Re: Cover Crop

Posted by Chrisinmo on February 13, 2011 at 16:17:54 from (75.121.225.148):

In Reply to: Re: Cover Crop posted by Kornfused on February 13, 2011 at 12:17:19:

Canola= rapeseed. We will grow it here in southern MO for cover cropping/early spring forage. One year the kids and I let it go to seed in a small plot (about 24x40 ft) we got the seed heads out, threshed them and saved for our own seed. IIRC, we got more than 10 quarts of seed from that area. It will reseed abundantly, but it doesn't seem to maintain itself very well in our area from reseeding.

We plant it in late August or in September and let it grow during the fall. It will overwinter with little to no protection and green up in the spring. If it has no winter protection, a lot of it will winterkill, but if you plant it kind of thick, that shouldn't be a problem. We'll go out and harvest a mess of the leaves for our chickens early in the spring. We've tried grazing it with milk goats. The goats liked it fine, but the milk from it tasted AWFUL!

Another thing about rapeseed: it makes a good vegetable late in the fall and early in the spring. It tastes kind of like a cross between cabbage and chinese cabbage. We like to stir fry it, but also use it for salads until lettuce and spinach are ready. We sold it at the farmers market last spring under its chinese name 'yu choy' and people loved it!

We have used it with lots of success as a trap crop for the white cabbage butterflies. If there is a big enough area planted to it, the butterflies will lay most of their eggs there leaving our cabbage, broccoli, etc pretty much alone. When it looks like the egg laying has pretty much been done for one generation of those bugs, I'll fence it off and let the sheep graze it down and then till it in. (I always give the sheep access to regular pasture or hay at the same time to avoid bloat.) When I do this, we usually get a free ride on those bugs through the spring and into the summer. That is a big deal for us, since the veggies we sell at the farmers market are not sprayed.

The one thing about it that we have noticed is that it doesn't like the heat very well.

Christopher

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