Healthy soil leads to healthier crops, lower input costs and more sustainable success. More farmers are discovering cost savings and benefits of building healthy, living soils. With practices like ...

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... For an Earth-friendly garden, keep a succession of plants in the soil by planting cover crops. These are plants grown to improve the soil rather than for ...

While farmers plant millions acres of plants like rye and clover to boost soil health and crowd out weeds, a cover crop does the same thing in the smallest home garden. With cover crops, a vegetable ...

Grow it as a cover crop, or grow it for the market stand. Spinach is a great early spring plant to sow directly in beds. As cover, it stabilizes soil, preventing weeds and erosion, while building soil ...

Establishing winter cover crops after or between harvests can be a great way to preserve soil structure, protect against erosion and produce biomass that feeds the soil ecology. However, if you’re in ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. You may still be getting the last of your crops in the ground from this spring’s planting, but it’s not too soon to be thinking ...

One of the tasks you can complete before spring is planting cover crops. February is a perfect time to broadcast some seeds and coat the ground with plants that benefit the soil in the long run. The ...

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Called cover crops, they top the list of tasks U.S. farmers are told will build healthy soil, help the environment and fight climate change. Yet after years of incentives and ...

Planting dry beans into spring cover crops could be a measure to protect young plants from damaging weather conditions like wind or hail. Dry beans are susceptible to damage from wind and other ...

AMES, Iowa – As vegetable growers and commodity farmers reach the end of the growing season and harvest their crops, faculty at Iowa State University are pushing for greater awareness of cover crops ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – No one wants to think of harvest’s end as the vegetable garden reaches peak, but now’s the time to plant over-winter cover crops to improve your soil for next season. If you’re not ...

Cover crops reduced the pigweed density by 58 percent in the early season -- zero to four weeks after crop planting, by 48 percent in the midseason -- five to eight weeks after planting, and by 44 ...