vet looks great.

1:56 The stand. Yeah, it's just a ton of diversity and like you said those cool seasons in the microclimate of a bigger mix they do great down here filling in the canopy. There's no bare soil, there's no sunlight hitting the ground. We have plants at all the.

2:13 Different stages and almost no weed pressure because we've filled all the different niches. We've captured all the sunlight and weeds just aren't able to grow in something like this. So if you're looking for a huge amount of diversity, maybe you've got just a.

2:27 variety of different soil conditions you want plant this into you know this is really a pretty good option for you and I would say you would be safe planting this anytime after your last frost of the year and then probably 6 weeks before your first frost cuz again we

2:42 Want these warm season things to have a chance to express themselves but even when all of our warm season stuff dies here we've got plenty of cool season stuff that's just going to keep growing and growing so this is going to be the mix that can take you. I mean this might literally grow for six months in a lot of people's area so if this sounds like it's something that might work for you check out the high diversity mix.