Yesterday we completed our first round of sweet corn planting for the Market.  We tried something new this year.  We planted the sweet corn into a living mulch of fall rye.  The intention is to kill the rye pre sweet corn emergence.  The later plantings will have a more dramatic effect because the rye will be a lot more substantial.  This is an effort to see if we can get weed control from both the mulch effect of the rye as well as the allelopathic (see wikipedia) effect when the residue breaks down.  Anytime we can use mother nature to our advantage saves time and money and reduces our synthetic treatments.

Perfect Seed Bed

The Green tinge is the living mulch Rye Crop