 So, I'm Holly Katron and I'm going to present on a SAIR grant that we completed introducing a new or a unique application of cover crops in a garden market operation. These are just a few farm pictures and my husband, Jim and I had a dream to own a farm. I grew up on the corner of a family farm up in Northern Indiana and we were for some reason all about it and kind of compelled to own it and sometimes I think people that farm are like driven to do it. It's like you have to do it. So that's how we felt. We were all about animals and just having fun on the farm and then healthy food. We have seven green kids and we like to teach them about food and farming and kind of some of those roots. So we purchased a 11 and a half acre farm in Lebanon, Indiana, which is in Boone County and we named it Hallelujah Acres Farm and here's just a picture of it. We wanted to, our first goal was to grow our own produce and be able to preserve that and kind of eat it year round and you can see our barn there but the first piece of land that we tilled was just in front of the barn on the side. It hadn't been tilled before. It was under grass and then you can see in the distance those, there were two pastures. There's two pastures on the farm that we ended up tilling up one of them. So probably about a half an acre total and then beyond that was a small woods and then to the left was a six acre hay field. So we purchased our little tractor and began to work our soil, which was the sandy loam type of soil. At that point the state of the soil was very clumpy. It retained water. It was really hard to plant seeds in it and then get the seeds to grow subsequently. So we began right away to use some winter cover crops. We used a mixture of crimson clover, daikon radish and oats and we also added some compost to the land. So after about two years that soil was easy to work. It was more porous, had a lot of earthworms in it and in many cases we didn't need to till. In that length of time we just saw this significant change in our soil. So do you use cover crops now is one of my questions and we've heard a lot about the benefits of it but we are like true believers in it. Healthy soil is critical to plant growth and a sustainable way to build the soil is through the use of these cover crops sown after the plants are harvested in the fall usually late summer to early fall and then incorporated in the spring. But one of the questions in our minds was can cover crops do more? So can we do more with it? So in the meantime having grown our own food in 2016 we became a market garden. Our goal was to provide healthy chemical free food to our community and in Boone County there weren't a lot of growers at that time so the timing was perfect for us to do this and we were well received in the community. We participated in two local farmers markets and this picture is a picture of the Whitestown farmers market which was relatively new at that time. We managed 25 CSAs. We provided some on-farm sales and some online sales also through one of the food hubs and we had fruit, vegetables, eggs. We also had some dairy goats so we did some herd shares offered those and then we had a really small mushroom operation because we learned about that and couldn't help but do it so we had that. And if you're not familiar with the Sare Grants I like to think of them as kind of an experiment so basically you get a grant and you're trying to solve a problem that you have on your farm. In this case our problem was a lot of weed pressure probably because what we tilled up was pasture and grass area. So when we were thinking about and learned about the Sare projects we thought about three different options and they're kind of listed here but there's controlling weeds through interceded cover crops but then we also thought effective succession planning on the soil would be a good one or control pass through companion planning. So we did go ahead and apply for that first one. The Sare grant really funds research and education projects and they keep all that knowledge in a database so that you can go and refer to that when you're looking for information. We applied for the farmer rancher grant and the programs run since 1988 and it funds projects and conducts outreach designed to improve agricultural systems. So our project specifics our goal was to measure the effectiveness of interceded cover crops for proactive weed prevention in a chemical free low till vegetable market operation and we received $7,500 was awarded to us. What we wanted to compare is the labor and cost to implement our prevention strategies, the weed pressure so kind of the results of our work, the labor to remove the weeds and then the impact of soil health of using the various methods. One of the tasks that we had to complete was choosing what cover crops we were going to use for the, I call it an experiment but for the project, okay. That piece was not as easy as it seemed it would be. You have to look at the cover crops and say do they use or produce the nutrients that that specific plant needs. Do they conserve or use soil moisture? And do they encourage or discourage insect pests? What is the length of the growth cycle of the cover crop compared to the actual vegetable crop? And then when do you plan it to have that impact on weed prevention? Here are two of my favorite resources and I noticed Lori had one of these up but this managing cover crops profitably is a SAIR handbook. And then the cover crop field guide we found was really helpful in doing this but it took a little while to analyze this which kind of surprised me. So our final decisions, we took several of our different crops so we took green peppers and decided that we would try some with the buckwheat as that inter-seeded cover crop. We would try some with paper mulch and some with hoeing and kind of compare and contrast those to see what our results were. Tomatoes we looked at crimson clover, inter-seeded, red plastic mulch or hoeing. Summer squash we wanted to try the icicle radishes and thought they could also be secondary crop, hoeing and nasturtiums. And then for the broccoli and onion we looked at crimson clover, plastic mulch for the onion only and then hoeing. Our process was to first submit some soil tests like the pre. Count the weed starts so if you look at the picture here, we built a box like one foot by one foot and in order to count the weed starts we would place the box on the ground and then count what was within it. So that gave us a way to compare you know how many weeds were there. So here the costs and time for installation, track our labor and then take all of our data and compare it and then be able to report that out. And then finally submit soil test post because one of our thoughts was that because we're using these cover crops we thought the soil might improve through that use. And you can see here the tracking sheet we used in our garden where we specified what crop and row and the date, what we did, the weed count at that time and then the time it took us. So for our results I'll just run through those quickly but we decided that for, hold on one second, that we would use the paper mulch for the green peppers or be very careful how we planted the buckwheat. So as you can see on the picture on the right, in the center there that actually is a green pepper. Okay, so we planted the buckwheat, it grew very quickly. We had kind of a coolish spraying so that green pepper plant did not grow quickly and we ended up with the buckwheat overshadowing the green pepper. So this is just to me a good illustration of picking the proper timing and maybe the proper cover crop. With tomatoes we're going to use the plastic mulch for the tomatoes. We did the interceding of the crimson clover and it just did not work out well for us. We had a lot of weed pressure so that may be some reason for that but overall it just didn't for us do the trick. For the summer squash we had a great success using those icicle radishes. We only used one plant planting and we would use multiple plantings in the future. We were able to use those as secondary crops and you could just plant those several times and take them out and that would work well. And then we did not have any luck with the nasturtiums. For some reason nasturtiums never grew well in our soil so we were going to go back to marigolds for some of the pest prevention. We did use white clover in the aisles and that was very successful in fixing nitrogen. So you can see the picture to the right the white dots are actually nitrogen that was fixed in the soil as a result of that white clover. So that was a good thing and that would make that nitrogen available to the plants. For broccoli and onion we will use the plastic mulch for the onions and the crimson clover worked well for the broccoli. Here's a chart that kind of illustrates some of our data. On the left hand side we're looking at weed count. The yellow is the hoeing, the green is the cover crop and the kind of the orange or red is the plastic mulch and you can see that the as far as weed count the plastic mulch was most effective but the cover crop was pretty close to it. In the center one the same thing with time and this did include the time also to remove the weed so it makes sense that it's pretty consistent with the weed count. And then finally on the right hand chart the cost to install the mulch was the plastic mulch was higher than the cost to plant the cover crops. So that's something to consider in your operation. We were able to hold a couple of grant, serigrant field days. They encouraged that you share your information that you received with your community and we had the Boone County Master Gardeners in our garden and hosted them to talk about this serigrant and we also worked with the Lebanon High School FFA group and they came out to the farm to learn about this.