Showing posts with label Crimper Roller. Show all posts

Crimper Roller Take Three


In the third stage of our No Till Crimper Roller experiment, we continue to hunt for that 'Goldilocks Moment' - when is the perfect time to crimp our rye/vetch crop?

This week we attached a seed drill onto the back of the roller as an experiment. When the crop is successfully flattened the next stage will be to incorporate the next seeds through the sward and into the soil, either by drilling or broadcasting.

As you’ll see, the drill proved problematic, which could have been due to the wet weather, or the crop’s lack of maturity, or just because the particular drill we used was not suitable.

We’ll be having another go next week when we will also be rolling again in our continuing quest to find out whether it’s going to be possible to use this innovative technique across fields in the UK.
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Crimper Roller Update


The second episode of the No Till Crimper Roller series follows on from week one where we established the crop was a little to under-developed to crimp yet. We continue to hunt for the ‘Goldilocks Moment’ where the Roller will destroy the crop before it turns to seed. We didn’t kill the rye and vetch in week 1 so will we succeed in week 2?

Join us next week for more, where we will be attaching a drill onto the back of the crimper roller to drill in the next crop as soon as the previous one has been crimped (And hopefully destroyed).

At this stage we are still deciding which crop to drill in, and would love to hear from you which plants you think we should drill in right after the rye/vetch mixture is destroyed.
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US Technology in the Cotswolds


The No Till Crimper Roller is standard farm machinery in arable America but as far as we are aware our experiment at Honeydale Farm this weekend is among the first times that one has been used in the UK.


As the name implies, the Crimper Roller offers a way of terminating cover crops with no till; by avoiding the need for spraying, mowing and ploughing, it’s a much cheaper and faster method. It relies on having a bulky cover crop which is then crushed, the flattened plants forming a mulch on top of the soil which keeps weeds at bay and also allows new seeds to come through. Ingenious!

This weekend marked our first attempt at controlling our winter cover crop of rye and vetch. The trick is to find the ‘Goldilocks Moment’ when the plants are just right to terminate, in other words when they are old enough to remain flat once rolled, but not too old to seed. 

We have rolled one trial strip in our cover crop to start with but as we suspected, we were a little too early and some of the plants may recover. We will be repeating the process weekly until we have determined the correct stage to terminate, so tune in next Monday to find out what happens!
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