Year Two Starts

I consider this the second year of growing organic vegetables since we started a Fall crop last year. We have planted our first seeded crops for transplants this year. They are some cole crops such as cabbage and cauliflower and we have started our cucumber plants from our own seeds that have grown now for two seasons. Those plants are already six inches tall from seeds sown a week ago. I’ve got a load of horse manure to compost before I put it out in the fields. For organic standards it needs to have composted for 15 days at a temperature of 120-140 and turned minimally 5 times. This should work out just right for our planting time of the first week of September.
Our cover crop experiment with the cowpeas versus soybeans is about over. The cowpeas won hands down. They had so much more biomass, and looked very green as if they had fixed the nitrogen. The soybeans in contrast looked very scraggly and yellow and covered nothing. I will not plant soybeans as a cover crop for my area again. We learned something from this small scale trial and I will need to add more horse manure and fertilizer to help the plants grow in that half of the field. I will be mowing the beans and then cuttings up and turning it into the ground this week. I just read a research report from HortScience about nitrogen release from cover crops. Apparently it took about 30 days for the plants to break down and the nitrogen to change to a plant available form. This should work out according to when the plant needs the nutrients the most.