Category Archives: Vegetables

Sometimes, less is more when it comes to cover crop residue

Snow is in the forecast for tomorrow in Maryland, and fields are neither drying out nor warming up quickly. Unlike a living cover or mulch that prevent the soil from drying in spring, low-residue winterkilled cover crops can facilitate faster … Continue reading

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A forage radish by any other name

Before I ever worked with forage radish as a cover crop, I knew it as the vegetable daikon, which has been grown by farmers in Asia for centuries. In fact, some of the characteristics of forage radish studied by researchers in the … Continue reading

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What about Brassica pests and diseases?

A very common question we receive about using forage radish as a cover crop in vegetable systems is: what about Brassica pests and diseases? The biggest pest of concern in the mid-Atlantic is harlequin bugs, and this post is devoted … Continue reading

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Cover crops change everything.

There was a nice summary of Joel Gruver’s 12 ways to manage cover crops in Farm Futures. Joel has been working on cover cropping in the Midwest at Western Illinois University, but got his start in  Maryland. One of his … Continue reading

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