Marigold for Cover Crop Mixes: Weed Control, Beneficial Insects & Nematode Management
Tour our marigold test plot with Keith Berns and Nathan Choat. See how marigolds produce heavy biomass, suppress weeds, attract beneficial insects, and may help manage soil nematodes. Learn why you might add marigolds to a diverse warm-season cover crop mix.
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0:00 [Music]
0:04 Molds are one of the flowers that we use in a showy flower mix and it's one that we're considering selling as a species.
0:12 By itself because of some unique properties that it has. It's one of the later blooming species. These blossoms have just really come out.
0:21 Would say in the last week and a half to two weeks most of them, there's still a lot of buds that are yet to pop here. A fairly tall, fairly robust.
0:29 Plant, so among flower species it's going to be one of the better ones for weed control and aggressive growing. Nathan, what have you noticed in these marigolds?
0:37 Plots this summer, yeah, so like you said, definitely one of the more taller ones. I mean, these marigold are waist high, where most of our other kind of cut.
0:44 Flowers would be considerably shorter so a lot more biomass production here. Held the weeds back decently well, not great. Overall the plants seem to
0:55 Tolerate our Nebraska summers really nicely. You know, a lot of folks plant some marigold in their gardens to repel unwanted insects, and a lot of times.
1:11 Going to put a lot of pounds into, but maybe you know you should be considering putting a quarter of a pound of maragolds in a diverse warm season cover.
1:19 Crop mix to take advantage of some of those beneficial insect properties that the marigold. One of the other things that marigolds are known for is.
1:27 Their ability to combat harmful nematodes in the soil. Oil it's got some pattiyal properties to it. We're still kind of studying how that works.
1:35 How I'm sure you know something this dense of a population is going to do quite a bit. You know, as a small part of a bigger mix, I don't know, but the diversity certainly is going to help. We love diversity and we love the colors. I mean, who doesn't like going out to their fields and seeing things like this? You can easily pick some, take them home to your wife, to your daughters, and score some bonus points that way. So again, Mar might be something that you would consider adding to one of your mixes.