Winter rye question

For the vegetable garden. Does the rye have to be a certain height before tilling in?
Thanks

No but you want to till it before the roots suck all the water out of the top soil. The roots really get huge when the plant spikes and you have a lot of organic matter to rot. Most guys on larger scale and conventional spray it so there is no chance of regrowth after tilling.

Bryce

Thanks

It depends on what you are trying to do. If you are following up as soon as you can with another crop you need to figure that it will take about 3-4 weeks for all that fresh green manure to break down sufficiently. For us grain rye can reach 6-8' by mid May and as it starts to form grain heads is when we would knock it down. But that is a lot of material to break down so you won't be ready to plant the next crop for a while.

Some are using rollers/crimpers to knock it down and kill it to serve as a mulch then direct seeding or transplanting into it. Been some research done on it down in auburn.

Yep, that would work since most of the biomass is not incorporated in the soil and locking up plant nutrients.

Surely you mean 6-8 inches not feet?

The USDA has been doing a multi year soil improvement study on the farm where I work. They’ve used rye and crimson clover as cover crop and rotate corn and soybeans each year. They roll it down and no till directly into it. I haven’t seen any of the soil data, but you can visually see the improvement in crop Health stand and yields

Try to see what the earthworm counts, I know some no-till farmers and their earthworm counts are off the chart.

The taller it gets the more organic matter you get out of it. Don't know if you seeded last fall or this spring but you want to be sure it all germinated before you till and plant your veggies or you'll have the coming up where you don't want it.

We use oats for our veggie garden, they reliably winter kill and don't hang on when you don't want it like rye can.

If you plant winter rye in the spring it will never spike or get tall. Yes winter rye will grow to 5 feet tall and when it spikes it grows a couple inches a day. Yes you get more organic matter as it grows but the older it gets the more cellulose you get and the slower the decomposition and you have more roots. I am betting that the USDA fields are spraying for weed control if they are no tilling corn into live winter rye stands. The rye will out compete the corn seedlings for sure. I agree that rye is a great winter cover crop. We are seeing a lot of dairy farmers here seeding winter rye in the fall, harvesting for forage in mid to late May and planting cornsilage and getting a very good total dry matter yield bump and a great place to put liquid manure twice in the same year.

Bryce