One of the things we do almost every year is bale hay. Some years it's decent, other years it is just trash. I have been slowly improving the soil in our field each year. I hate the idea of having to result to chemicals to beef up our hay production. I won't fault anyone who does that. It's just not the way we do it here. Last year I drilled in a mixed cover crop on a section of field, to see how it would do. I mainly wanted to see what grew out of the mixed seed I put down. Mostly, I needed to know if the heavy iron content in my field would even let anything grow at all. My experiment showed that I still have a lot of work to do. But stuff did grow. Not really well, but still. It was something. To continue improving the field I broadcast a bit of potash, and have been making plans to sow the field in Rye this year.
Here, I took a half pound of seed and soaked it in a pan. In just over 7 hours there were kernels that had germinated. I have NEVER seen any seed sprout that fast. I watched the pan for a few days, and calculated at least an 85% germination rate. Possibly even higher than that. I'm curious to see how this will do in the field, once planted. What do you think?
