MSU Extension MI Ag Ideas to Grow With

I just want to welcome everyone to this afternoon session of MI Ag Ideas to Grow With, where we're going to be talking about soil health for beginning farmers. And we're really excited to have Vicki Morrone with us. Excellent, thank you very much and thanks for joining us today. I hope you find it beneficial to you and your farming practices. I'm Vicki Morrone an, as Mariel indicated, and I work with organic farmers and begetting farmers. Okay. What is soil health? That's such an abstract word. Well, it is a form of soil conservation. Maybe not on the little ones, but it's definitely important to consider when you're farming because soil health is like your long term investment there now and the years to come as you or as you share your farm with others. Soil health is divided into three themes or areas. The physical aspects, the chemical aspects, and the biological aspects. Together, they make up soil health. They build on each other. They complement each other. When you have all three and sink, you'll have better soil, you'll have stronger soil soil that supports crop growth in times of even difficult growing periods like drought or heavy rains. What is soil health? Well, from a farmer's perspective, it's the management to create a good environment for the crops to grow. But an ecologist would see more on the reducing toxins and nutrient losses in the soil so that the water system is clean and safe. A biologist would be focusing on the soil microbes growing and reproducing, and the soil microbes that are beneficial to crops that comes through proper management. You can see it's all about managing the soil to support crops, to support the ecology and the biology of the soil microbes. So what can you do to know which way to go? Which management practices? There's so many management practices, you hear so many things. There's advertisements. If you watch podcasts or Youtubes on soil health, get all these ads and like, what's true? What's the right way? Well, the best approach for you is to make observations of your own. Soil is on a seasonal basis. As the snow is melting, the soil is thawing right now. Maybe it'll freeze tomorrow. Who knows? It is Michigan, but you want to look at it before you plant and after you plant. As the soil freezes, as the heavy rains come down, watch the soil, see what's happening. We have health cards and even a Land PPS app that guide you through these observations. They help you to understand the implications of your texture of your slope, of what you have on the soil weeds as well as crops. These links to the resources are in the QR code and link that Mal will share toward the end of the program, but feel free to use that. And it'll be a link folder drive that will support lots of activity around cover crops. And so health soil testing. 58% of you already have taken your soil test. Hopefully you do it more than once, But at least you have a baseline of understanding about your soil in terms of nutrients availability, in terms of the ph. That's seven is neutral, right? And 8910, that's basic. And 54 or five is acidic. 45 is good if only if you're growing blueberries. But beyond that, you want to shoot for around 6.87 for your ph. Take a soil tests about every two or three years and collect soil samples from areas that are iffy. You're like, what's going on over there? That corner, that's so bizarre. Everything looks good except there. Take a separate soil sample, do your own on farm trials. If you see a spot that's questionable or you're not sure what's going on, plant something and you think that might help you detect what's going on. Is it a hard pan, meaning that the roots don't grow well, or is it a variety thing that you maybe need to switch varieties. Let me move this thing if I can. The soil physical aspects, the issues that you typically face are things like erosion. That's the movement of soil compaction. That's when the soil is pushed down at, below the surface or even on the surface. Difficulty for the plants to grow, for the roots to enter on the surface, it's compaction on the surface. It's called crust that makes it difficult for the little seeds to germinate, to push their heads through a low organic matter. That's more of a long term challenge to work with. And it's little by little, as long as you're adding some organic matter every year and minimizing your tillage as much as you can. What's realistic? You'll build organic matter. Now note that we have sandy soil and clay soil and there's stuff in between, but it has some of both. In sandy soil, it's most difficult to increase your organic matter. Those particles are large, they don't hold water as well. It makes it difficult for the organic matter to stick on to the particles and create organic matter. But in clay, you have a better chance of building your organic matter. Sure, clay has its issues in terms of water, like up here, and erosions. It's more likely to erode, but you can build your organic matter easily because those are small particles and the organic matter can adhere