Cover Crops for Vegetable Growers
Why
cover
crops?
Soil Health
Newsletter articles
Early summer
Mid and
late summer
Late summer legumes
Early fall
Fall
Early spring
Cover crop information
Annual
ryegrass
Buckwheat
Sudangrass
Mustard, spring
Mustard, fall (includes
radish, rape, kale)
Red
clover
Hairy vetch
Oats
Wheat (includes
spelt, triticale)
Rye
Research
Buckwheat
planting date
Buckwheat
field preparation
Fertility
Why use cover crops in vegetable rotations
Vegetable production involves many practices that compromise soil health, and therefore limit productivity. New York soils are less forgiving of such practices than many other regions. Therefore, leading vegetable growers want to overcome that barrier to success with practices that maintain soil health.
Some of management goals that farmer use cover crops for:
- Suppress weeds
- Protect soil from rain or runoff
- Improve soil aggregate stability
- Reduce surface crusting
- Add active organic matter to soil
- Break hardpan
- Fix nitrogen
- Scavenge soil nitrogen
- Suppress soil diseases and pests
This website is part of a project that enables growers to use a broader range of cover crops to improve soil health by biological means. It will complement the chemical (fungicide) and physical (tillage) methods that are being developed by our colleagues. It will also take advantage of the Cornell Soil Health Team’s new diagnostic tool for determining which aspects of soil health need improvement. Our goal is to provide a key component of an integrated management recommendation for growers.
