Daikon radish cover crop

A small group started a Permaculture group in the area. Falls right into what I've been doing with our commuity greenhouse. The soil here is less than ideal pumice with a bit of pine duff on top it needs plant material. There happened to be a soil regeneration class at the extension office and it generated more interest in the group. I was buying Daikon radishes for my own cover crop experiment. If you order them as a fodder crop or a tillage crop you can get them pretty cheap.  1.00 a pound. So I added 50 lbs to my order to share with the group. I offered them free to people who wanted to play along and see how they do and report back. I should have ordered more seeds.

Great idea, Robert. A local permaculture farmer here in KY, zone 6b, who has a CSA program, uses Daikon radish as a cover crop/soil building strategy with great success.

It's not as good a price as you got at the Extension office, but for what it's worth I have ordered bulk diakon seeds from Outsidepride via Amazon and they have done well with broadcast seeding in the USDA zone 6b Kentucky mountains. I use it for soil improvement and we eat it as a vegetable, so does our dog (the cooked roots).

50 lbs from Amamzon from Outside Pride is 174.00 and 50 lbs from my source was 50.00. My local extension office doesn't sell seeds.

Is there any chance your vendor sells over the web? I would love to find a business that sells bulk quantities of more kinds of seed.

Great Basin Seed

Robert Ray wrote:... So I added 50 lbs to my order to share with the group. I offered them free to people who wanted to play along and see how they do and report back. I should have ordered more seeds.

So how did the experiment go?

Good question!
I'm going to try this at my sister's garden.
It has good soil,but I just peeled back all the weeds so it's bare.

In addition to the daikon I mixed in collard greens. I left the daikons in ground over winter and did a reseed when snow was on the ground. This years crop is just starting to poke it's head up. I will throw a few pics up this afternoon when I get home. Chickens loved it the deer are frequent visitors and it seems to help keeping them out of the apple trees and blueberries. Will rototill this year at end of season and plan on trying buckwheat for next year to try encourage some pollinators and see what yield a small plot of buckwheat delivers. This was an unused 30x50 area at tail end of irrigation. It has added some plant material to the pumice and pine duff with stun (sheer total utter neglect). Anything that will improve water retention in the pumice dirt will be welcome.

Robert Ray wrote:In addition to the daikon I mixed in collard greens. I left the daikons in ground over winter and did a reseed when snow was on the ground... Chickens loved it the deer are frequent visitors and it seems to help keeping them out of the apple trees and blueberries.

I was thinking of planting some in our "upper field" to get carbon deeper into the soil. The deer eating it was one of my concerns, but it sounds as if your deer didn't eat the plants to the ground, so that's very useful information for me. I don't have a ton of time to spend on this, so I want to feel that it will have at least some success! I don't have collard greens seeds, but I do have plenty of what we locally call "leaf cabbage" and I have Russian Kale. Some sort of Mustard green is common in disturbed areas, as are a number of other weeds in that area of the field which gets bone dry during the summer, but is growing better grass/forbs than it used to at this time of the year. Like you, it's too far to do much more than some variation of STUN - a little of Shepard version of it, "strategic total utter neglect" at best. We don't have enough hoses or well pressure at the moment to consider better than that!

Angela Wilcox wrote:Great idea, Robert. A local permaculture farmer here in KY, zone 6b, who has a CSA program, uses Daikon radish as a cover crop/soil building strategy with great success.

Would you be willing to share who this is? I'm in Robertson county KY and always looking for an opportunity to work and co-op with like minded people. I've been working the last several years on developing myself and the land into a natural, permaculture farming style and I'm a bit disheartened by the extensive use of plastics I'm seeing on small farms. Things like Daikon and other cover crops, even "weeds" have come on my radar, and in my practice fields but I'm putting in lots of effort and seeking inspiration for sustainable ways to continue. Thanks!

This is one of the 3 sisters beds beds I just undersowing with daikon radish.
It has a mix of legumes as an undersown cover crop but a broad leaved plant like daikon should be better at preventing weed germination.
They are also more appetizing than chick pea greens.