to the particles and build what we call soil aggregates. Those are, I think of them as knights in shining armor. You have the organic matter in the middle and it's protected by the aggregate that surrounds the organic matter. That's the armor that protects it. But if we till it too much, if we work the soil too much, we break up those aggregates and we lose that organic matter. Drainage can be a challenge in our spring times. Here in Michigan, we often get heavy rains that makes it very difficult to plant. Whereas a sandy soil may typically drain faster. Whereas a clay soil, it could hold water a bit too long, making it difficult. But if you keep your soil covered with things like cover crops, it'll help to dry the soil out. The roots will go deeper to draw in water and to hold onto those nutrients that may have been left over from the previous year. Soil issues that you have to deal with. You see the erosion over here on the upper left. It's moving the soil and you can see this is a really bad situation. Obviously There's a lot of sandy soil and they've perhaps put a lot of topsoil on and you can't ever change your soil texture Once mother nature has given you a sandy loam, you have a sandy loam, It's up to you to figure out how to manage it the best you can. And then compaction from repeated, constant tillage, whether it's through a rototiller small tractor. That's why the less movement of soil, the better things are. This is the crusting, I was referring to rains, push the soil and make a crust. I call it brownie soil. You know, a good brownie when it's all creakly on top. That's what a really compacted soil with crusting looks like. That's not a good thing. It's good for the brownies, but not good for the soil. Soil organic matter, like I mentioned, you have to build it slowly, but each year add something and try to add diverse things at different times. Not just only in the fall, but microbes, the bacteria and fungal are looking for foods at different times because they differ. Just like us, there's different populations, different species, and flooding can be a real challenge in the springtime here or any time. And with climate change, we're probably prone to more frequent, extreme weather, such as heavy rains. And by keeping your soil covered, planting things with deep roots, and even growing on ridges, growing your plants on ridges will help. All of this feeds the soil food web. Here you see we have bacteria, we have good bacteria, and antagonistic or bad bacteria, we have nematodes. Those are the common term is eel worms. They're microscopic. They can be root feeders which we don't want, or they can be predators, means they attack other nematodes. Then nematodes can even be fungal and bacterial feeders, They can feed on bad bacteria and fungi. We have good guys and bad guys at all sense, but good guys tend to like. Organic matter that is fresher, more diverse. We've even found that beneficial bacteria tend to like more grass like covers like rye, rye oats. Whereas the fungal organisms like the broad leaves like mustards. And you see that diversity is important. When you put your plants out, don't just buy a bag of rye and say, okay, I've got my cover crop, I'm all done. Try it, start out with rye, and work your way up to the diverse chain of cover crops. Of course, beyond the physical aspects of the soil are the chemical needs of chemical needs to grow a healthy plant. You see here, this is everything that a plant needs from carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, which are contained in the air and water. We're not dependent on the soil for that, but we are dependent on the soil for the macro nutrients which is nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. The nutrients called secondary because you need some, but you don't need as much as the primary micronutrients and that's sulfur, Calcium, magnesium, then the micronutrients you need just a little bit. It usually impacts the trees, for fruit trees, the number of flowers that are developed, in terms of how large the fruit are, whether it's tomatoes or whether it's apples, but all of that comes from the soil. So it's up to us as good tenets of our soil farmers to make sure that the soil is supplied with healthy sources of these nutrients. I think a very nice visual to show the NPK we need the most of the next size bubbles are the secondary nutrients that we need, each of them contribute to plant development in different ways. It's not like just, oh, I've got nutrients. This calcium is good for my tomatoes and it reduces blossom, rot. That, and good irrigation combined. You won't have blossom and rot. You say well how do I know what deficiencies that I have? 11 Tool is looking at the leaves and here we see a poster of corn leaves. Corn is the most demonstrative plant to show nutrient deficiencies. I suggest sometimes for farmers to grow a few corn plants, even if they're not trying to produce corn, because we all know you need a block of corn, quite if you don't have a big enough garden, you might not grow it. You need a block