Comparing Cover Crops for Winter Squash – Practical Cover Croppers

What does farmer-led research look like on a vegetable farm? Check out this video for a mid-season glimpse of a research project comparing hairy vetch and cereal rye cover crops before winter squash. Kate Edwards has been playing with methods to expand cover crop use in vegetable production on her Solon, IA farm, and she wanted to put some ideas to the test. Kate hypothesized that the vetch cover-cropped area would result in higher-yielding squash, but in previous years she had observed differences between weed pressure in squash on an area that had been cover cropped with vetch and an area that had been cover cropped with cereal rye.

For more details and results of this research trial, read the final research report.