Oilseed radish pasture improvement

I've had very mixed success with buckwheat in the garden, so I wasn't terribly surprised when the cover crop failed to thrive in our chicken pasture.  Despite reports that buckwheat is great in poor soil, my experience has shown that the grain is much less tolerant of low fertility and waterlogged clay than oats, annual ryegrass, and oilseed radishes are.  Here, I think the issue was a new one --- shade.

We tried to girdle the box-elder trees in this pasture last fall, but the trees shrugged off our efforts and keep plugging right along.  The result is a pasture that's in pretty much full (although dappled) shade, so although the buckwheat came up, the plants are so spindly I doubt I'm gaining much organic matter.  Time to bring in the big guns --- oilseed radish.

Oilseed radish isn't listed as shade tolerant either, but the leaves will be off the trees in a few months, so I might get some good growth anyway.  And I know for a fact that a radish cover crop will thrive in problematic soil where other things won't grow.

(Yes, we do turn any pitchers that crack when being turned into chicken waterers into grain scoops.  Mark has gotten pretty good at the process, but there are still mistakes now and then.)

In the garden, I generally sprinkle seeds of the next cover crop amid the blooming buckwheat, then pull up or cut the buckwheat so it forms a light mulch to get the next round off to a good start.  Part of the purpose of cutting the buckwheat is to ensure the plants don't go to seed, leaving me with lots of buckwheat weeds next year.  In a pasture setting, though, volunteer buckwheat wouldn't really be a weed, so I just sprinkled the radish seeds amid the standing buckwheat and walked away.

I'll keep you posted on how this second round of cover crop pasture improvement goes.  Even if the radishes grow as abysmally as the buckwheat did, I'm pretty happy because the summer's work has already knocked out 95% of the tall weeds, which will make it much easier to plant clover into bare ground next spring.  And maybe the rotting oilseed radishes will attract worms for the chickens just like they did in our garden last year?

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