of corn so it can pollinate. But if you grow four or five plants, just for the sake of detecting nutrients or disease, that can be helpful. Of course, you can always have leaf tissue analysis done at a lab. If you have a crop that's really showing problems, we have our MSU extension, Michigan State University extension. All land grant universities have an extension office. So if you're not from Michigan, you can use their extension system within your state and they can guide you through the process of identifying nutrient, nutrient deficiencies and diseases. The soil aspects of the physical are, as we see, the flooding and the hard pan. The hard pan is a plow pan. It's when you have too much tillage at the same depth. But this is what you're shooting for. If you dug down, took 18 " and saw roots like this, you can smile. You know that you're doing a good job. Here are some options to improve your soil. Feed the good guys in the soil. How do you feed them? Through diverse organic matter options, compost, manure, different types of cover crops. If you can't grow cover crops because your garden is too small, you can bring things in like alfalfa and turn that into the soil. You can bring alfalfa and mix it with an oat straw that you're getting. Some straw is more carbon than nitrogen, but you put them together in the soil after the last harvest of your crop. It'll help provide a variety of foods just like us. We like variety. These practices will not only support healthy soil but will also provide plant nutrients for your crops. Just like us, we want a diverse options. We don't want just rice every day. We want a little bit of everything. Rice, lantro corn, tomatoes, a little sour cream to make it really yummy. Just like the soil microbes, they want a diverse diet. They like variety supporting microbes through diversity. Whether we're growing clovers, this is a crimson clover, or if we're growing a nice mixture of oats mixed with a mustard. That's beautiful because oats will win, kill, meaning that when we get a heavy frost, they'll die and lay a mat like a nice mulch. Sometimes mustards will just depending on our winter, probably not this winter, but some other winters in Michigan will definitely kill the mustards and then adding compost it away. We want the diversity and we don't want just one thing. It might be easier, but you're not going to get the diversity of soil microbes to do their job. Then manure, you can add poultry manure. Remember, every animal manure is a little bit different, so take that into consideration when you're adding inputs. But the bottom line is supporting soil microbes by providing a diverse diet. Cover crops are a plant that you grow when other crops are not growing and some farmers try to grow in between the rows. And those with larger farms do things like ridge tillage, Meaning they grow a field of cover crops and they take a tiller, they clean the rows on crop plants that there for money are going to grow. That's not always feasible with smaller farms, especially if you're doing a lot of hand labor. But if you have wide enough rows, you could plant in between and mow them to keep them in check, you can plant them in between. Say you're going to grow some salad greens in the spring, and then you're going to grow cabbage and broccoli in the fall. Well, maybe you have a nice window there, so let's take a look. We have summer we could grow some sudan grass. Grass is really tall. Just be careful because if you're trying to manage it with your equipment to weed whipper or a mower or by hand, you want to maybe mow it a few times so that it doesn't get out of control. Buckwheat is a beautiful crop for not only the soil bringing up some phosphorus because it's beautiful, deep roots, but also its flowers are really good for the pollinators, for the beneficial insects. And then, no, I've put some asterisk beside some of these and those are the crops that will winter kill, meaning when you get heavy frost, they die. That can be good for organic farmers as well as farmers who are looking for reduction in herbicides because you can just let mother nature freeze them, reported dradishes, dicot, radish. It's almost like they melt into the soil. It's beautiful and they leave nice chattels for water to trickle down and help your drainage. As well as the roots of all these cover crops contribute to the soil in terms of penetration. The physical, in terms of feeding the biology, the soil microbes. As the microbes feed, they release the nutrients, the chemical You see ser crops contribute to all three principles of soil health. The summer you can grow forage, radish and mustards. Spring will grow well in the spring and even the summer. Sudan grass though, likes it warmer and it will not produce the seed. In the Northern part of the US, buckwheat will produce the seed. If you don't mind, you might get some volunteers. But if you do mind, make sure you cut it before the flowering stage, then you can plant oats in the early fall. You want to remember winter kills. So you want to have enough growth before the heavy