IN YOUR ORCHARD
THE BEE BOX
Extreme Weather Demonstrates the Need for More Cover Crop: Introducing Rory Crowley
Greetings from Project Apis m. (P Am )! My name is Rory Crowley and I am the new Director of Habitat Programs, managing Seeds for Bees. I live and work in Chico in the Northern Sacramento Valley. For the last seven years, I have helped operate our family’s ranch of almonds and walnuts. Although my first year as an almond grower was mostly about learning in the school of hard knocks in the orchards, I quickly jumped into the science of “soil health.” I learned about the vast potential of cover crops, and that fall we planted our first batch of seed. Like many of you, Billy Synk coached me on my very first cover crop planting of P Am ’s Brassica Mix. We had soil problems which we were trying to correct, and I also saw how important it was to give back to the bees that worked so hard for us in the almonds. These areas—soil and bee health and productivity—marked my next seven years on the farm. Cover cropping became a foundation to our family’s commitment to agricultural stewardship. Ever since that first year of planting cover crop, I just can’t seem to shake how vital this practice is to our system and to the bees. If we put life into the soil, we will get life out. This is true for both the trees and the bees. Over the years we have had huge successes and abysmal failures with cover cropping. As I have observed this year, for those who planted cover crops, there were more failures than successes, through almost no fault of those who planted. When planting cover crops in California, each year is different. One year, mustards might have a phenomenal germination and explode to six feet with thick stock and great floral resources, but the daikon looks no bigger than the baby carrots we get at the grocery store. Other years, you may have daikon the size of your forearm, and the mustards look like toothpicks. These annual changes in
A “bee pasture,” as this grower put it, in Colusa County. No irrigation was required in certain parts of the Northern Sacramento Valley to produce a successful stand. (Photo courtesy of Done-Again Farms)
A very successful stand of PAm’s Brassica Mix in a young almond orchard in Merced County. (Photo courtesy of G & M Tree Farms, LLC)
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ALMOND FACTS
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