Methods of Seeding a Cover Crop

This fall has been a busy time for us even though we had no grapes to harvest. We spent much of October cultivating our vineyard alleys to get rid of the weeds in preparation for seeding our cover crop. The spacing between rows is 7 feet but the alleys are narrower so my husband used a cultivator shown on the right. There are many configurations for the attachments and he tried them all! We were warned about this by our friend Dave. He said that the only thing that we would be doing each time we made a pass was to bring up more rocks and he was right. Not only did we bring up rocks but we also brought up the crab grass which died and left unslightly clumps in the alleys.

We moved the rocks into the vineyard rows and removed as much of the crab grass as we could. In preparation for seeding, my husband used a roller that was loaned to us by Tim Marvin, our John Deere dealer. Tim said that we could keep the roller as long as we needed it. How great is that! In mid October, after receiving our soil test results, we limed certain parts of the vineyard to raise the pH. Then we did more cultivating, more rock picking and more angsting over dead crab grass in the vineyard.

But it was time! We had to seed. The weather was becoming increasingly cooler (see Frost Friday and Sowing Oats), so we couldn't delay any longer. There are various methods of seeding a cover crop and this is one of them, shown here on the right. However, we did have expert advice from Rick and Russell Holmberg from Holmberg Orchards who said to just fling the seeds in the alleys. So, that is what we ended up doing for the cover crop. That left the perimeter of the vineyard that still needed to be seeded. Since the perimeter was not encumbered by vines, we rented a seeder from Tim and Dennis Marvin and that went a lot faster!

We finished seeding the perimeter in no time at all and it was a good thing that we did because the rains came on Halloween evening.