frost hits to make it worth all your effort and money to invest in that cover crop. Cereal rye is the most forgiving. It's the Michigan's friend for cover crop, it's the beginners cover crop you grow. It'll grow well in early fall, it'll grow well in the fall. There are even farmers who are planting it now, calling frost seeding. It's the most forgiving and it's the best thing to try if you've never done a cover crop. And then you could also grow different clovers and hairy vetch for providing nutrients to the soil and feeding the microbes. Here's a nice diagram of the benefits. You can see so many benefits. The soil structure, we talked about those aggregates, we wanted to help with the aggregates. Build those aggregates for orgetic matter, but also provide more. Pathways for your plant roots to grow easily and to get nutrients and then to increase the organic matter. The pest management, especially things like the mustards, they've shown nematodes suppression, plant disease suppression, all cover crops. Anything growing will be competition to weeds. If you have that Sorgum Sudan grass that I showed a little bit ago, its density blocks out any weed and we tell people if they have thistles or the really troublesome semi perennial weeds. Circumstantgrass is your ticket plant. It mow it a couple of times and then let the leaves rest on top of the soil. In your final one, cut it, let it dry, and then turn it into the soil. All of these contribute to environmental quality, reduce nitrogen leaching. That means it's holding on to the nitrogen that was left over from a previous crop and not letting it go into the groundwater. It's covering the soil so that when the rains come in, heavy rain or the winds, it's not blowing away your beautiful top straw that you're working so hard to create, Then reducing the runoff. If you're a slope or any kind of raised area, it reduces that runoff. Adding manure, compost is another approach. Just note that raw manure, meaning right from the stall to the field, can be dangerous. The only time you would want to apply that is in the fall. Because if you apply it right before you plant or while you're planting, it can burn young plants, it's so hot, the nitrogen can cook the roots Manure is your source and you're not able to make compost. Let it sit for at least six months before you apply it. Then please do understand food safety when you're using manure products. And Mariel is a resident expert online and she can answer questions during Q and A which will be toward the end. Note, compost is an aged manure mixed with other organic materials like kitchen waste or leaves and grass. But it's heated and aged and that makes it less volatile or less able to bird your plants. And you can even use it as a side dressing while the plants are growing. And the typical rate you say, well, how much do I apply? About a half a cubic yard per 100 foot row, if your row is five feet wide. And that's using the typical recommendation of one to two tons to the acre. And I'm making an assumption, maybe it's wrong, but I'm assuming that you're mostly working on square feet versus acres. But if you're working at acres, there's the approach to, and then you want to protect the physical structure of your soil, reducing that erosion, reducing that compaction till your soil, only when needed. But you still, of course, have to manage your weeds. So it's a trade off, 50, 50. Here you want to seek alternatives to rototilling. Rototiller is the most common equipment use on a small garden, but you want to reduce that as much as possible and find alternative ways to manage your soil. Then include living and dry mulches to reduce weeds that can serve moisture. And of course, if you're reducing weeds, you reduce the need to till. But also by keeping your soil covered, you're reducing that compaction that can come from rainfall. Mulch is a nice approach to really benefiting the soil and your plants. Smart tillage to loosen your soil but not overwork it. There's the standing broad fork that loosens the soil and so you push it in, you wiggle it back and forth, and you lift it up and then go to the next 6 " or 8 " of whatever amount of soil that was moved from the wiggling of your broad fork. I know a lot of market gardeners have BCS, the roto tillers, they have a power harrow. Say you used the tiller at the beginning of the season. In between, you're rotating first you have your lettuces, and then you're going to be planting tomatoes, for example. Well, you don't have to go through a rototill again. You can use a power harrow. And the power harrow moves soil, but moves it this way, whereas the rototilar goes this way. And so you see that way. What am I doing? I'm scraping against the soil, causing compaction. Whereas if I'm going this way, I'm just moving the soil, loosening it up, aerating it so that the new seeds or transplants can grow easier. It tills it, and then this little roller here presses it down to make a nice seed bed. If you should happen to live on a slope land, you can do contour planting and that's going against the slope you're planting With the curve of the slope, you can see if it rained. The rain comes in and starts washing down, but it's caught by the contour by the plants growing against the flow of the water down the hill. You reduce your loss of soil and gullying, I don't know if you've ever seen after a heavy rainfall, you'll see a little river banks in between your rows because of the heavy rains. But by contra plow, you really slowed down the water movement. Raised beds are also help in terms of slowing the water down. We have resources, we have lots of resources for you to glean from. Here is the QR code, if you want to take a picture of that, I'll leave that up for a while. Mail will also put the link in the chat you can grab and use at whatever today or any time it's a folder. I'm maintaining and keeping it accessible to anybody who has the link of all these. I may be adding some more as I discover them, but I've checked the links that they work. You can see I've put in a lot of information there and this is just about half of them. If I made it many smaller, you wouldn't be able to read them. But there's one that tells you what to expect in terms of the nitrogen return based on which cover crops you grew. And I think that's very helpful because many farmers forget to give the cover crop a bit of credit of how much nitrogen that they apply. Remember, if you apply nitrogen source like a legiume, you're going to get even more out of your plants to contribute to the soil in terms of nitrogen and as well as all the other benefits in terms of roots. The cover crop selector tool here is a nice way to go look at the options that are available in terms of cover crops. You put in your county and within Michigan, several midwest states, as well as Michigan. And then you put in the crop, the cash crop that you're going to be growing. Sadly, right now, they only have the row crop cover crop selection tool, but I would recommend that you put in corn as you're selected because it's a field crop as well. And just go from there. And remember that the growing period for corn would be from mid May to September. Think of it that way when you're putting in your objectives. Why are you growing a cover crop? Because you have poor drainage. Because you wanted to hold onto the nitrogen and reduce the leaching, because you want to build organic matter, because you wanted to provide nitrogen like through a legum. Those are all potential reasons, but you identify in this tool which options are the most important to you. Then it shows a window of time that is actually available. What I have enough time, I think I'm going to show you. I'm going to get out of this and I will go to the decision tool, Uber Crop Decision Tool is all you have to put in. It comes right up. You see, it tells us that the Roe crop tool is available, but vegetables say they're working on it. Let's hope so. Okay. We're going to select our state, we're going to go to Michigan. Select a county, I'm in county. Look at all the goals we have to choose from erosion fighter, good grazing. If you're doing some even chickens, they graze lasting residue, meaning I need a nice mulch. I'm growing pumpkins I want to stick. After I finish the cover crop, I wanted to stick around so that my pumpkins grow on it and they are nice and clean for the market. I want a nitrogen scavenger. I don't want to lose that nitrogen. I'm going to add another goal. I want to have lasting residue because I'm, I'm going to winter squash. All right. The cover crop type option. Display cover crop group. Cover crops type A. See here I can add the cash crop. And we're going to go with corn for grain, seed would be a longer duration, whereas silage would be shorter duration. Maybe we'll go silage because grain would have to dry quite a bit. Si I would chopping it green, then they ferment it for the animals. We'll pretend we're growing corn. They put in seasoned fish. That's new. See Vicki, right? We're going to grow some warm season vegetables. I'm growing tomatoes, and I'm going to plant them on January, June 1. I'm getting hopeful here weekend. That's what I do on my weekends. Like the harvest date? Yeah. Well, who knows when they're ready. Right. Let's say August. Remember? This would be your last harvest date. So that means it's the window of when your field is clear. I'm going to hope Mother nature holds off on her frost till September 30. All right. Now we say fine cover crops. Look what do we have? We have rye, winter cereal grass. That's the tall one I mentioned. When can we plant grass? It says I can plant it June through August, but that's what my crop is, right? So I can plant it right after my crop, and I would be able to let it grow for a little bit. But reliable establishment is right when I'm growing my crop. Probably not a good idea, but look at this one. This is good alfalfa, huh? Now falfa, remember as a perennial or a semi per, it'll keep growing. It may be a little challenging for me to make sure it's nice and dry and dead before I plant my tomatoes. That might not be such a great options. Now, oats, there we go. It'll form a nice matt. It's good for the soil, has beautiful roots. I would go with oats. If you get choices like this, you're like, what the heck? How am I going to decide? Let's see what this says. It wants me to go to this. Links to information on using cover crops in the mission can be found at this, they give us a link. They talk about the different cover crops so you can get a little bit of information if it's still not adequate, which I don't see much here on oats. I would Google and look for land grant university descriptions as well as within your references, you have the book, Growing Cover Crops Profitably by Sa. That is an excellent book and it's the whole book as a PF, so you don't have to be messing around with downloading it. And it gives good descriptions as well as nice timetables to look at what different options are available beyond your cover crops. Select this select tool combined with that book. You'll have no problems finding a cover crop that works for you. Then in terms of compost, if you get compost from you purchase it, ask them for the test results. If they're a good facility, they'll be able to provide that to you. If you are planning to be certified organic or certified organic, you will definitely have to have that. Or if you're saying this company is, it looks good, but I'm not so sure. I want to make sure you can have that compost tested yourself, just like you're doing a soil sample. And have it tested by AN L or any other soil lab that you find useful to you. And L is the lab that Michigan State University is using now. They've done away with their own lab testing and they do the interpretation. With that, I think I'd like to go ahead and open it up to questions. Hopefully you have some, if you have questions about the resources, about how to do something, about other point that you didn't quite understand what the heck I was talking about anything. There's some in the chat, Vicki, I can read those two. Okay. Lk is asking how much sloping angle percent with a patch should cause concern then. Is puddling of runoff the main determiner? Yes, puddling and runoff is the absolute determiner for that. And then that's why your observations are critical. And they say 7% slope. But. How are you going to be able to go out and measure that? But I would say say you left the drip tape or the soaker hose on your field, you forgot it overnight, and you see water all the way at the bottom of your field. I would say that would justify doing it on a contour if contour is just not feasible because that shape at least race beds in some places they call those Buns, UNDS. They're meant specifically to hold onto the soil and keep water from across the field. Okay, this next one is just some appreciation from Michelle. Thank you. A wonderful presentation. So much valuable information and appreciating the tip to use corn in the cover crop tool, but now we see they have vegetables too, so That's cool. Yeah. The next one was the question for me actually about that cover crop tool is the planting date then your transplant date if you're starting seeds indoors in your example. Okay. Yep, yep, yep. So planting date would be the date that you start your seed, and if that's indoors, so be it. And transplant date is the date you take it from your indoors under your lights out in your garden, and don't forget to harden off your plants, right? You want a week, ten days of hardening off. That means that in the daytime you put the transplants out. You let them get used to the outdoor temperatures and the sunlight. And so it's a little by little rather than all. So I usually go out about five days just during the day and bringing them in at night. And the last couple days, unless I watch my app for weather, unless there's going to be a frost, I'll put them out overnight. And there's been times when I'm like they said, it wasn't that cold, but it's getting below 40. I'm going to go out and bring my plants in. So, you know, go out my pajamas and bring my plants in because I've worked hard to grow those nice transplants. I don't want to lose them. But another way to harden off your transplants is a fan. Putting a fan by them to make them thicken up the stems so that when they are out in mother nature and it's windy, they're a little more resilient. You go back to the cover crop tool for a second because it looked like you put in June 1 for the planting date. I just wanted to see what that looks like again. Um, sorry, you have to go all the way. I was a little confused kind of about the planting date versus when you put in when you plant the cover crop. I don't know if anyone else was either. Okay. Let's good. All right. All right. I believe in Minnesota, I don't know where this is. All right. You want to Rosian Fighter and a soil builder if you can do both a fighter and a builder. All right. Display cover crop type. All right. The first part of the bar then is the planting date for the cover crop. Yeah, that's when you planted period, Reliable time that you can establish alfalfa will establish well, in this example from April 1 to May 1 and it's excellent. Hey, they got their codes mixed up here. We didn't have yellow in the last one. Yeah, the Golf Fulfillment. Golf Fulfillment is over here. Okay. And this is it would be a yeah. It doesn't make sense, does it? Here. This makes it a risk of freezing. But it's not going to risk freezing when it's warmer, right? You're right, the goofed up. Well, it's time to go back to the Midwest Cover Crop Council. Let them know they go. Thanks for going back to that Kiah. We have another question. How can no till work for acreage had to change from Grandpa's methods? Like the idea of not disturbing the microbiome. And would would it be safe to assume that manure would be a key factor in that or is there some other strategy use? No till their goal is to use Yeah, lots of acreage. Okay. For lots of acreage, no till they typically do is use herbicides. And one approach to one other approach besides herbicides is a crimper, A roller crimper. And roller crimper was invented by Ro Dale and it It does not disturb the soil. Crypt does not work here. For a larger scale, they come in various, this is quite small, one at six feet, but you see the ridges on this sharp and you put this in the front of the tractor and you, whether it's oats or what, it's usually a cereal grain. And you do that when it's about 20% flowering of the grain. Rather than tilling it. You're not breaking into the soil surface, you're just plugging it down and you have this nice mat of mulch that you can use a seed drill and then plant into it. A seed drill is your friend, if you're going no till, a crimper is the alternative to tillage. Now I, an organic farm over in the thumb has shown that even Harry, if you recall what Harry Vetch looks like as a cover crop can be crimped. It's just a matter of timing. Just like any tool, you have to consider the weather, if it's appropriate. With crimping, you have to determine at the right the cover crop is at the right stage. You want it to be mature. If it's too mature, it won't die, it'll come back. But if it's putting its energy into the flowers, it's the right time to kill it. Which is you're cripping it. So you're cripping, knocking it over and bending it. And so you're breaking it. So you want it to be brittle enough that it breaks the stem. I'm just looking for the Harry bench. I'll put this up anyway. This is Harry right here. It's a legume. It's the best nitrogen fixer of all the legumes that grow well in the Northern Midwest area, it produces lots of nitrogen. The wheat farmers have challenges with it because if it goes to the seed of hay, vet can be a contaminant in the wheat grain that's important for the, for those that might be producing a wheat. Okay. If I didn't answer your question, feel free to open up your mic or put in a follow off in the chat, please. Is there any other questions? I don't see any right now. Okay. All right. So thank you for all the resources and information. So if you want to share in the chat, how does anybody make their own compost? Then if you do, do you test, do you ever test it to see what you're adding to your soil? Yes or no? Looks like people are making compost but haven't tested it. Yeah, that might be something that you want to do to see just what you're adding to your soil. You're always adding orgetic matter, which is great. It's really valuable, but it would be good to know what you're contributing. Then I guess it would depend if you test it. Are you using typically the same ingredients? For example, if you add manure, Are you always using chicken and manure? Or if you add your carbon source, Are you always using dry oak leaves? Oak leaves are tanny. They're more acidic than say, a maple leaf. That's why I ask. It would be interesting for you to know what you're adding to your soil so that when you have issues, when you still think the plants look as good as they should, you have somewhere to go, you know which way to turn ki. What tests do you recommend for testing compost? Just a regular soil test. Nl or All the soil labs, they have a test just specifically for compost. So you indicate that. And when you do a soil test, you make sure you get at least ten subsamples. Take a bucket and either a trough, or if you have a soil probe go through the field, do a zigzag or a W, because you want something from the interior and the exterior, and across the field, you're doing a sample of the whole field. And then you mix that together, pull the roots out, pull the rocks out, and then you take a bag, ziplock bag of about a The court size bag. And you send it off to your soil testing, if that's for your field. And then you get to indicate what crop you're going to be growing in your location, and they give you recommendations based on that. Then in terms of compost, make sure that you take it from the compost pile that is aged and ready to apply to your field. Don't take something that's young because it won't show results, say two weeks before you're ready to apply your compost. Go ahead and take the sample if it's mature and then have that analyzed. I see a big question here. I'll read it. I've got this open. I use duck bedding and from a flock of ducks and spread on my garden and around my trees. As you might already know, duck poo is considered cold, so it does not bird plants. The more saturated stuff goes at the base of the fruit trees to help the soil. Is there a better approach that I could follow? The duck straw. You're doing it only on trees and not on vegetable plants that are low to the ground. I wouldn't do it on the lower on the ground because it may not be high in nitrogen but it may also take it away. Mariel, food safety, Yeah. So from a food safety perspective, you want to make sure that if you're putting in the food safety world, they consider it raw manure, if it's not gone through a composting process, even if it's been aged for a while or that kind of thing. It's still recommended that you follow the protocol for raw manure, which is to put it on for 120 days or 90 days, which is dependent on whether that crop is growing in a way that touches the soil or not. Okay, so the vegetables, once they start growing, the ducks don't get access to the garden because they eat the veggies. Yeah, I've had that experience to ducks that I had at one time. Yeah, that's good to keep them out of the garden for that reason and for food safety. But definitely, if you're handling stuff that could be considered raw manure, it's best to put it on much earlier in the season than when you would be having plants growing and getting ready for harvest. That's the other thing. It was interesting. I was watching something, maybe it was a webadar they were showing. Yeah. You have apple trees and you've put on some manure, and then the next week you take your ladder outside and you're starting to harvest and you're climbing your ladder. And your feet have been in the field, and you're climbing the rungs of the ladder and your hands are touching the rugs as well as your feet. You're getting some cross contamination. And then you use your hands to pick the fruit. Another reason to consider maybe not using raw manure when any kind of fruit is ready that you'll be harvesting. Because it would be sad to have those beautiful fruit. Cause anybody to get sick. Yes. And if you're subject to food safety laws under Fizma, you definitely need to pay attention to that because that does get covered. If you don't know about that, e mail me and I can give you lots of information. But it's something to be careful of. The other thing is you might be interesting to know what the nitrogen level is of your straw duct. Because if you get a really high carbon, which is the straw to nitrogen, you're not providing any nitrogen to your soil because it needs to break down and to make that nitrogen available. And that's the other glory of composting it. Breaks it down to make it accessible. Whereas you're throwing on the surface the soil microbes can't get to it so easily. And it's through more of a rotting process than an actual being fed to the soil microbes to break down and make the nutrients available. Mariel's put her E mail address in there and you see my e mail address here. Feel free to reach out to us as you see appropriate and we're always happy to help. There are questions that, yeah, there's one question from David. How does strawn, wood product betting change the horse manure I use in my field? And what should I be cautious about? The brown things are carbon, right? With a good compost, you have a three part carbon to one part nitrogen. Things like straw have a level, and things like wood chips have a level. Wood chips are much higher carbon. It means that you have to use less of it if you're making a good compost and it takes longer to break down the straw, you want to have moist any material that compost has to be to work. The soil microbes need water and they would then provide access to moisture so that the soil microbes can do their job. You want to be careful with wood chips because of the high carbon. Another minute. If there's any other questions, a lot of you do your own compost. And just note that if you get grass clippings from a yard service, be careful that they're not collecting it from yards that use pesticides. Because herbicides, those are the pesticides that kill weeds. A lot of times they'll be residue in the grass clippings that could even kill plants like your vegetable plants or your flowers is suggesting to sift out the straw and wood bedding. I think it might be better just to compost it and to take that into consideration and add a little more fresh manure into your compost as you're making it. Because one thing if you're just doing one little bin, but if you're trying to really make enough compost for your whole garden, even if your garden is 50 by 50, that's still a lot of compost. Excellent. Well, thank you so much for your time today. Hope we answer some questions for you. So you have a healthy gardens coming. Thank you so much, Vicki, we appreciate you taking the time to share all of your information with us. That was my pleasure.